How can I get better at Chess?
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Try to play rapid games more than blitz or bullet and before making any move review which of your pieces is under attack and analyze your games to see your mistakes and try to avoid them and also games played by other players or by grandmasters
Chess is an extremely hard game. People invest enormous time into learning it. A select few become the best of the best and archieve the grandmaster title.
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The first thing you should train is your tactical eye.
Get the free "Lucas Chess R" chessclient and solve all Mate in One puzzles. They can be found under Train / Training Positions / Checkmates in GM games.
Then solve all Mate in Two puzzles.
You can solve everything else the client offers, but Mate in One and Mate in Two is where you should start. Maybe return to them occasionally, too.
You can also install the newest version of Stockfish from the internet, if you like, to analyze your games. This allows you to analyze as many games as you like.
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After that, start solving puzzles on lichess. You dont need an account. These puzzles will be quite easy, but they are the basis for tougher stuff. Later you may want to also check out chesspuzzle.net and chesstempo.com; these have harder puzzles. With chesspuzzles they have stalemate problems, too. And chesstempo has complete random puzzles, you never know if you get something easy or really hard.
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After this point you may consider getting some books. First one is master games. The classic here is the one by Bobby Fischer "my 60 memorable games"; but there are many books that have classic games with commentary either by the original players or by grandmasters.
Another book to consider is a good one about endgames. The classic here is "Jeremy Silman: Silman’s Complete Endgame Course".
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Another invalueable resource are the speedruns by GM Naroditsky on YouTube. They are possibly the best source for learning chess ever, at least to my knowledge.
There are of course countless other YouTube channels. Personally I focus only on channels by IMs (International Master, one level below Grandmaster) and GMs.
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The next thing you need to do is play slow time controls until you hit rating 1000. You will need time to think about your next move. I recomment playing 15|10, thats 15 minutes plus 10 second per move, so you can have an endgame once in a while.
Do not waste your time with Blitz or worse Bullet before you hit 1000.
Do not waste your time with openings before you hit 1000; after that they turn very useful though.
You can play trick openings if you like but those wont give you real rating, just a temporary inflation.
Anyway once you have improved a bit, you may want to carefully review your games; at very least your losses. Only if you know your weaknesses you can fix them.
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Ideal is of course also getting a coach, joining a chess club, that sort of thing.
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To summarize, the core of your learning should be 3 things:
- Play games and analyze
- Solve puzzles
- Pick something you want to concentrate on, such as endgames, later openings, master games, etc, that you can study. Dont mix multiple things; just stay with one topic at a time.
Then you should be able to improve over time.
Feb 27, 2026
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#4
First of all, Welcome to Chess.com! I was a 357 elo for 3 years. Now I'm running a Beginners Chess Club here on Chess.com and spending quality time with many of my member to personalize improvement. Tbh, the members in my club are very 100 eloish !!! Check them out and see what almost every last one of my members did together. Tomorrow is a big day!!!
So about 2 months ago, I started playing chess. The thing is, I'm still stuck at 100 elo. I've finished most of the lessons, but it doesn't look like I'm improving. What tips can you guys give me?