Stuck at the 1000

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond…

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

1. Watch how top players play to get a feeling of how they play.

2. Choose an opening that you are comfortable with. I suggest playing Ruy Lopez as white, its easy and it isn't complicated, for black, since the opening is based on how white decides, you need to learn basically all of them.

3. Learn all opening traps so you don't fall for the traps.

4. Learn tactics.

5. Play chess, play 5 games, regardless of the results, analyze 5 of those games to understand what the best moves mean, and please understand 100% the best moves the computer shows because you will need to actually use them in an actual game.

6. Look at the whole board (prevents any tunnel vision, please look at all the boards, potential moves by the opponent and how do you respond to those moves.

7. Learn endgames.

8 (extra tip) watch gotham chess, its boring but his tips will help you at some point.

Anyone between 0-2000+ can watch GM Naroditskys speedruns on YouTube. They are highly instructive. And totally free, too.

Ruy is fine. Just like Italian and Scotch are when there is e4-e5 on the board. One will stumble upon those 3 naturally as a beginner without knowing anything about openings. How complex it is on the highest level is irrelevant, as one plays against other beginners at the start.

I agree with learning principles. Ruy teaches principles in a very good manner as well: put pawns at the center, pressure the center of the opponent, develop and so on. On top of everything else, this opening exists for 500 years or so and it is still here, which means that it is a pretty natural way to play the game.

Generally I would always choose an opening that is more classical than hypermodern style at the start (though surely hypermodern ones can work to so I wouldn't completely be against them if someone enjoys them, it is just that I would learn the basics first, that is all). The name of the opening is not so important at the start, OP should just find something that he enjoys.

One can be pretty flexible with their opening choice, the only thing I do not recommend are objectively bad openings that gives the opponent an advantage, and system like openings where beginners will always play the same moves and will be exposed to same structures in all their games. So I would avoid London at the start, or at least I wouldn't play it too much, like no more than once every 4 games as white (I would avoid it altogether, but at least a beginner who wishes to improve shouldn't play it every time).

Ruy Lopez is really diverse but its the best opening for white, for a level like the OP, he will rarely counter any such diverse variations of Ruy Lopez. I won many games using Ruy Lopez i won, despite its diversity most of the opponent i faced, they only played popular variants which is well known. So ruy lopez is a good opening choice for a beginner, he might even study it when he gets better.

Dear The-Golden-Mew-151,

I'm 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.

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 territories (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 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.

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 17 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!