I Need Help Learning to Attack!

I've been learning chess for a few months now, and I've discovered I am good at playing "defense," but I struggle with attacking. Any tips?

Pick a target and start moving/pointing your pieces towards it. Count attackers and defenders. If you have more attackers than defenders you will win the pawn or piece and the position will be simplified by reduction of material. If you simplify to an endgame push your pawns and activate the king to win. If your target is the king and your attackers outnumber the defenders you are likely to win. Best way to launch an attack is control the centre by locking the pawn structure so the other side cant redirect pieces to defend or counter. Know your pawn breaks so if things open up your position does not fall apart.

I think maybe it might be time to put away the scholar's mate. A lot of your games as white involve a quick Qf3 and Bc4. This might work at low elo sometimes. But it's very easily defended. Maybe try looking into the Scotch game. It's an opening I played a lot as a beginner. But overall, at your elo the best thing you can do is play principled chess. Try to control the center, develop your minor pieces and castle asap and check each turn before you move to make sure you aren't blundering anything - and checking to see if your opponent blundered something you can take.

You just need to play slower. If you use 2 minutes and 10 seconds in a rapid game, you aren’t playing Rapid, you are just playing blitz, and that’s probably faster than you should play, even if you were actually playing a blitz game. You have to actually think about your moves and what you and your opponent could do. If you just make the first move you see, you aren’t really even playing chess. The point isn’t to always know what to do and test how much you know without thinking.

Play longer games and actually use your time, then you can find your real level and begin to figure out what you need to work on. Until you do that, you are just intentionally underrating yourself in order to try to use the clock to intimidate, and that’s not how to get better at this game.

HeckinSprout, I still play the scotch game 😭

I should play it again. More of a Jobava player lately. If I can't break 1200 rapid by the end of the month I'll switch.

Study classic attacking games.

I'm not really sure if it actually works, but looking at famous games by very aggressive players (Tal comes to mind) is something I believe a lot of people would recommend.

Many people have the wrong idea entirely about attacking.

You do NOT gain the advantage by attacking. That whole idea is exactly 180 degrees wrong.

You gain the advantage by OUT-MANUEVERING your opponent. You can then cash that advantage in by attacking.

Attacking is just a way (and not the ONLY way) of converting one type of advantage - better development and center control, for example - into a more readily usable form of advantage such as mate or the win of a piece.

But attacking, by itself, does NOT bring you any advantage. Not at all. You must gain the advantage FIRST by maneuver, and only then exploit it by attacking.

Say more about this!

one thing I would say is attack only when you have a well-defended position. but if you do want to attack, only attack if that move helps you. Don't just keep on attacking One Piece until you get it, or don't just keep on attacking so much because you will eventually lose structure and and you will have no defense, and then you will be down. Before you attack, see if it's a good move

If you are seriously interested in my views on the subject, you could start by reading this thread on how to analyze a position and decide on a plan.

Read my posts #4, 7-to-10 and especially post #12; and then play over the three sample games that I posted on pages #1 and #2 of the thread (one on the first page, two more on the second). Read the notes to the games.

GM Larry Evans' method of static analysis

Posts #19, #38 and #39. But read the first dozen posts FIRST.

Are you sure that this is useful material for a 400-rated player?

You write "Static Analysis... counting Space, Time and Force, and assessing Pawn Structure. You can do that while EITHER player's clock is running, because the results won't change much in a single half-move. "

But in a 400-rated game, none of this matters much. The opponent will threaten your queen or blunder his own queen the next move, and the only thing that matters is to notice exactly that.

Dear BeckyRey,

My name is Gabor Balazs. I’m a Hungarian FIDE Master and a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one given way to learn and improve. Chess is a really complex game and a lot of things are connencted. So, e.g. if you want to improve your attacking skills, you need to improve your calculation, visualisation and strategic skills, too.

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 analyzing your own games. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem is that it can't explain to you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why it is so good or bad.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main areas (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames) and 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 enjoy the lessons because they cover multiple aspects of chess in an engaging and dynamic way, keeping the learning process both stimulating and efficient. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

If you would like to learn more about chess, you can take private lessons from me (you find the details on my profile) or you can visit my Patreon channel (www.patreon.com/Bgabor91), where you can learn about every kind of topics (openings, strategies, tactics, endgames, game analysis). There are more than 37 hours of educational videos uploaded already and I'm planning to upload at least 4 new videos per week, so you can get 4-6 hours of educational contents every month. I also upload daily puzzles in 4 levels every day which are available with a FREE subscription.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck with your games!