So I really suck at chess...help?

Hey guys and gals.

So I suck at chess, and it really irks me. I play against the computer on "novice" difficulty and get my ass handed to me again and again. It irritates me because I'm not by any means stupid, but when I look at a chess board all I see is chaos, and I miss all the plays and make all the wrong moves.

I just find it difficult mentally to analyze so many different possible moves and outcomes and subsequent outcomes and so forth and keep it all in my head at once - it just feels like too much information and I don't know what I should be looking for or focussing on.

Are there any good resources out there that can help me to stop being chess-stupid/chess-blind?

Yours in frustration,

Kings To You 

Buy some decent book for the beginners and start with page one. See you in 3 months.

Practice practise practise

1.Play with a friend near your strength

2.Play slow games

3.Read a book geared towards your level

join a group here on chess.com that focusses on learning the game.

Play some games on this site, so that we may determine the extent to which you suck. We all suck, it's just different shades of suck.

practice makes perfect but nobody is perfect so why practice? soon u will see that chess has a very good history ,just be patient until u will fall in love it

I've just come back to the game after thirty years or so (!) and my rating is down at beginner. I've occasionally got over the 900 rating, but tend to find I stay about 850. Don't get downhearted; the advice about practice is absolutely sound, as is that of getting 2 or 3 books. I'd suggest Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (Bantam Books) and Yasser Seirawan writes books in the Winning Chess series (Everyman Chess). Both these books have little tests at the end of each chapter's input, so you can assess yourself. Seirawan's tests are really difficult (for me, anyway), but that's part of learning. Above all, try to enjoy it. I'd imagine that there are days when most of us play like clots and lose more than we win. The beauty of this site is that your rating fluctuates with your performance. You could try changing the parameters of your rating, the + and - settings on your page. Hope this helps.

relax,u become part of a large group that all have the same problem-----just different levels,but u will love the game.

First of all, don't confuse chess ability with intelligence - some very clever people are hopeless at the game & some bright players aren't up to much academically ! I don't know of any proven link between chess rating & IQ.

Being good at chess has more to do with memory & good spacial abilities as I see it.

BTW - Which computer are you playing against, because I notice you've only joined Chess.com today ?  Might be better to give this site a good chance before getting despondent - play some games against members here of your own ability & see how you do (very different from playing any computer). You can play either rated or unrated games - up to you.

If you play rated, then probably a good idea to start with opponents under  say 1000 ?  You can adjust the maximum rating of opponents from whom you'll accept challenges in your Online chess settings (look in Home>>Account).

Then once you've established a games history here you can ask other members to identify where your weaknesses are - there's a forum dedicated to game-analysis on this site, just for that purpose.

I'd recommend playing mostly Online (i.e. correspondence) chess to begin with because it gives you a lot more time to think about your moves !

Good luck with your games    

I must agree with stephen_33 about online chess. It gives you plenty of time to think about a move. I despise having to make all my moves in ten total minutes or five or whatever. I miss lots that way. I wouldn't mind playing live games in 45/10 or 60/10 or something like that, where I could play slowly, but I doubt I'd get many games. I keep from 6-10 online games going all the time, so that each time I log on, I've usually got 3-5 moves to make. My other contribution to the discussion is that after a loss, you should play back through the moves slowly, and try to identify where things went wrong. Tactics are often the bane of lower rated players, so you could try out tactics trainer on this site. Feel free to challenge me to an unrated game, I'd be happy to play through an online game at 3 days or more per move and look for pointers to give you. Remember to have fun, too. If you aren't having fun, you may as well be at work. lol

I disagree with THETUBESTER that playing against a weaker player is a good idea. It may make you a bit more confident, but you will certainly not improve and might even play worse afterwards.

The best and easiest way to get better at chess is to do some simple tactics puzzles. Eric Schiller's checkmate in one book is quite good (the only good Schiller book - it has only one mistake I've found, a puzzle with two solutions where he only gives one, but it just goes to show that everyone needs to practice mate in one!). Learning patterns cuts down on the amount of time you need to spend looking at a position before it starts to make sense.

