How to become a better chess player

Many of you probably want to become a strong chess player. It takes hard work and dedication to become one. Here are a few tips and advice to help you become a better chess player. 

Advice #1-After your chess tournament, analyze deeply all of your games to find out your mistakes and fix them. 

If you want to be a better player, you have to analyze your chess games to see where you need to improve. If you don't, you won't know your mistakes, and you will continue to make the same mistakes over and over. A strong chess player doesn't repeat their mistakes, but instead they analyze their games to find their mistakes, so they don't repeat the mistakes in future games. Analzying your games will greatly help improve your chess, so you don't make the same mistake over and over again. 

Advice #2-How to Analyze

NEVER analyze with the help of a computer engine. Computer engines don't understand anything. All they do is blunder check your game to see where you made blunders, and you can do that yourself. They don't understand any positional mistake. That is why analyzing over the board, without a computer is better and more effecient than analyzing with a computer. We, humans, know more about positional chess than humans so we can find out our positional mistakes better than computers. Strategical chess is part of the game and it is important that you know your mistakes in that part of the game. After you have fully analyzed your game OTB without a computer, then you can use an engine to see if you made a mistake in your analysis. Only use a computer to CHECK your analysis, not DO your analysis. Once you finished that you have completed analyzing your game, and you will become a better chess player. If you want, you can ask a strong chess player like me to check your analysis if you don't want to use a computer to check it. 

If you need any help with analzying your games, contact me, and I can help analyze them for you. 

To be continued...

CHECK OUT MY NEW GROUP "CHESS IMPROVEMENT"

http://www.chess.com/groups/view/chess-improvement 

Doing a blunder check is just important as well. Not everyone has a strong positional understanding

yeah, but thats all a computer can do, and you can find that yourself when analyzing OTB.

At my level I first need to get rid of blunders and than eventualy to work on my positional understanding.

play a lot blitz chess to learn patterns :-D

Yeah, I know you're joking. :)

Work on lots puzzles and tactics to improve your calculation. Then by improving your calculation, you will have less blunders because you calculate better.

no, seriously I am not

I blunder a lot more after getting my tactic up. Seriously I got from 2100 to 2400 in tactic in 3 days and started blundering in bullet and blitz, and even more in standard which I had not done in a long time.

If you play blitz you have less time to think about each move which means that it's a higher chance that you will blunder. Works for me.

By the way, when I win rapid games I usually don't blunder but I have many mistakes and inaccuracies.

Maybe you are playing too fast in standard, and you are missing stuff by playing too fast. Try playing correspondence chess and taking your time in correspondence chess. That way you can calculate at any pace and have less chance of blundering

no. When I use more time it only turns that I get lazy and don't see obvious 4 movers or 3- movers which I would see in blitz. Correspondance is a little better as I can think about the games while going to the toilet.

I play better blindfolded as I see the position and the tactical motives more clearly in standard

how can u play better blindfolded??? 

You are NM, and don't know?

Well I would be glad to help.

You can change the board settings, or make the pieces look different.

One option is blindfold.

instructive!

tactics teach position: therefore the advice to play lots of blitz to understand patterns is not irrational but there is more than one way to skin a cat of course 

Why do I feel like nobody here is actually really reading the posts of the people they are responding to?

Doing your own analysis is best, of course, but a computer can be a good tool if you use it well.

If you go over a lot of games, not just your own, you will get a better sense of what those centipawn numbers indicate.

It's not just tactics either. There is a remarkable amount of positional assessment which goes into those pluses and minuses. If you see your numbers dip in the absence of a compelling tactic, you can be pretty sure you did something dumb positionally. The computer won't tell you exactly what -- that's up to you -- but it's a good clue.

to be a better tournament player,just dont play like maggie feng