Chess

[Lost Oliver]

After years of forgetting about the game, I recently discovered the Chess.com app and have been playing it every day. I'm loving! I can't beat the Antonio bot, 1500, no matter how hard I try, and it's got me thinking that maybe that's my level. Is there anyway of going beyond your level in chess? There's so many videos out there about it, but to me what that usually means is that there's thousands of people who want to get better, can't, and will watch countless videos in an attempt to try.

Anyone else play? Do YOU have any tips?

Anyway, if anyone fancies a game let me know, My current rating is around 1000.

[Mister Six]

Ooh, I don't play but this makes me want to! I made my horsey run around gobbling up the prawns but then the castle ate him :(

[Noodle Lizard]

I go through phases of playing! I think my Chess.com score is around 900, and I've forgotten all strategies, so you would probably merk me.

[Proactive]

I taught my wife to play and she beat me in the first game. Wish I was joking.

[willbo]

I'm on chess.com, under the very regretted un-changable username ICallGroguBabyYoda. I'm a bit of an addict and wavering between 700=800 most months.

[shoulders]

I enjoy Chess but know no strategies so just play a dour defensive slow boring stalemate game and hope that my opponent gets sloppy.

It's a terrific game, I wish I was clever enough to really play it.

[Lost Oliver]

Same I think. There's the Queen's Gambit, which I always try for at the start, but other than that I'm thinking max two moves ahead no more. It's just not possible for me to keep that much information inside my head. I dunno if I'll improve by playing, and it'll be a musclememory way of playing through the opening exhancges, or if that's just it. Anyway, absolutely loving it. And it's free! Will add you Willbo

[Mr_Simnock]

If your 1000 and bellow some puzzles each day will improve you, often the worst aspect of a lower rated player is very week board vision. Anyone watched gotham chess on youtube? that's very good for folks around 1500 and below. I'm on chess.com and my peek blitz rating is just over 2100, I'm currently around 2050.

[Critcho]

Yeah the Chess.com app has a bunch of puzzles you can do daily. You also get a free game analysis per day which well worth doing. Their computer chess god takes you through the whole game, explains the impact of every move and where you screw up suggests what you could've done instead.

Just yesterday I lost a game and their analysis pointed out at one point I could've had a mate in three, but threw it all away.

If you're a learner it might be worth trying 'correspondence' style chess, where you have days to make a move so have a lot more time to think about different options.

Recently I mainly play games where each player only has 10 mins each side, which makes for nice zippy games but gets a bit stressful when you actually need to think things through.

This is an ancient site but this opening database is a good way of seeing different options for different openings:

https://www.shredderchess.com/online/opening-database.html

All this said, even though I've been playing regularly since my teens I never got *that* good. On 'correspondence' style I got up to the 1600s, on 'Rapid' I'm usually somewhere around the 1300-1400 range.

[Mr Vegetables]

I invented my own version of Chess once, but it wasn't as good

[druss]

All I know about chess is that you have to insert anal beads to be good at it which put me off a bit.

[jamiefairlie]

[drummersaredeaf]

I've been using it as a displacement strategy for the past few months - knocking out 2-3 games a day here and there and tinkering around the puzzles. Practically a complete beginner, but managed to gain 150 points in the first month of playing to the dizzy heights of 350. Keen to take on any tips as my learning at the minute revolves around trying to navigate common openings (opponent sending their queen on a mission inside 3 moves is common at this level) and ensuring I can cut blunders out like hanging pieces when I think I'm being clever. I feel at this level it's more about reducing mistakes than anything else though.

[willbo]

my biggest trick is putting a pawn on C4 or F4 after backing it up with multiple other pieces, then putting it up to C5/F5 making a higher "chain". Seems to really throw people off

[Mr_Simnock]

I've been using it as a displacement strategy for the past few months - knocking out 2-3 games a day here and there and tinkering around the puzzles. Practically a complete beginner, but managed to gain 150 points in the first month of playing to the dizzy heights of 350. Keen to take on any tips as my learning at the minute revolves around trying to navigate common openings (opponent sending their queen on a mission inside 3 moves is common at this level) and ensuring I can cut blunders out like hanging pieces when I think I'm being clever. I feel at this level it's more about reducing mistakes than anything else though.

