If "Chess books confuse the ever-living !#%$ out of you," it simply means you either don't have the right books for your level, or you're being lazy.There are many excellent books for beginners out there. Search for them in chess.com forums, or create your own thread asking for advice about that, you'll find many good recommendations. I myself would suggest not a book, but a software: Chessmaster Art of Learning, in my opinion, Josh Waitzkin has the best set of lessons available in the world that would take your from complete beginner and if you back those lectures up with really using your own brain while watching them and a decent tactical training, it could take you to 1800. Waitzkin is the person who injected the love of chess in me around 6, 7 years ago.
I think at this level, you don't need a coach to get started. Your rating is 1000+. That means, there's not really much a coach can do other than teaching you how to calculate (which would take around 10 minutes), and the rest is simply practice, practice, practice on your part. Learning a thinking method is very easy, implementing it consistently and sticking to a disciplined thinking process on every single move is extremely difficult. But don't worry, practice makes you better.
Only by studying tactics 30 minutes every day, you can raise your rating about 600 points in a year.
I think it's when you're around 1800-2000 and you need to reach a new level of chess understanding that a coach can really help you. Until then, improving your tactical ability (which is a very straightforward, simple, yet extremely difficult and a neverending process) and pretty basic strategical rules of the thumb would suffice. And those principles you can find almost anywhere:
http://www.chess.com/download/view/chesskidcom-curriculum
http://blog.chess.com/webmaster/your-guide-to-chesscoms-study-plans
So, my advice would be,
1) Study that curricilum in depth and try to apply the opening principles and middlegame ideas (bishop pair, rooks on open files, weakening pawn moves etc.) in your games.
2) either search around chess.com forums or google for methods of properly calculating (the idea of candidate moves, tree of variations, always trying to refute your own idea etc.), and then log into an online tactics server and train tactics steadily to apply those calculation principles correctly and consistently.
3) Analyze all your games with a good engine.
Dear Everyone,
I would like to find a chess coach, but I'm overwhelmed looking at the list of coaches on this site. Do you have any tips on how to sort the coaches that might help me from the ones who might not? I know a few things about how I learn:
1. I have to know the WHY of chess strategy/tactics as well as the WHAT.
2. I do better when my instructors know my strengths AND weaknesses.
3. I'm low on money, but high on willingness to learn. I take advice well, especially if it makes sense to me. If it doesn't make sense, I'll keep asking about a concept until it does.
4. Chess books confuse the ever-living !#%$ out of me. I want a human teacher!
Thanks,
Ladya79 (check my rating. I need help.)