bump. Still hard.
It's Very Hard to Navigate to Search Page
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May 6, 2017
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#3
Harder yet (in 2017) for a rank but passionate beginner 75 yo... I had to resign my first three attempts at live chess (actually I haven't tried a fourth game) because I didn't even know what the time limits per move were, much less the surprise that I didn't have to play another move until the next day, what?
Anyway until I can find a patient journeyman with empathy for an older guy who didn't grow up with a key board and mouse....I won't understand the icons and what they mean...last anecdote I was doing a lesson on "multiple squares" and the instruction box kept telling me to cover the key squares with the three pieces... I had no idea where to move the pieces 'cause there were no squares highlighted....and I was hunting the entire web site pages,icons and doing searches in every dialogue box for "KEY SQUARES" even thinking the side bar icons might be the "KEY SQUARES" highlighter button....right.
And I thought if I upped my membership to gold I'd be entitled to some sort of TUTORIAL with lessons on each page...there I've vented....and I don't know a lick more than I did before this post.
Is there a "Chess.com For Dummies"?
I find the feature that allows us to search for games by player name very useful: http://www.chess.com/games/search.html
With this, I can find games between Petrosian and Bronstein, etc. (so long as I can figure out which Petrosian, and which Bronstein!) However, it's remarkably hard to FIND this very valuable page. In fact, I almost gave up on looking for it, though I knew from several months ago that it exists somewhere on the site.
How did I find it? By stumbling around, going to the Book Openings page (http://www.chess.com/openings/) and discovering the search link among many little icons in a box on the right side of the page. I thought, "I'll probably just get an option to search by openings, or to search my own games again, but heck it can't hurt to make one more futile click, just in case..." and low and behold, I found the search page!
This page isn't even linked to the site map, so I don't know how someone would find the feature if they particularly wanted to know if it existed.
My recommendation is to highlight this feature by providing a direct link in the "learn" menu, or at least link it to the "game explorer" (http://www.chess.com/explorer/) which promises that we can "view millions of master games," but doesn't mention that the interface only allows access by sequence of moves.