Tips for Beginners

1. Develop your pieces quickly. 2. Control the center. 3. Put your pieces on squares that give them maximum space. 4. Try to develop your knights towards the center. 5. A knight on the rim is dim. 6. Don’t take unnecessary chances. 7. Play aggressive. 8. Calculate forced moves first. 9. Always ask yourself, “Can he put me in check or win a piece?” 10. Have a plan. Every move should have a purpose. 11. Assume your opponent’s move is his best move. 12. Ask yourself, “Why did he move there?” after each move. 13. Play for the initiative and controlling the board. 14. If you must lose a piece, get something for it if you can. 15. When behind, exchange pawns. When ahead, exchange pieces. 16. If you are losing, don’t give up fighting. Look for counter-play. 17. Don’t play unsound moves unless you are losing badly. 18. Don’t sacrifice a piece without good reason. 19. If you are in doubt of an opponent’s sacrifice, accept it. 20. Attack with more that just one or two pieces. 21. Do not make careless pawn moves. They cannot move back. 22. Do not block in your bishops. 23. Bishops of opposite colors have the greatest chance of drawing. 24. Try not to move the same piece twice or more times in a row. 25. Exchange pieces if it helps your development. 26. Don’t bring your queen out early. 27. Castle soon to protect your king and develop your rook. 28. Develop rooks to open files. 29. Put rooks behind passed pawns. 30. Study rook endgames. They are the most common endgames. 31. Don’t let your king get caught in the center. 32. Don’t castle if it brings your king into greater danger. 33. After castling, keep a good pawn formation around your king. 34. If you only have one bishop, put your pawns on its opposite color. 35. Trade pawns pieces when ahead in material or when under attack. 36. If cramped, free your game by exchanging material. 37. If your opponent is cramped, don’t let him get any freeing exchanges. 38. Study openings you are comfortable with. 39. Play over entire games, not just the opening. 40. Blitz chess is helpful in recognizing chess patterns. Play often. 41. Study annotated games and try to guess each move. 42. Stick with just a few openings with White, and a few openings with Black. 43. Record your games and go over them, especially the games you lost. 44. Show your games to higher rated opponents and get feedback from them. 45. Use chess computers and databases to help you study and play more. 46. Everyone blunders. The champions just blunder less often. 47. When it is not your move, look for tactics and combinations. 48. Try to double rooks or double rook and queen on open files. 49. Always ask yourself, “Does my next move overlook something simple?” 50. Don’t make your own plans without the exclusion of the opponent’s threats. 51. Watch out for captures by retreat of an opponent’s piece. 52. Do not focus on one sector of the board. View the whole board. 53. Write down your move first before making that move if it helps. 54. Try to solve chess puzzles with diagrams from books and magazines. 55. It is less likely that an opponent is prepared for off-beat openings. 56. Recognize transposition of moves from main-line play. 57. Watch your time and avoid time trouble. 58. Bishops are worth more than knights except when they are pinned in. 59. A knight works better with a bishop than another knight. 60. It is usually a good idea to trade down into a pawn up endgame. 61. Have confidence in your game. 62. Play in as many rated events as you can. 63. Try not to look at your opponent’s rating until after the game. 64. Always play for a win.

Thanks a lot!

Hi! I posted something on the subject of improving chess skills, which for me is more than following a few tips. Instead you need to study and train. Folllow attached link: https://www.chess.com/blog/maafernan/chess-skills-development

Gosh I need help

Post #24 in this thread (currently) was my response. It may help you. Additionally, feel free to message me and perhaps sometime we could setup one or two unrated live chess games for learning purposes. Getting started with chess can be tough on your own, so sometimes all you need is one or two people to give some good advice and help point you in the right direction.

