new at chess

I am wondering if I should do 1min games or 15 or one of the others? Which one would be more helpful to creating a better player overall?

Long games are much more useful, and in the other direction, 1 minute games are useless.

ok thank you!

Are variants helpful?

I'll try to give you both sides of the answer.

Young talented players who improve extremely quickly and play in national / international tournaments typically play all sorts of time controls online (including 1 minute games) and also variants of all sorts. Not because it's part of their training, but because they're passionate and chess is a fun game.

So if you play 1 minute and bughouse and 3 check etc and you enjoy it then that's great. Chess is supposed to be fun.

But in chess and anything else in life, you maximize improvement when your practice mirrors your performance. What I mean is, if you want to get better at 1 hour games, then you should play 1 hour games. If you want to get better at calculating, then you need to spend a long time calculating, etc. The kids who improve quickly aren't just playing blitz and bughouse, they're also playing long tournament games, reading books, and doing analysis.

So there's a happy median here. Some people will say pretend you're a Soviet child trying to feed your family by becoming a chess professional (i.e. treat chess as a job with no fun allowed). Other people play nothing but 3 minute blitz games and variants and wonder why they never improve. All things considered, the best thing for you to do is somewhere in the middle

I Like 10 minute rapid and 3 minute blitz.... long games seem tedious for me as If I make mistakes I am stuck with time.. just better taking down notes and analyzing if your serious unlike me!

Thanks for the tips! That's really helpful!

Long games and analyze your games. Chess.com will only give you one per day with your account but if you use Lichess, you can do it for free. I would also recommend learning a solid opening so you can have a plan in the game. For example, against e4 I play e6 (the French) and I would try to learn the opening through books and videos.

When you are learning an opening whether it's from a book or video, I highly recommend creating a study on Lichess and put all the moves in the study. Here is my French study where I used a book as my guide. This is a theory book so it did most of the organization for me especially when they branch out into different variations.

A lot of people don't recommend this approach but if you know your opening better than your opponent, you are more likely to win and catch them when they make mistakes or blunders.

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

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

Dear Karolparm,

I am 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 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. 

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.  Oh, and regarding playing too many Blitz games... this is very harmful for your chess improvement! If you always want to make fast decisions, it becomes a bad habit and it totally ruins your chess. Play Rapid games instead. 

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

I think shorter games like 1 minute are not great for learning. Speaking from experience. I do play quite a lot of them when I only have a few minutes of time, but ideally I think 10+ minutes is better because you need time to think and work through stuff as a newish player. I had a friend who used to play much slower games, like 45 mins, and was improving rapidly from taking the time to think and building those skills.

If you're interested, i've decided to learn the endgames, I figure its about time. It's probably a good idea at any stage, even total beginner. I'm making youtube vids of what I'm learning (from books - 100 endgames you must know! is my first book), just started yesterday. I think/hope it could be pretty useful for other people also. Check it out if you like.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuSJqmh8IImcqTtyA0Vknww

Getting a coach would be great but you need to heavily consider whether you are going to commit to it or not. I'm self taught and it works to an extent but I will admit that a personalized lesson with a master would benefit anyone

I recommend 10 min+ games (10 min per side is actually up to 20 minutes for the entire game since there are two players), but it depends on your schedule and how much time you can invest in chess. 

Speed chess has its pros and cons (and even some useful benefits for improvement such as being able to play more games in the same time frame), but speed chess is going to be more compatible with higher rated chess players because they already are better at longer time control games and have more patterns studied and in their subconscious. 

Speed chess has the very real danger of conditioning your mind into moving quickly and neglecting calculation - this is a very real and self-destructive habit to get into. This is the underlining reason why speed chess is typically frowned upon for improvement. 

The best chess players in the world are also some of the best speed chess players in the world, but some of the best speed chess players aren't necessarily the best at longer time controls. This is because longer time controls translate into "chess ability" which is more transferable to all time controls but the inverse is not true.

ok

Gothamchess and chessvibes are to nice youtubers to see tutorials for begginers, I started a month ago

Yeet

Skrtt

I love ChessVibes. He provides so much quality content such as high probability traps and opening exploration streams. He has to get at least 100K subs

okkkkkay?....

10+0 regular is great for beginners. Classical is also good if you're patient enough