The road to improvement

Hi everybody,

I'm playing chess since I'm a kid (always casual games) and I started to play on this website 3 month back. After a period of fast improvement (when I began to make very very less stupid mistakes), I am now kind of stagnating (between 1250 and 1270).

Can you please tell me what are the best ways to improve my skills in chess at my level ?

For the moment, I study the opening a bit, I use tactical training and I look at my lost games to point out the bad moves.

Thanks all

This fits a bit to me!  Try some tactical training, and try to play live lightning chess, at as fast time controls as you can. (I use 2+1 a lot).  At least that trained my eye to see possibilities faster!  At this levels tactics is way more important than openings.

I would say totally the opossite, try to play slower games, if you play too fast you are not really thinking, and you are not applying anything of what you could have learnt before.

Sounds obvious, but remember, there are (at most) 32 pieces on the board and you need to keep an eye on all of them. Sounds easy enough, right?

Then remember that each of the 32 pieces can move multiple different directions, to multiple different squares. Or maybe they cannot move to any squares at all. Each square is an intersection of sorts. There are 64 squares. That means there are 64 intersections. Making mistakes means you or I did not see all of the directions that all of the pieces could move along the various lines of the intersections.

Sounds obvious, but I know I make mistakes when I forgot or couldn't see one of the places a king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn could move. Ohhh right...the queen can move 8 different directions. That means it is doing work along at most 8 different lines...imposing force.

The king can also move 8 different directions. Rooks 4, bishops 4, knights 8, pawns...3. So you have two kings, two (or more) queens, 4 rooks, 4 bishops, 4 knights, 16 pawns. That's a lot of directions and squares to pay attention to, but you can keep developing a feel for their "auras".

Anyways, there's a lot to a game of chess, and so it is easy to lose sight of any number of the various things. Ah we've perfected visualizing that knight on e5. Looks marvellous doesn't it? Oh, but wait! Checkmate? I did not see that coming.

To socialista, you seem right ; thanks for the advice.

To BhomasTrown, very fun, you write well.

But still... what should I do ?

Try some Tatical Puzzle books as they usually have a greater variety of themes than is offered online.  303 Tricky Chess Tactics by Wilson & Alberston is a good example.

Next go through an endgame book (or two).  I found books by Chernev, Silman and Pandolfini to be helpful

Remember also that when learning we sometimes reach a plateau for a while before noticing further improvement.  Just keep playing and enjoying your chess and the improvement will come.

Thanks for your advices.

I was given Tartakover book. Do somebody know if it is helpful?

I would recommend checking out NimzoRoy (he is another chess.com user) blogs on endgame and opening theory. There he recommends books for improvement and also has some good puzzles for practice.

Which is the name of the book onizukant?

You are not improving because you don't study chess that much. Study endgames and strategy,would be better from books. Solve chess puzzles.

To socialista : A Breviary of Chess

Do somebody know this book?

I don´t know that book, I was trying to find reviews, but I couldn´t.

I have this book and I like it:

The Inmortal Games of Capablanca - Fred Reinfeld