Chess is largely about pattern recognition. If you can recognize the squares a knight can move to without drawing it out with your finger or mentally, it's much easier to visualize knight moves. (The knight moves to every opposite colored square in the box outside the one adjacent to where the knight is currently standing - this helps me to visualize knight moves)

So just work on very, very simple problems (keep it SIMPLE) until you can do them very, very quickly. Even if it's just how many moves does it take a knight on h1 to reach f3 (four) or how many moves does it take a knight on e4 to reach d4 (three) and finding the possible pathways.

http://www.chess.com/chessgroups

http://www.chess.com/groups/view/chesscom-university

http://www.chess.com/groups/home/dan-heisman-learning-center

I am finding that online chess does help out quite a bit.  You have a couple of days to mull over a tricky position.  It especially helps out in endgames ALOT!  Fight for the center, get a playable middlegame, fracture the pawn structure, look for weaknesses, exploit them and the get a winnable endgame, yea, thats the ticket!

not to sound like a chess.com shill, but if you join and use the trainer it makes a difference. that and just play and enjoy. 

Tactics, Tactics, Tactics

Also, don't be worried that you are not going up right away, I was stuck at 1200 for a year, and the next year i went up to 1800!

1. Practice

2. Practice some more

3. Practice MOAR!

@KingsToYou, there are a plethora of writings out there. Two of my current favorites are Idiot's Guide to Chess (not Chess for Dummies. The two books are as different as Reinfeld and Soltis) And, speaking of Soltis, his The Art of Defense in Chess is a marvelous, and easy to read, instruction to the middle game.

But, by far the best book on chess is written by someone you know well. Yourself. Here's the gig.

Buy a notebook and some grid paper.

Every game you begin, write the moves in your notebook, and on the page margin, keep an active notation of what YOU are thinking about doing. Don't get too wordy, just your own shorthand. Learn to draw simple figures like this.... (http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-pieces-art  #3)

So, YOU are the author of your games, and you can find where you went wrong, how you went wrong, or, even more fun is finding what you did that was right and won you the game. Trust me, THOSE will be more fun to write about.

Most games will take a little less than a page. Longer if you go on and on and on and on like I'm doing here. I would suggest that if it's a longer game, have a page extra page handy. Starting on a page back gives you the two full pages open for when you are getting ready to ake your move.

Well, in theory, this is a good idea. It either works or not depending on what you put into it. You sound enthusiastic, and so, you'll do well. And then you can sell your notebook, play better chess, and have a few dollars from the whole affair. Heck...you're not doing bad at all, now that I think of it.

Have you any tips for the rest of us?

d=^))

Start making chess part of your daily routine. Get Polgar's "5334" book and work through all of the mate in one problems several times until you can do them in your sleep. Try some of the mate in two problems, and then dedicate yourself (over a long period of time) to playing over lots and lots of the short games (there are 600 of them) at the end.

Let me second the recommendation for Wolff's "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess." It's a superb book with lots and lots of instruction and enough diagrams that you can read the book cover to cover without a board. No, it doesn't have complete games, but it's a great overview of the various stages of the game, tactics, strategy, and psychology.

For complete games, I like to recommend Chernev's classic "Logical Chess Move by Move." Yes, it's openings are outdated, but Chernev's amazing annotations show what was going on at EVERY move of the game. He keeps hammering the same points home over and over until you can't fail to grasp them

Finally, a super book on tactics for the beginner is Bain's "Chess Tactics for Students." There are 434 essential tactical positions arranged by theme (pin, skewer, back rank, etc.) in the book, and solving them over and over is one of the BEST ways to improve your tactical eye.

Until you don't "suck" anymore, those four books are all you will need--probably for the next year or so. After that, when your rating improves dramatically and you have all sorts of new confidence, come back and look at book recommendations for further study.

And don't forget to play SLOW games. Speed chess teaches you nothing but sloppy habits.

Thanx, MSteen for that. Two more books for me to get, for sure. Polgar's sounds like the Silman book that speaks to inbalances in one's games. It also sounds like I'll not be able to find it quickly at the half price bookstore (not all of us newbie chess players get speaking dates on the Dick Cavett show) however, I'll bet that Chernev book will be because the new generation doesn't like P-K4 notation. (that's e4 for simplification)

It's great hearing from you because I keep saying that players are usually quite helpful. The "Idiots" book is a weapons book, and that helped me a lot. Transitioning is still hard for me but, the Art of Defense has helped me 8nderstand the unity of a game better. Maybe any day now, I will learn...

But, just in case...don't hold your breath. So danged stubborn I am.

d=^))