Chess for begginers (help me)

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond…

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

I second the third one. Look for videos of full games where the creator clearly explains what they are doing and why they are doing it. Got me out of the 800 elo hell, now I'm in the "just-below-1000" elo hell 💀

Um Eric Rosen is an international master, not a grandmaster.

Not that it makes much difference to us regular troups. International master, grandmaster, super-GM or world champion, these are all operating far above the average chessplayer.

I would like to add that the Super-GM Hikaru Nakamura recomments for players below rating 1000 to stay away from blitz and bullet because you first have to learn the basics before these fast games can help you learn.

https://www.chess.com/blog/alirayyansanwal/what-you-shoudnt-do-as-a-beginner

I agree with

- Doing some puzzles: It helps to analyze situations and find multiple solutions.

- Review your games: Avoid Mistakes and find alternative Moves,

But i don't agree with Youtube Videos because this is a passive way of learning that is not very effective. Also these games are very hard to understand if you don't know the basics.

Make your brain find the solution. First study the concepts of fork, pin etc. and try to find them on your board during the game.

Enjoy the game

There are some outstanding YouTube videos, such as the speedruns by GM David "Danya" Naroditsky.

But yes there is also a lot thats really just entertainment.

Learn and apply the most important principles of chess. - (core of my teaching)
Always blunder-check your moves.
Solve tactics in the right way.
Analyze your games.
Study games of strong players.
Learn how to be more psychologically resilient.
Work on your time management skills.
Get a coach if you can.

I suggest also getting a few books on Chess. One of my favorites is Jose-Raul Capablanca's "Chess Fundamentals", available on Amazon for <$20 often. This book has superb examples and move exercises to LEARN some basic strategies, as you go. Also, some example games are presented - from the author's repertoire of games he's played. (100 years ago now!)

"Capa" has been one of my personal "chess heros" (if I can use that term) because his mastery of the game was amazing, and in his prime, he was almost unbeatable. His mastery of the final stages of a game were very novel at the time, and his games are almost an artform!

Another GREAT book to get is "Understanding Chess - Move by Move", by John Nunn. This is a bit more advanced, in some ways, so I recommend it AFTER the Capa book. John has taken over for Irving Chernev, one of the best Chess writers back 60-80 years ago, and John's more modern games exhibit superb examples of concepts to learn - by seeing actual moves in past games of GMs.

What I have done in the past (and still do) is to play through the moves, with a board and pieces, and carefully analyze the moves - as you get better with this, you start to "see" what the player(s) were sort of thinking, and the lights come on!

IMO, this is superior to just doing puzzles - why? because some puzzle are "synthetic", and some positions almost ridiculous, or almost never encountered. So, why do them?! The daily puzzles on Chess.com are great, but I find if your newer, doing the above is more instructive, and you also have the luxury of returning to the examples again and again, and learn something new after awhile...

When I did the books examples, my games improved such that I was MUCH more comfortable playing more advanced players. The concepts and general principles are best to learn, instead of memorizing positions, tactics, etc.

Another (older) book that I Truly love, is Chernev's (Irving Chernev) book called: "The most Instructive games of chess ever played" by Dover books; it is a classic, and the games older (80-110 years old, but by the old masters!), but the principles are timeless. Some of the openings are classic and some are almost mechanical, but as these games evolve during the examples and analysis, you can see the examples of what to DO and NOT do or avoid as risky or unwise, as the games are presented. Concepts like positional advantage, pawn structures, and use of bishops or knights in interesting ways are shown well. You may add to your own repertoire after going through them!

I prefer this (I am pre-internet, but do both!) often over just doing YouTube videos and such, because the time taken to review the games, pause, learn and review, is much better when doing this as a self-improvement process. Some instructional videos are excellent, some okay, and some assume the audience is at a certain level. Couple this with heavy accents, or a language not your primary one, and it can be harder to do that type of learning sometimes. FYI, the ONLY tricky thing with the last book of 62 instructive games is that they are pre-algebraic notation, so you must learn that system to follow the games. In a way, this is GOOD. If you can then annotate your game book using the modern system, properly, you can review ANY chess text moving forward - which is a nice skill to have! I have not checked, but the last book example may have been revised to include a new algebraic notation - either way - a LOT of chess wisdom in those pages!

So I hope that this helps! Best of luck, and let us know how you make out!

Rookium

Chomp on hanging pieces

This is a hot take, but Puzzles are not good. They all have answers, If you need to delay unstoppable mates, with out using tactics, what are you going to do if you just grind tactics?

Thanks for the hint

I agree with Namon... The biggest issue with doing only puzzles, is that unless you go further and find the game (if there WAS one it was based on), there's no correlation on HOW one got to THAT position.

This is why I prefer studying an actual game, because you start to SEE how the position developed, learn valuable insight into positions and patterns of play, and that is much more instructive, IMO, than a pure snapshot of a board and say... GO find mate in three, or have the puzzle asking how to just take the bishop first, for example. While also instructive, not nearly so as following a game course.

A fun activity I do sometimes is to plug a critical position from an actual game into my computer, and play it out at a critical point where the game could have gone to a different result. VERY instructive as well!

Rookium

About opening choices, I would recomment to play simple, straightforward ones like the Scotch:

Especially openings like the Kings Indian arent that great because beginner opponents try to "refute" them, and as a beginner one has a harder time than necessary to fight back:

Stockfish will tell you that white is over extended, that means he has too many pawns advanced and not enough support from officers for these pawns. So black has already the advantage, but to human players, even grand masters, this is hard to prove, and beginners may easily get overwhelmed.

GM Hikaru Nakamura has made an instructive video about beginner openings recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DOAfOcWh4Q