Even at my level I still do it but not every 5 moves like beginners. You still get plonkers around 1850-1950 still trying to somehow hoodwink you with shit like this in bullet games, it looks scary for about 1 millisecond before you realise just the smallest amount of calm piece development will ensure they get the queen chased all over the board before being hammered. There are though a few gambits here and there with the queen coming out early that can be dangerous but the problem with those is that although you will catch folk out from time to time these openings need the least amount of work from the opposite side to not only counter effectively but almost refute outright, they should be for tricks only not played every game.

[Endicott]

If your 1000 and bellow some puzzles each day will improve you, often the worst aspect of a lower rated player is very week board vision. Anyone watched gotham chess on youtube? that's very good for folks around 1500 and below. I'm on chess.com and my peek blitz rating is just over 2100, I'm currently around 2050.

Yeah I like gotham. I haven't played for years though, I just watch every now and again for entertainment.



People should really move on from Queen's Gambit, any decent player will wipe the floor with you as it's pretty easily countered, and you'll lose the advantage of playing first. (edit: should have read whole thread)

[Mr_Simnock]

A word on openings for beginners and those around 1500 and lower, it's not the opening that's not good, it's yourself. I find it's the most tricky thing to get your head around when your starting, lots of books and stuff online about 'unbeatable' and 'winning' openings, even though there are no such thing. Decent players aren't showing you the opening is bad they just know a couple lines that either white must also know to keep the (small) advantage or there are traps involved that beginners don't know but can be easily side stepped by other decent players, they are relying on your lack of knowledge for an easy win.

This video has some really good advice about the game in general

This video has great advice about what you should think about if your new to openings

3 Fantastic video's covering ALL the main openings and how they relate to a possible beginner trying to pick them up

Wish I had these when I started out

[Marner and Me]

I'm very reckless, which can win me games. When I play more conservative (according to the review function) I do lose. Around the 300 mark atm. I like the 10 minute games chess.com provides

[samadriel]

I taught my wife to play and she beat me in the first game. Wish I was joking.

[drummersaredeaf]

I'm very reckless, which can win me games. When I play more conservative (according to the review function) I do lose. Around the 300 mark atm. I like the 10 minute games chess.com provides

I would have taken you up on this a few days ago, but I am currently on a HOT run that has taken me to the dizzy heights of 410. I was 190 at the start of the year and thought I was stuck at 320-350 earlier this week. Follow your dreams.

[Marner and Me]

I had a game the other day and some guy was decimating me, sent me a message saying I was trash. Now I think it was luck, because I certainly didn't mean it. However I had what was left of my pieces in good positions I moved something and mated him. He was in such a strong position too.

I also can't play it on my phone, needs to be on a laptop for me. No idea why. I also think playing on a board would be harder as you don't get the top down view and see all the lines. I think over all I win as many as a lose atm.

I find a few plays resign after losing their queen, I mean a win is a win, but losing the queen isn't a total loss.

[drummersaredeaf]

Not to demean either of us, but who in their right mind thinks calling someone in the same (shit) ELO trash is a wise move? I seem to be steadily improving and when I play people in the slightly lower ballpark, I see the same mistakes I was making until just weeks ago but I try to review a game a day and think about where I could have played differently. It's just new knowledge and habits isn't it.

[touchingcloth]

I don't know if they still make this series of software, but I learnt to play chess properly using Chessmaster 10, where the instruction was largely "led" by Josh Waitzkin - the real life kid from off of Searching for Bobby Fischer (his teachers in turn being played Ben Kingsley and Laurence Fishburne).

Was dead good if you enjoy learning by being guided through interactive scenarios, though I suspect chess.com and other sites (are there others worth mentioning, or has chess.com swept all contenders aside?) offer similar tuition these days. Side note, but is anyone following the Carlsen-Niemann thing? I read the report into allegations of cheating that chess.com produced, though it all seems to have been quiet for a few weeks now.

