Good luck with your goals.
For the newbies ( like me)
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Thanks for the sentiment. It is being helpful to me!
Excellent story. Thanks for sharing with us.
Dude, what a beautiful and inspiring reading! Very useful! Have you ever think about becoming a column writer or maybe a blog? You has a intersting way to express ideas.
Thank you and good luck!
Finally a post worth reading...thank you for that and good luck in your quest!
Oct 12, 2019
0
#10
My goal is to play 1 decent game of chess per week; either a positional win, or a tactical win or most rewardingy, a win from a position where I was near defeat, but hung in there and persevered and managed to win or draw. A lot of times, I muck it all up, but every now and then I can say, "I played pretty well that game."
That post was totally inspiring I ACTUALLY CRIED (WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH)
I KNOW I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE 
Follow & reread!
I think saying that I am a newbie is a little unfair to myself. I played chess from my twenties to my thirties. I was a formidable street player and loved to study the games of the masters.
I had trained myself to play multiple boards blindfolded as a novelty for parties, I committed to memory the games I loved and also studied a lot during a time when I was disabled and unable to work. During that time I devoted about 10 hours a day to chess for 2 years and learned all manner of things.
Now ten years later I have returned from figurative retirement and I am hoping that what I have learned about learning chess again will be useful to the newbies.
I have seen a lot of posts about how to learn this and how to learn that and as I am struggling through this myself and rediscovering my humble approach to this I wanted to share my thoughts with the newbie community, now that I am one of you again.
Now that I am working again and a single parent to an eight-year-old my ability to study 10 hours a day is simply impractical. I am sharing how I am approaching learning chess again with the hope that someone new to chess, that loves it enough to ask how they can get better, will have some ideas about what they should do. Because it is my humble belief that answering the question, tactics, tactics, tactics, isn’t very helpful even though it is true.
Step one: Love it or accept that you don’t love it.
For me, it is important that my hobbies be something I am willing to do for the rest of my life, even if I take vacations from them from time to time. If I love something then the hours devoted to the pursuit of that hobby will never seem wasted. If you love your hobby and fail at it for whatever reason, it being something you are committed to doing forever will get you through the difficulty of losing.
I have noticed this as I continually struggle with tactical motifs I can almost remember but I fail to solve. Every time I press the hint button it stings a little inside but I accept my defeat and hopefully I learn something.
I recall a time where I could solve ELO tactics at 2000 in seconds and here I am struggling with tactical shots at the 1200 level. It is most humbling and also very interesting in that I am experiencing the failures of a newbie while having a pretty large body of background information just out of reach in my memory.
But because I love the game I push onward and I keep trying.
Step two: See the board for what it is
Until recently I would look at the tactical problems and I will think, “I don’t see it I need a hint.” But I realized that this wasn’t the way I used to do it. I used to have a plan for solving problems. So after about a week of looking at these problems I started to require a process from myself before clicking the hint button.
If after asking myself questions like that; after SERIOUSLY attempting to understand the position, if I find I have no solution than I turn it into a learning moment. I click hint, and I make the first move and then I look again.
If I end up going through the puzzle and I still don’t understand why it worked or what the point was I click analyze and I go through variations. I often find that I was missing something; I learn something from my failures and I began to see the board more for what it is.
Step three: Learning languages requires persistence and practice.
The feeling of losing is horrible, or it can be. For this context is a big player in understanding your failures. I like to use the “learning languages” analogy to analog the idea of learning chess because it seems very fitting.
If you are a sociable person and for some reason, you end up taking a job in Ukraine where most people don’t speak English but you come from an English speaking country and never learned a second language, what would you do?
Is it possible that as a social person you would sit in your apartment watching Netflix in English and being sad about it. But most likely you wouldn’t.
You would have a plan to learn Ukrainian or Russian and it would be a priority. You would give up other things to learn the language because it would be a priority. You would make sacrifices to learn something new every day; because – priorities.
Since most languages on average use about 1000 words in general conversation, you would suffer through learning those 1000 words. But you wouldn’t speak the language you would just know 1000 words.
So then you would test your skills with your new collection of words and go into the world and try to communicate. You would most likely fail because words in a different language never sound the same way you learn them. They are used differently when next to other words. You would find that when people speak it just sounds like one long word and you would get very confused. But every time you pieced a little part of it together you would learn something. You would start seeing the board for what it is while suffering through failure after failure to understand. Your persistence would pay off as you would be better at the language then you were when all you knew how to do was say “hello” the wrong way.
Learning chess is a life long effort and you have to approach as such.
Step three: Have reasonable goals.
In all areas of life, a single person setting unreasonable goals quickly discovers failure. You can get away with unreasonably high expectations in groups of people but individuals typical always fail when measured up against unreasonable goals.
If you are rated 1000 and your goal is to be 2600 by the end of the year but you can only dedicate 1 hour a day to chess, that is unreasonable.
If you are rated 1000 and you want to be steady at 1200 by the end of the year that is more realistic and you are likely to achieve it. It is an easy success and worth your time and effort.
I will probably never be a master chess player, and honestly, that isn’t my goal. I would love to be a master but it isn’t my goal. My short term goals at the moment are as follows.
It is also important to have long term goals though it is difficult to really know if they are reasonable or not. It is important to know that what you strive for could be wildly unreasonable. Accept these goals for what they are; what you would like not what is reasonable.
My life long goals are as follows.
In conclusion I want to wish you the best of luck and I hope you learn something helpful from this post. I don’t know how great a chess player you will be but I truly hope you become the best chess player you can be.
Take care,
Another less than average chess player.