How to improve my chess game?

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TinyTreck
Heya all, I’m pretty new to competitive chess and although I understand the mechanics and the simplistic side of it. Chess is clearly not a simple game so I was wondering if there’s any way to improve. I’m an avid watcher of gothamchess but other than that I seemed to have hit a wall.

Any tips or comments are much appreciated.
Strangemover

Just having a brief look through a couple of your games there are a few things you can do:

1.Play longer games so that you don't have to worry about running out of time or moving quickly. Give yourself the best chance to find good moves.

2.You hung pieces and left them to be captured. This is something you have to stop if you want to get better and it pretty much comes down to blunder checking before every move you make. Ask yourself each time if you are going to lose material.

3.Your opening play was a bit dubious, moving the same piece multiple times, developing inefficiently. Think of the opening like a race. You are racing against your opponent to get all your knights and bishops out, and castle your king before them. If you lose time in the opening by fiddling with your pieces it leads to difficult positions.

There are many good YouTubers out there as well as Gotham so have a little explore of the others. 

TinyTreck
Strangemover wrote:

Just having a brief look through a couple of your games there are a few things you can do:

1.Play longer games so that you don't have to worry about running out of time or moving quickly. Give yourself the best chance to find good moves.

2.You hung pieces and left them to be captured. This is something you have to stop if you want to get better and it pretty much comes down to blunder checking before every move you make. Ask yourself each time if you are going to lose material.

3.Your opening play was a bit dubious, moving the same piece multiple times, developing inefficiently. Think of the opening like a race. You are racing against your opponent to get all your knights and bishops out, and castle your king before them. If you lose time in the opening by fiddling with your pieces it leads to difficult positions.

There are many good YouTubers out there as well as Gotham so have a little explore of the others. 

Wow! Thank you so much for such an in depth analysis, I'll make sure to look back at this post and incorporate certain things, get rid of bad habits and look out for a wider variety of channels . I really appreciate you taking your time to post this.

All the best. happy.png

Strangemover

👍Good luck!

RussBell

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond...

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

Bgabor91

Dear TinyTreck,

I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. happy.png  Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals. happy.png

So, the question you asked is not so easy to answer, but I can tell you one thing for sure. In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career. happy.png

I hope this is helpful for you. happy.png Good luck for your chess games! happy.png

TinyTreck
RussBell wrote:

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond...

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

Your blog covers a lot of areas that I need to work on, thanks a bunch.

I'll make sure to make good use of it .

nomanjahangir

To improve chess , player should hire services of FIDE rated chess coach who has capability to increase Beginner assessment , strategy ability.
I refer https://saswath.academy/courses/chess-for-kids for learning chess classes for kids Online.

nklristic

Here are some basic tips for you. You might actually consider it as a sort of a training plan for beginners (not really but it can help you make one that suits you):

https://www.chess.com/blog/nklristic/the-beginners-tale-first-steps-to-chess-improvement

Welcome and good luck on your chess improvement.