[Noodle Lizard]

I'm very reckless, which can win me games. When I play more conservative (according to the review function) I do lose. Around the 300 mark atm. I like the 10 minute games chess.com provides

I've found the same to be true, at least when playing online against people who are (presumably) far more knowledgeable than me. They'll always beat me if we're following the same guidebooks, so I go rogue in order to throw them off sometimes. In an average real-life game against someone who's played "a bit", I always follow basic strategies because they do work against people who are unfamiliar with them.

[Old Nehamkin]

This thread has inspired me to fire up chess dot com and start playing again and I'm sorry to say I immediately got beaten by a German guy with a Hitler avatar :(

[touchingcloth]

I've found the same to be true, at least when playing online against people who are (presumably) far more knowledgeable than me. They'll always beat me if we're following the same guidebooks, so I go rogue in order to throw them off sometimes. In an average real-life game against someone who's played "a bit", I always follow basic strategies because they do work against people who are unfamiliar with them.

This is where my interest in chess stopped really. I don't have the skills or patience to think about getting anywhere close to an 1800 rating, so you either play against strong players who easily beat you because of that, or weak players who you easily beat with a little knowledge of the standard openings, and things stop being interesting unless you have a lot of opponents of a similar skill and knowledge level, at least speaking as a dabbler rather than a very frequent player.

There doesn't seem to be very much appetite for people to play forms of chess like Fischerandom that remove some of these sorts of handicaps - why is that?

[grainger]

Openings are what put me off Chess. The game has been so thoroughly played and analysed (understandably, due to its age and quality) that you have to learn accepted sets of moves in order to have a chance.

I don't want to rote-learn stuff that's been worked out by other people - I want to figure it out. But doing that - unless I found an opponent who was also a noob who wanted to do the same - would just result in being utterly crushed.

[grainger]

It kind of reminds me of when I tried to do the Rubik's Cube a few years back. I got so far with it, but got stuck, and wanted some pointers as to what I should be aiming for, but all the help online was "just learn and do these moves which someone at some point worked out ". To me, that's not solving it - it's rote learning.

I'm not saying that Chess is all rote learning, by the way, but there's a signficant part of it that is - unless I've misunderstood.

[touchingcloth]

It kind of reminds me of when I tried to do the Rubik's Cube a few years back. I got so far with it, but got stuck, and wanted some pointers as to what I should be aiming for, but all the help online was "just learn and do these moves which someone at some point worked out ". To me, that's not solving it - it's rote learning.

I'm not saying that Chess is all rote learning, by the way, but there's a signficant part of it that is - unless I've misunderstood.

It's the Noughts and Crosses thing. You can enjoy it when you're four and playing against another four year old who also hasn't realised that every game can be forced into a draw, but more complicated. Part of me would love to be master level and be able to play games which were truly novel rather than coming down to whoever had studied openings and endgames more, but even learning the openings properly would take me all of my leisure time. I'm in awe of anyone who can be a chess master and accomplish other things besides that, even if that's an accomplishment like "read one book a year".

[Old Nehamkin]

With chess I think there's a perfectly valid and rewarding middle-ground to be found between just randomly winging it and being Mr. Playbook with one thousand rote manouvres imprinted in your brain at all time. I think too many people get needlessly overawed by the vast corpus of chess theory out there and have this anxiety that they're going to get made a fool of by more well-versed players or that they'll be dupes who are missing out on the real point of the game in some way if they don't treat it like a homework project and subject it to agonising study and discipline.

To me this is a bit like not wanting to play 5-a-side at the weekends because you know you'll never be a professional football player. That might not be a perfect analogy, but basically chess to me has always been this incredibly accessible, fun, raucous game that virtually anybody can pick up and jump into and which belongs just as much to the total amateurs fumbling around on the board working out how to outfox each other as it does to the savvy veterans who know every opening or the grandmasters who can see into the innermost fabric of the game.

My advice to new players would be to not overthink it and remember that the game has always primarily existed to be played casually and for fun by ordinary people. Jump on chess dot com, play some games and you should soon find yourself sorted among players with a similar skill level to you. If someone pulls some dirty trick you'll probably learn to recognise it pretty fast. Other than that I'd say just try to develop your game with your own logic, intuition and imagination before you get too concerned about textbook stuff. And even then, you know, you can still just keep doing your own thing if you want. There isn't going to be an exam or anything.