Dan Heisman

Dan Heisman is the best chess coach and his videos are now available to chess.com members. His videos have always helped me to improve my game. You can find them at https://m.youtube.com/c/danheismanchess

He had an awesome column on chesscafe.com -- many are archived and free at

https://web.archive.org/web/20140714190611/http://www.chesscafe.com/archives/archives.htm

Further, he collected the best of those columns, edited them, etc., and put them into an incredibly awesome book called A Guide to Chess Improvement: The Best Of Novice Nook, https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Chess-Improvement-Best-Novice/dp/1857446496

Run, don't walk, to get this book.  It outlines a method of improvement.  I'm still reading it right now, but I have found what I have read thus far to be incredibly eye-opening, with *a lot* of common sense suggestions, that seem so obvious once he says them, that almost nobody else is saying.

Nobody should pay any attention to Dan Heisman. The last thing I need is better opponents, haha...

Well, that's the question: do you want to win or do you want to get better?

Heisman recommends (something like) 3/4 of your games with folks that are up to 200 points higher than you.  You won't learn a whole about from beating somebody who's going to make mistakes, and who's not going to take advantage of your mistakes.  (True: you will learn how to take advantage of mistakes, but not much else).

Geez, I was joking - I'm a HUGE Heisman fan. been preaching his ideas for years and own quite a few of his books. :-)

However, I've mostly sort of given up pointing beginners to his articles. I got the impression that most of them weren't actually interested in working to get better. I think they just wanted some magic incantation (magic dust?) that would instantly bestow chess strength upon them. So I quit trying.

I wasn't sure, but indeed I thought you were joking . . . . I just used the opportunity to offer a tip to anybody else reading

Huh.  Now that's interesting.  Indeed, if one really wants to get better, one has to work at it.  There is no magic.  And no magic formulas ("just learn this opening and watch your rating improve!!!").  Old fashioned work of starting out with: figure out where your weaknesses are...