hi

You're not a total beginner, so you know the basics. What you want to work on will be your tactical vision, and picking up a few positional ideas to look for to improve your position (or how to prevent your opponent from improving theirs!).
I've seen lots of people point out opening themes (control the centre, knights before bishops, minimal pawn moves, minimal multiple moves of the same piece, castle early, etc). While it is tempting to spend a lot of time studying openings, there's not much need as most times your opponent will go off book anyway. So, most of the time you will probably end up having to make moves based upon sound opening principles, and that will do you find for some time. Just study a one or two openings as white and play those as much as possible, but if your opponent deviates don't get into the habit of sticking to the opening line - they haven't after all. I recommend focusing on an e4 opening as white, and something that gets you into an open game. Could the Italian, Spanish, Scotch, Scotch Gambit, King's Gambit, Evan's Gambit, doesn't matter. Personally I like the Italian as a starting point, as you can start to add others to it, like Evan's Gambit, and Scotch Gambit has a similar set up with the Bishop on c4. But pick something that leads to an open and tactical game - the reason is that is what you want to practice. Spotting those pins, forks, etc, in a real game situation, and e4 e5 games often hinge on being good at that, particularly some of the gambits.
For Black, pick something solid that you like to play. Again, early on (as in under 2000), it really doesn't matter as any decent opening or defence will be fine.
At the same time, start to think about some positional ideas. Things like "I just traded by light square bishop for their knight, so I better make sure I get my pawns on light squares as they will help make up for my missing bishop by controlling the light squares" or, "My oppnent has most of their pawns on dark squares, if I can capture their light squared Bishop, that is going to be bad for them."
And also, look at the position for outposts - those squares that are in front of your opponent's pawns but which can no longer be attacked by their neighbouring pawns because they have advanced past it. Those are great places to put a knight, especially if there are still lots of pawns on the board. This is because your knight blocks one pawn, hindering its movement (and it blocks rook/Queen attacks on the knight from that direction) and it can't be chased away by a mere pawn. Sometimes you can see such a square, but your knight can't just jump into it, so if there are no immediate tactical ideas, it might be worth working out how to get a knight there. And, if you see a square in your position that your opponent could use as an outpost, try and work out how to either get that backwards pawn moved forward, or how to prevent their knight from finding its way there.
The other main positional idea is one you've probably heard already, but get your rooks on the open files. Once pawns start coming off, make sure you can get a rook to control that highway to victory. And if you can't control that open file with your rooks, don't start the pawn trades! Don't open up a file just so that your opponent can grab it and get the goods.
Those 3 positional ideas will help a lot. First, they will help create opportunities for tactics (tactics are opportunities, positional play are the ideas - opportunities are the results of good ideas - they go hand in hand, it's not either/or). Second, thinking about those when you've come up empty when looking at checks/captures/threats, the tactical checklist. And, they make you look at the board from your opponents point of view as well, and doing that is a must to really improve. You need to recognize the weaknesses in your position and correct them, these help you spot them.
As for study, I would focus on end games mostly. Know the basic checkmating with K+Q, K+R, how to ensure that lone pawn gets promoted with the aid of only the king are the 3 most critical early on (you probably can do the first 2 already, and it doesn't take too long to learn the basics of how to use the opposition to force a pawn in, just practice to make it automatic). It is worth the time to learn how to mate with a king and two bishops, and then with a king, bishop and knight. Doesn't come up all that often, but does help learn how the pieces work together. Once you've got those, there are some basic rook end game sequences to look into (like "building a bridge"), which comes up when you have a king, rook, and pawn against a king and rook.
Anyway, that's plenty to think about. Personally, I think starting to think about some of the positional ideas will probably help the most, particularly when you play slower time controls and give yourself time to think through each move. By practicing the tactical checklist, and considering the positional ideas, you will get faster at spotting them, but initially it takes time to go through all those, so play slow and go through them. End games are not as exciting to study as openings, but you will benefit more at this stage from learning the endgames than more openings.

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Hi! I've learned and kept on using london system as opening. Can you suggest a much stronger opening for beginner? Aside from the opening, I felt like I'm not really thinking of an end game. I just play based on opponents response but of course there's holes in this type of game play. How can I improve positioning of my chess pieces?

I am of the opinion that is best to try to master the basics first, followed by mastering tactics, then, once both of those are good enough to get close to 1700 Elo-Range, then try to master one opening at a time... this last part is mostly just a bunch of rote-memorisation of every possible variation and the best-response for every possible move that the opponent might make for the first dozen or so moves or more than the first dozen if you can get them all ingrained into memory (the purpose of this is mainly to save time from having to think of what the best response is so that you have more time remaining on the clock to try to solve for what the next best move may be before your own timer runs out).