Becomming a better player?

Hello,

I'd really like to get better in chess. I have always enjoyed the little puzzles. But since february this year I've nearly been playing non-stop.

I am starting to really really enjoy it. But I've also getting more and more fustrated with the game.  Just due to the fact that it looks I am not getting any better.

I've learned some basics. One, two or maybe three good openings. I start a lot with trying to enforce Fool's Mate.
Not since it's good. But since it works on my current rating (little note, I have seen how bad this backfires when playing against a good player). I've also been using a few basic Gambit Openings. And just some generic randomness. Like Borgs Defence. I just can't seem to remember or being able to enforce due to my opponent, most of the openings I've learned. Most my games end with me making a HUGE mistaken. Eg missing a Knight and thus losing my queen. 

I've bought some puzzlebooks of chess. Read a varia of things about midgame and endgames.

But it keeps being like the following, I suck at chess.
I'd really like to become a better player. Atleast around a 1200 ~ 1300 rating.

How would  you guys recommend to get better?
Chess.com  Mentor, Tactics Trainer?, Exploring more and more openings? Most of the Computer Workouts are too hard. Maybe I should join a local chess club or just hire a tutor?
What do you all recommend?

Thanks 

Firstly, stop playing moves where you hope your opponent makes a mistake. You might catch people out, but you want improvement not easy wins. Make a move which is good against any response.

I think it's just paying more attention to your opponents threats, not too much else at this stage. After you've found a move which seems good look at every check or capture they will have after your move. If you decide that they can't make any threats which you aren't able to deal with, only then make your move.

If you're not seeing that their knight can take your queen then you're either playing too quickly, or not concentrating enough.

Rather than actually learn openings by name, you should focus on following the three principles for a good opening:

• occupy the center
• develop your pieces
• protect your king (castle early)

By looking at your games I can tell you tend to block in your own pieces, and more importantly you are too quick to rush into an attack before you deployed all your pieces and secured your king. Don't move your queen out into harms way this early, just look at your game against IMRUNNINGWITHTHEPACK and see how badly it got chased around.

Other than that, play regularly and do a lot of tactics puzzles, be sure you work on the main principles (pin, skewer, discovered attack, fork).

Chess Master Grandmaster edition > Academy Lessons = Much better player.

spam tactics trainer, some people find it a bit boring but youll sky rocket if you do

Cheers codeinject,

it seems that we are around the same level. The main difference though is that 1 month and a half ago (4th of July) I was at my lowest level, 597 (@ live standard 30 min games). After my father beat me I've decided that I want to improve in order to be able to beat him. Now chess is my favorite hobby. I've almost forgot about rugby :)

The main thing that helped to reach my current level is doing 1 hour/day of tactics on chesstempo. There I have a rating of ~1300 after 2200 puzzles. 

Also, a great way to get good at our level is going through our losses with a strong player. I know it hurts, we don't like to look at them but we can learn so much. Post some annotated games on forums and make some chess friends. This will help a lot.

Now I've hit a plateau but I'll break it by working on my thought process regarding choosing the next move. You'll be amazed what happens with your game when you ask yourself "what is my opponent threatening with that move? Any forks, pins or other tactics coming sonn? What checks do I have available? Any captures or threats?". Here's a good example 

Good luck  

I must say, I often play while talking to someone. Or when I am about to go to bed. Or when I had a couple of drinks.

I've told myself numberous of times to put on my headphones while playing so I'll be consetrated. 

@Belund 

Thanks a bunch for that analyses. I have been thinking about my attack issue. But it felt like a strong method.

But, sometimes it backfires. This comes back to what Scottrf said.  "stop playing moves where you hope your opponent makes a mistake"

@Fear_ItseIf  

I've got into chess due to those kinds of puzzles. The reason I registerd at Chess.com is to be able to spam it.

@KeyserSzoze

"with a strong player", does Crafty, GNUChess and DeepBlue count?

I use pychess to analyse my games and see what I could have done.

Although I think it sticks less than talking a game over. 

Maybe I should join that chess club in town..

Thanks for the advice. I'll give it a try.

codeinject, let's take it step by step, you gave some good hints about why your betterment process is stalling:

- Crafty, GNUChess, Deepblue, I suppose these are chess engines. At our level I think it's counterproductive to use them. Why? Because they do the hard work for us. Why don't you spend 2-3 hours reviewing a game with a stronger opponent (I'm not stronger but if you want we can do this together, it will help me also, send me your skype id in a message). Besides finding out your wrong moves you'll exercise your thought process which is very important. And like this you won't play hope chess, I'm working at it too.

If you play talking to somenone it's clear that you can't be focus on the game and on choosing the right next move. How do you know if you made the best move if you're engaged in a conversation with another person? Regarding putting your headphones while playing I don't know if it's a good idea. I guess the rhytm of music will influence your game. About drinking, you know the answer :). You know that alcohol reveals gambling attitudes, that's why they serve free drinks in casinos I guess. I play in a quiet room, I remove anything that can steal my attention (skype, phone) and I focus on the game because I consider playing chess a moment when I'm in a close connection with my mind and it's one of the few opportunities that make be there, in that moment 100%.

