Question for more seasoned player.

I just started playing Chess and have been practicing some things in normals/unrated. I am hoping more seasoned players can help me with some things. I am starting to study end games through Pandolfini's Endgame Course for check mates. What resources should I use to hone and practice openings? Are tactics best for studying middle game?

I embrace the repetition of games. I feel like that is definitely the way to go, but I honestly have zero interest in blitz.

So should I search a database at higher elo ranges and study their games and why they win and lose?

Soo don't worry about learning the obscure variations of openings? Also do you have any recommendations as far as collections of games to start with. Or a place that I can find a good collection?

 I like urk's comments too, but the way I got better as a beginner like 15 years ago was to start backwards....by endgame study...the real purpose of an opening is to arrive at a better endgame position, so you have to study that first. Then go back and learn just the first few moves of the most common openings and it may click faster as to why the opening bookmoves are what they are. If you understand the theory openings get easier. Also as a beginner study tactics, do the puzzles and lessons right here on chess.com, a lot of it is free. Also if there is a local chess club where you are and you have time, join it and play over the board.

Read 'A Guide to Chess Improvement: The Best of Novice Nook' by Dan Heisman. It's a superb book with a lot of useful advice. He advises playing 90% of your games at a slow time control. The other 10% can be played at a faster rate to improve your opening play and become more familiar with openings. Other useful things are repetitively studying tactics, analysing your own games to identify your frequent errors (super important), playing mostly stronger players (weaker players may not punish your mistakes), quickly playing through annotated master collections, etc. Don't worry about opening or end game specifics as games will be mostly won and lost via tactics at a lower level. Knowing the ninth move in a Sicilian variation is useless if you hang pieces or lose to an easy tactic.

For someone seeking help with openings, I usually bring up Openings for Amateurs by Pete Tamburro (2014).

http://kenilworthian.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-of-pete-tamburros-openings-for.html

I believe that it is possible to see a fair portion of the beginning of Tamburro's book by going to the Mongoose Press site.

https://www.mongoosepress.com/excerpts/OpeningsForAmateurs%20sample.pdf

Perhaps joshblevins would also want to look at Discovering Chess Openings by GM John Emms (2006).

https://web.archive.org/web/20140627114655/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/hansen91.pdf

Possibly of interest:

Simple Attacking Plans by Fred Wilson (2012)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708090402/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review874.pdf

https://www.newinchess.com/Shop/Images/Pdfs/7192.pdf

Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev (1957)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708104437/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/logichess.pdf

The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played by Irving Chernev (1965)

https://chessbookreviews.wordpress.com/tag/most-instructive-games-of-chess-ever-played/

Winning Chess by Irving Chernev and Fred Reinfeld (1949)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708093415/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review919.pdf

A Guide to Chess Improvement by Dan Heisman (2010)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708105628/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review781.pdf

Join a club, play over the board games and analyse your own games afterwards.  Do not learn sequences of moves but choose an opening move that feels good to you (d4, e4 or Nf3) and stick with that for a good while.  d4 is said to lead to more positional play, Nf3 is very flexible - putting it to your opponent to decide how s/he is going to go - and e4 gets tactics into the game quickest.  For a beginner there is a view that e4 is good because tactics is the heart and soul of chess so the quicker you find yourself calculating lines the better and this speeds up the recognition of patterns.

Only once you have played enough games to have some idea how games with your chosen opening move can develop get a book.  Find one with the games of one of the great classical masters who played in the opening/style you have adopted.  Now have a look at how what happens in the opening carries over into the middle game and then into the end game.

Do the tactics puzzles on this site.

Play some rapid chess here (but not to the exclsion of longer time limit chess).  Fischer disliked rapid chess but was advised to play some and took the advice.  I don't know if he finished up thinking it worthwhile but the advice makes sense to me.

There are things in chess which are purely cerebral - problem composing for example - but mostly it is a game for those who like to win.  So enter tournaments and put yourself on the line as much as you can.  But spend little or no time looking at ratings.  If you just want the kick of seeing your rating advance go get your wizard to the twenty third level or pick some other game where such things are the reward.  The reward in chess is the thrill of finding the moves which gain you advantage and then victory.  It is a game for warriors.

Hope you have fun.

Simple attacking plans is a very good book if you study it properly

So I decided to start reading Logical Chess : Move by Move and I have to say, I absolutely adore Sir. Chernvez's ability to explain the reasoning behind every single move from the first one to the last. I have been reading Pandolfini's Endgame Course during lunch at work just because of how easy it is to pick up the book and get a lot of value out of a single page or two. I played yesterday using the Sicilian Dragon and I have to say as a complete newbie, even though I lost I got a lot out of my loss.

Can someone explain the Glicko RD thing to me? Is a lower number better or a higher number better?

"If you find an opening here that appeals to you and you wish to find out more about it, the next step would be to obtain an introductory text devoted entirely to that subject." - GM John Emms, in his 2006 book, Discovering Chess Openings

"... I feel that the main reasons to buy an opening book are to give a good overview of the opening, and to explain general plans and ideas. ..." - GM John Nunn (2006)

"... almost all opening books and DVD's give ample attention to general plans and developing schemes, typical tactics, whole games, and so on. ..." - IM Willy Hendriks (2012)

Check out the PGN Mentor site, go to the PGN page. They have databases there grouped by the name of the player, opening and different tournaments and world championships. All of the PGN files are free.

My understanding is that the Glicko number represents the degree of approximation of your given rating to the rating you are probably worth. The higher the Glicko number, the more likely your eventual stable rating will significantly deviate from its present position. The predicted deviation is most pronounced if you have attained a particular rating without having played many games. If you have played a great deal your rating is assumed to have settled and that it is unlikely to differ significantly in the near future. Consequently your Glicko number will be quite low. If, on the other hand, you have only just started playing rated games and you have reached, say, 1600 very quickly with almost no defeats, your Glicko number will be quite big as your results suggest that you may obtain a significantly higher rating fairly quickly. The number itself represents the possible difference between your existing rating and what statistical analysis based on your results and generated by the computer suggests it might well become. So, if you have reached 1600 (starting quite recently from 1200) but haven't yet lost, you may find your Glicko number is quite large at, say, 135, indicating a likely ascent to 1735 in due course. This automated guess of 1735 is likely to be very inaccurate in its specificity, and you may find it significantly revised as you whizz past 1700 without defeat, but as a large Glicko number it does fairly clearly tell you that your existing rating should be considered very provisional as a measure of your ability insofar as it (your rating) hasn't really yet settled down to what it will become after you do in due course reach your level.

I looked up the Glicko RD formula. Its simple but great.

Here is the route I have decided to take. It is a compromise between learning from low rated games and grandmaster games.

I decided to follow this book path:

Pandolfini's Ultimate Guide to Chess (i know its basic, but to skip the fundamentals is a huge blunder)

Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (checkmates and etc)

Winning Chess Tactics (it teaches all of the concepts and ideas behind tactics)

Play Winning Chess (teaches the advanced ideas of tactics like space and tempo)

Tactics Time

Tactics Time 2

Both of these books are tactics books from players who aren't GM, but these are the common things I will run into with explanations on the correct solutions.

After this point I would feel a bit more prepared for tactics and end game play. Then I would just have to practice with the tactics trainer. I picked to read these books in this order because it starts at a lower level, which makes sense and in order to get better at tactics I need to understand and know the various checkmate patterns.