Diamond Membership a Waste of Money and other things

OnOne interesting option to add for the tactical trainer could be that 50% of the puzzles are fakes and you have just to parry a threat. In this way unsound combination habits would be prevented

Great advice! Thank you!

I will think of the best move possible before consulting the database. That makes a lot of sense, and it will be much more fun because I will get to play my chess moves. I will be the one that gets to play chess, and not some grand master doing it for me for the first 5 or 10 moves.

I must say a very big thank you to everyone who has contributed to my thread on the Diamond Membership. As you can see, I am no longer a Diamond Member, but have taken to heart everything everyone has taught me.

For tactics, I still have a $4.00 per month subscription to www.chesstempo.com, and more important, I have everyone here at chess.com where I can post my games in the appropriate thread for game analysis.

There are so many good teachers on this site that are not even staff members, so I am in good hands. I also have been offered many opportunities to be coached by strong players on this site for free. I have nothing to complain about. 

Last, to the chess.com staff, a big thanks for creating the largest community of  chess players on the planet. Well done!

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Well, the labor day weekend is over and it is back to work for me. I won't be back to post anything new until 5 pm PST.

Everyone have a great day!

Not in every case of course, but a lot of times these volunteer "coaches" on here just beat you without giving any helpful input at all.

Oh hey woodshover, I heard a rumor that your account was closed!

I agree that you shouldn't play a move that you don't understand, but I would put forth one heck of an effort to understand the move (if it is a mainline and important part of your repetorie).  I would look carefully at the earliest games where the move was played, especially the games by the great champions of the past.  I would also look to see what moves where played before the move was played (especially those games by the orginator of the move).  Often following the history of a variation will provide clues as to why a move is played.   I would invest about 50 hours in the move before I gave up and decided it was beyond my power to grasp.  If you don't have time to do it during the game, then I would spend the time after the game was over.    After the game, I would try playing against the move with my computer.  "Seek and you shall find".

The original poster here seems to imply that online chess at 2-3 days per move is too slow but Blitz and 15-minute games are too fast. The latter is true but not the former: I am playing about 20 online games at a time, and for most games, the reply time is hours and sometimes minutes and not days. So I consider online games perfect for slow playing where you don't have 3 hours in a row to play a slow game. I log on whenever I have time, sometimes every hour, and I usually have more than one game waiting for my move. Typically in the morning I will have about 10 games waiting for my move.

As a matter of fact, if you chjeck players' statistics, you will see that most of them have much less than one day between moves.For example my average reaction time is less than 3 hours.

I just have to say that this thread has got to have the most useful pieces of advice packed in one place despite the negatively phrased title! It really invited people with different opinions, priorities and values in todays age where chess resources are available through books, computers, Internet and people.

The staff of chess.com ought to make this into a sticky thread.

I'm back from teaching my band and orchestra students and just logged on as a non-diamond member.

There are advertisements. Fascinating. I'm not kidding, but the advertisement reads as follows: Design Your Dream Barbie Doll!

I now must apologize for saying that there are too many posts on this site that only contain fluff.

The silly talk posts I see from time to time are far more interesting than learning how to deisign my own Dream Barbie.    

Shouldn't I be seeing advertisements for chess books and chess sets?

This is still a chess site, isn't it,  or have I entered the twightlight zone?    

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Update on Barbie.

Now the advertisement is telling me to click "start styling".  I was going to catch up on my pm's and maybe do some tactics. Should I click on "start styling" instead? 

 When did you hear this?

Maybe someone is just trying to mess with your head?  That's not cool.

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O.K. This is a chess site and yet I am still getting more adds for more dolls! Why would a doll company think that an old guy like me who plays chess would want to buy a doll?

Here is the advertisement brought to you by chess.com that I am seeing right now. And I thought this was a site for chess players. 

American Girl Dolls  - With so many American Girl dolls to choose from, every girl can find a friend and story to love.

Is some staff member at chess.com only sending these doll adds to me as punishment for my justified rant on the Diamond Membership ? Have I been sent to purgatory?

I hear a lot of people complaining about those kinds of adds on here. Must get old. Anyway, I sent that poster a note asking where they heard my account was closed, and I never heard back. They were on line at the time too.

You did left once though did you but then you came back because you didn't want to lose the money.

I understand that chess.com is working on video lessons and updating chess mentor to help the beginning chess player like me.

Until that time comes, here is a sample of a new thread I will be starting soon, as the understanding of pawn moves is a very weak part of my game. 

Pawn Moves for Beginners

In the Open Sicilian, after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6, why is 3.d4 played?  With 1...c5, Black effectively prevents 2.d4, denying White the strong pawn center duo of d4 and e4. 

Why does White still play 3.d4?  Black will play cxd4. After cxd4, White only has one center pawn while Black has two. Why would White give up a center pawn so freely? 

Right now, I just find them extremely funny and enormously entertaining, especially since they have nothing to do with chess. It's like the advertisers are mentally challenged or something.

Woodshover, would you try to sell Barbie Dolls on a chess site?

I've been to many chess sites, and on the sides, top and bottom of the page I see tons of adds for chess books, chess clocks, chess pieces, chess boards, chess bags, chess hats, chess coffee mugs, chess DVD's, chess......................

I'm also seeing many strange adds targeted for generation Y, I believe.  All kinds of dating services and social networking sites. It's all very strange. Actually, I kind of feel a bit younger right now. 

No offense. Even my wife read your post and could not make sense of it.

"didn't want to lose the money" ? ?

I didn't lose any money. My membership expired. I may upgrade to Gold or Platinum to get rid of the adds, but not yet, because I find these adds to be extremely entertaining.

I was referring it to woodshover and the person didn't want to lose the membership(money)

 I was just about to tell him that. That was over two months ago. I would have thought that other poster would have seen me on here since then.

I think they use Adsense of some other adservice which tends to target you based on cookies from sites you visit. 

But I don't visit Barbie.com

Oh!  My pre-teen daughter borrows this laptop now and then. This explains everything. Thank you.

sure, your daughter visits them, i understand.