After reading the first chapter in this book and going through some of the openings on a chess board, I still don't understand anything beyond the basic opening principles. So I guess I'm not advanced enough for even an easy version of a book on o...
Lately I'm not sure whether to think I'm getting better or what. I think I'm getting better because I seem to be pretty good at spotting peoples' attempts at the standard king-rook fork on an uncastled king, which I wasn't doing before. I guess I'...
Today I am frustrated because I don't understand how to use pawns. That's all I have to say....
Lately I seem to be having trouble with being impatient. I'm not really seeing things that seem like they might go somewhere in a few moves and I just want to do something. I also keep missing typical tactical things like forks, discovered attacks...
I know this has nothing to do with Chess or the subject of my blog on here, but I thouhgt this was important enough to make a note of. I'm currently trying to raise money for The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Click here to donate! ...
I seem to be having a hard time coming up with a good strategy for attacking the king, or anything really. I seem to do OK at these checkmate problems, but it's like I have no idea how to get to the initial position of such problems in the first p...
I can't tell if I'm doing better or worse. Seems like most of my games aren't going very well but then again most of my games are with people who are effectively higher ranked than I am. At least I seem to be doing better with Tactics Trainer.
I noticed today that two knights seem to be great at chasing a queen around a mostly empty-in-the-middle board such as when the other player tries to move it out as his first piece. This happened to me today and it soon lead to exchanging queens, ...
Right now transitioning from the opening to the middle game seems to be the most difficult thing for me. As my teacher says, this seems to be the point at which you have to come up with a plan and, at the moment, this is very hard for me to do. I...
Recently it occurred to me to wonder at what point I should resign. I posted a forum topic asking about what people thought and asked my volunteer chess teacher who's nice enough to volunteer his time to teach me stuff. The final answer I arrived...
Finally won a real game instead of a timeout. (I'm white.) (My rating is currently highly inflated due to all the timeouts.) I've been submitting games for computer analysis. It'll be interesting to see if it says I made any blunders or major m...
Won my first three rated games. Unfortunately I won two of them on time because my friend took more than 2 or 3 days to move for various reasons. Checkmated someone else in 10 moves but that player seems to be very new to the game. It was recomme...
I checked these out from the library and decided that they were good enough that I'd just buy them. These will be the first actual chess books that I buy rather than just borrow: A World Champion's Guide to Chess: Step-by-step instructions for wi...
Ok, well, apparently I'm still not that good at spotting things that, in retrospect, seem like they should be terribly obvious. I'm white and it's black's turn to move: Yea, ouch! Well hopefully I won't fall for that one a...
Recently it occurred to me to wonder why I bother to learn anything about chess at all. Maybe some people just want to be all badass and beat other people at a game in order to feel all smart and superior and stuff, but that must not be what's mo...
I think I might be getting better at the tactical puzzles, but Tactics Trainer says my rating is only 605. Well, that's still better than 482 that it was earlier today. Seems like I have to solve those tactical puzzles very fast or I get negative ...
Dear Diary, Chess seems difficult. Despite the vastly greater computational complexity of go, I think I picked up go faster than I'm managing to learn chess. Shredder on my iPad thinks I'm 1109 Elo after 13 games. I'm unsure exactly what to thin...