Joining the chess club is a good idea, you'll make a lot of chess friends and this will help you. If my job won't send me anymore everywhere on this planet, I'll join a chess club in my contry, we have some good coaches :). Thas't also true for Holland

Cheers 

There are 5 traps to avoid when using exclusively engines to analyze your games :

1) lazyness : as Keyser rightly pointed out above, it's very tempting to let the engine do the analysis work for you. But spending some time trying to figure things out by yourself actually helps the learning process : it's easier to understand an explanation or the answer to a problem if you've spent some time working on it yourself,

2) not trying to understand where the mistake comes from and how to avoid it in the future : that's where engines are notably bad compared to humans : they just can't characterize your mistakes. Let's say you miss a checkmate in one of your games. There may be many roots to this mistake such as : not knowing the mating pattern in the first place, not looking for an attack in the position, not enough time to calculate, not willing to calculate, etc. 

Depending on the cause you may want to adress the problem in a different way. That's something you must be able to do by yourself, as the engine can't help here...

3) not being able to synthetize the analysis : sometimes it's good to be able to give a summary of what went wrong with words. For example, concluding that in your games you try to attack too soon before your development is complete might be less accurate than 50 lines of variations, but much more useful to make progress :-)

4) not being able to make the distinction between important mistakes and relatively unimportant ones : for a computer, if you make a -1 mistake, it's a -1 mistake, no matter how difficult it is for your opponent to take advantage of it (engines don't know what a difficult move is). But if taking advantage of your mistake requires your opponent to play like a computer for a bunch of moves, then maybe the mistake is not that bad (that's a human mistake !). Now if the refutation is very easy to see, of course, you have to consider it as an honest mistake and care for it. I've seen many 1400 players analyzing their games with Houdini, and pointing one mistake after another, desperately trying to look for explanations ("I should develop here", "I should castle first", "now I should have attacked before castling", "of course, by playing this I would have won a rook and a pawn and my king was more active and not in danger, but here, I win only two pieces...", "though Rxh7+ won the game for me, it was better to prepare the attack by playing a4 first..."). In the end, you may feel exhausted and powerless, when knowing only about 2 or 3 major mistakes in every game and trying to cure them is good enough for steady progress. Funnily, my coach sometimes dismisses some of my post-game analysis by saying things like "yes, maybe it's better than what you've played, but I wouldn't worry too much about it" - ie. that's not what is most important in that game...

5) bad evaluations in some positions : though there have been considerable progress in this field, some engines are still relatively weak in some areas of the game such as endgames. They may give wrong assessments in some typical endgames (rook endgames for example). 

I'm still a very fervent defender of human analysis : it's flawed, but it helps ! 

Good post hicetnunc.

hicetnunc, thank you for the answer, I think this could be a very good description of what a reviewing session should achieve. If there are any more points, I would highly appreciate if you share them.

Regarding the engines, I think a beginner will make good use of them after he is pretty good at reviewing himself the games. The engines could be a tool of choosing the best from the best. I might be wrong about this but this is how I see the things at my level (2 months).

Thanks for the replies.
I've engaged in a Tournament here on Chess.com for 1800-
So, needless to say all the opponents are way to skilled. 
But the biggest reason I wanted to play in these High-Rated games is to try to not use the 'mistake'-technique but using real genuine good moves.

This is what happens:

• I've won one game against a  1448 rated person.
• I skyrocketed with the Tactics trainer.
• I've managed to play chess more isolated as I could say: "this is hard, one moment".
• The higher rated player gave me a GoodGame message. In trends as in, interesting match, like your techniques etc etc
• I managed to analyse a few games myself by hand. And made Crafty reanalyse them for me. To give me the same answers.

Conclusion: 

Thanks a bunch for the notes. And Keyser, I've challenged you for a match and I'd like to add you to my Skype.

Great, if you select +200 players for live standard games will be great

@codeinject - I have been playing and teaching chess for over 35 years and the best, quickest and most effective way to improve your game is by going over Grandmaster games, particularly the best Grandmasters, i.e. Bobby Fischer, Emanuel Lasker, Anatoly Karpov, etc.  When you do this you begin to learn why the Grandmasters make the moves they do and before long you start to make moves like the Grandmasters do. 

  Also, going over great Grandmaster games shows you how much there is to chess and how much you can improve.  One of the best examples of this is Bobby Fischer's, "Game of the Century".  You can find a video of this on YouTube.com along with many other great chess video's where Grandmaster games are analyzed for you.  It's a wonderful way to learn, improve your game and at the same time be in utter awe of the greatest Grandmasters and the art they create on the chess board.    Plus, video's on YouTube are free to watch of course.

   Send me a message and it will be my pleasure to help you out.  Don't get discouraged my friend!  Help is on the way!