dont let the people at the chess club discourage you from playing chess, im sure a lot of them may have been playing for years, and by the sound of your story, you seemed to have picked it up pretty quickly.I found i started to improve when i started playing longer matches where I had to make my move based on calculations rather than on time. Playing blitz and bullet is fun as well, i guess play whatever time controls you enjoy most.
My Journey into Chess as a newcomer (very long)
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i actually enjoy longer matches more but the blitz really helped me get over my nerves
Jun 20, 2013
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#4
That was a good post and thought I'd tell you a little about my learning process in chess. At young age of maybe nine or ten I learned the rules of chess from my mom. She only knew how the pieces moved and taught them to me and we played a few games. I was hooked but my mother as a busy working parent didn't have the time and enthusiasm to continue playing. I couldn't find any friends to play against so that was that for a few years.
At the of perhaps 16 or 17 I found out that my big brothers friends played a lot of blitz chess. They were 5-6 years older than me and I started to play against them regularly and I was hooked again. They had a chess clock and we played 5 minute games against each other and I got beaten time after time but nevertheless I enjoyed it and was getting better rather quickly.
Two of those friends became really close to me and when I was 22 I got my first computer. At that time I was playing a 100 game series against my friend Janne, and we kept record of every game we played. The first set Janne won something like 70-30, the second one 65-35. After that it all turned upside downd! I had studied chess from some beginners book during those times but with the computer I got I went over the openings I knew my friend was playing against me. I just moved the pieces on my computer screen and learned opening tricks against those particular openings. Next time we played, I won the set 65-35 or so. The next one 70-30. I just got a little better than my buddy and it's been that way since.
After those highly educating chess marathons I started to play online chess. Mainly with 5 0, 3 0 and 1 0 time controls. I'm now 37 years old and have played tens of thousands of live blitz games online and thousands over the board but only perhaps something like five long games OTB! That's right, I've never played any more games with the classical time controls .
As to your question how to study chess I can only tell how I used to improve my level of play... I play only blitz and bullet, a lot of them. Then I look openings, endgames, tactics or strategy from either some book but in the later years mainly from internet. Then I play again and try to utilize what I've learned in practise. And then repeat the cycle from time to time. I also used to learn from the chessmaster game, there are much good learning content in that particular chess software.
Nowadays I mainly just play. But sometimes I get irritated by some opening and then search youtube for some advice and then go back playing and see if I do any better. You said "chess is an extremely overwhelming game" and that's well said. My advice for that is to study one are of chess at a time. Opening study gives you perhaps the fastest results but don't overemphasize it. End game study helps you to better understand the transition from middle game to end game. Strategy and tactics are also an endless target to study. The more you study them the better you understand chess but you will never know it all and that is the greatness of chess. Just push forward studying but more importantly enjoy the gaming and remember that there are always players that will beat you. The most fun I get is when I start to keep up with some one I earlier got beaten by.
And finally some encouraging words from one the great masters from the past:
"Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness. Therein lies its peculiar charm. Intellectual productiveness is one of the greatest joys --- if not the greatest one --- of human existence. It is not everyone who can write a play, or build a bridge, or even make a good joke. But in chess everyone can, everyone must, be intellectually productive and so can share in this select delight. I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy". - Siegbert Tarrasch
Hello everyone my name is Sean and I thought I'd say hello to the community and talk about my journey into chess. I just picked up chess recently not knowing much about the game but I'm a very competitive person who strives very hard and picks things up very quick. I started playing chess because a person at my work was challenging
anyone to a game and being the competitive person I am I took the challenge. The game was on our phones and he set it up to were we had 1 day to make a move because he knew I never played chess before. After work I went home and started studying on chess.com, youtube and other websites the very basics of chess like how to move the pieces, the principles of the opening and tactics. Everyday on the bus ride to work I would do tactic puzzles on my phone so I could use the things ive been learning against my co-worker. Over the next 2 weeks or so we managed to play a whole set were I ended up winning 2 wins to 1 loss to my astonishment. I decided to take a step forward and look for a chess community in my area. I ended up finding one and decided to go that Friday thinking if I beat my co-worker, who I thought was really smart and good at chess, that I could handle my self at a chess club. Well that Friday when I went I got absolutely destroyed. My first game was actually against the organizer of the club who knew I was new to chess but was very friendly and wanted to get a scope of how good I was. The next 2 people I played were like me (except much much stronger) and were just stopping by to check out this chess club. I actually didn't play against any other regular and not 1 of them introduced themselves or even acknowledged a new person was there. This kind of made me feel unwanted because any other game I played the communities were always trying to grow and welcome new players but the chess club seemed so secluded. As of recent I've still been doing tactic puzzles everyday but now I've also been looking at the more common openings and some of the games from chess masters. One major problem I just recently come across though is what to do now. chess is an extremely overwhelming game and it's hard to get an idea of where to go next. I've also realized that I've only played 6 games in my first month and a half of picking up chess and that I'm kind of nervous to play chess. I don't know if its cause I'm nervous to make an embarrassing blunder or its just a mental state saying that I'm not ready and need to keep studying. Well today I decided I need to break past that mental state and just play a game, so for the first time in almost a month I played a game. The game was an online Blitz game which I knew I wasn't ready for but I wanted to go with the "high-dive" method and just jump in. I ended up losing that game because of time (like I knew I would) but I gained something much more valuable in return, I had a lot of fun with that match and even got my heart beating when that clock was counting down. So here I am today more eager then ever to play, learn and just have fun and if anyone wants to play I'm taking challengers (just remember I'm not that good yet lol).