what is the best way to get good at chess

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Avatar of carnageisreal

How many good ways are there to get good at chess?

Avatar of sirgreasypanda
Practice and review all your games.
Avatar of Arnaut10

Only one way

Avatar of tygxc

Analyse your lost games and learn from your mistakes.

Avatar of Drummer_GD_Elijah

Use's chess.com's study plan to help:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/study-plan-directory

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Avatar of Drummer_GD_Elijah
tygxc wrote:

Analyse your lost games and learn from your mistakes.

Not only that, but identify mistakes that you keep making, and try to learn from them.

You can also watch videos online on the subject of repetitive mistakes as well, I think Gotham has a couple.

Avatar of Fr3nchToastCrunch

There's a general rule of thumb to go by when you have no idea what to do. Prioritize three things:

1. Find checks. Are any of them useful?

2. If no, find a threat against another piece, or even a capture.

3. If none of those threats are good, find your worst piece and make it useful.

4. If you can't do any of those things...you're in zugzwang or otherwise losing horribly.

See also:

"Equal" trades of pieces are not inherently equal. Sacrificing your bishop to take out an opponent's bishop that's threatening to play (or assist with) checkmate is good; sacrificing your bishop to take out a knight way in the back that's not doing anything is not good.

Also also:

Look for sacrifices. No matter how absurd they look, try to find them. Is it a blunder, or is it something amazing? Figure that out to determine if you should do it. I've played six brilliant moves as of this writing, and all but two of them involved me looking at potential sacrifices and concluding that the particular sacrifice I did would be good.

This isn't a perfect strategy, but it helped me get out of the 500s.