
Learn to play chess online - cmdz0rd
https://www.chesscademy.com
======
gautamnarula
For those who already know how to play chess but want to get better
(preferably quickly with minimal, targeted training), I wrote a guide called
"How to Get Good at Chess, Fast" that hit #2 on HN:
[http://www.gautamnarula.com/how-to-get-good-at-chess-
fast/](http://www.gautamnarula.com/how-to-get-good-at-chess-fast/)

~~~
primitivesuave
This is fantastic, thank you for sharing this with the people who missed it
the first time around.

~~~
gautamnarula
Glad you found it useful! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a
comment on the post and I'll get to it as soon as I can.

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codeshaman
I love chess, but I abstain from playing, because when I start, I become
obsessed with it and it takes over my life. I spend more and more time
training, doing analysis, reading up, playing, trying to get better at it and
become very touchy about my rating number..

And then I ask myself - why should I get better at chess ? I already play
better than everyone who doesn't play chess. I play worse than anyone who can
dedicate 4-8 hours a day, every day, training. Why should my emotional well-
being be a function of a number which is my rating in some online chess
service ?

So I stop playing...

Anyone else experienced this ?

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bluedino
That's likely true with anything else in your life. I love to cook, I'm much
better than people who doesn't cook but I'm worse than anyone who dedicates
4-8 hours a day every day.

But I don't care, I enjoy it so I keep doing it. Do you not enjoy chess enough
to play it without needing another reason?

~~~
codeshaman
I rarely cook to win :).

You play chess to win and losing is stressful and unpleasant. So you train
more to increase your chances of winning. I still enjoy playing just for fun,
but after a couple of "fun" games, the competitive side kicks in and it stops
being fun and becomes a goal.

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milkcircle
It's often instructive to watch great players play chess. ChessNetwork has a
series of hundreds of videos in which he talks through every move of the games
that he plays. I encourage budding chess players to check out his Youtube
channel:
[http://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork](http://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork)

~~~
Fillipoman
I love the channel for the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis. It
has numerous lectures targeted for beginner, intermediate, and expert players
that cover a wide range of topics while analyzing games. The lectures are
given by various GMs and IMs. Check out Ben Finegold's lectures, He is a great
teacher and never fails to crack me up.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub](https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub)

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Ologn
> I teach my beginning students simple openings like the London System as
> white

This is not a good idea for a number of reasons. One is a d4 opening will lead
to a more closed game, at which the beginner is at a disadvantage, since it
requires a deeper understanding of positioning and strategy.

Two is the beginner will learn less if playing closed games initially. A
beginner should aim for open games (1. e4) where they will have more
opportunity to learn tactics. As they advance, they can move to closed game
(1. d4) strategy.

Inevitably, you will play as black and some of your opponents will open with
1. d4. So you will be learning a little about closed games from the beginning
even if you're never opening with them yourself.

One thing I did initially was just to usually play the same opening moves. As
white, I always played 1. e4. As black, I would see what piece white moved,
and then played the same response to that every time. This cut down on the
openings I had to learn - at the end of move 1, the board was always in one of
twenty positions, as opposed to one of forty positions, or one of sixty
positions. Easy alpha-beta pruning.

For example, I never played the Italian Game as white. If white played it, I
might play the Rousseau Gambit, which is probably not good against experts,
but is good enough against beginners who depend on knowing the traps of the
Italian Game. Even if they do 4. d4, you can do 4...fxe4 and then the board is
wide open again, even if you're at a slight positional disadvantage.

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nevi-me
I wish I had learnt to play when I was younger, i.e before my teens. I learnt
as a teen while in secondary school, and it came at a time where I needed to
learn some mental discipline.

In high school we used to coach younger kids from a neighboring primary
school. Some kids would be all over the show, but the ones who did well picked
up quite well. A few of them made provincial school tournaments, and fewer
would make nationals. The gap in our training would then be apparent at that
level because they'd be playing against kids who are learning enough chess
theory, i.e endgame theory.

We once had someone in our team leading in material, but fail to mate her
opponent, so sad yet funny because it was like a witch hunt, chasing the
opponent king all over the show with a few pieces. We hadn't taught them some
endgame tactics.

I think chess is one of those games that many people should try out. I'm glad
I had a friend in the game when I went through painful teenage years.

~~~
jacquesm
> The gap in our training would then be apparent at that level because they'd
> be playing against kids who are learning enough chess theory, i.e endgame
> theory.

Openings are a vast area of theory as well.

I played competitive chess in my teens for a bit (my neighbor was insanely
good at it and I got better just by being his punch bag) and I always refused
to learn any theory. I think it's comparable to cheating on a test, it's
supposed to be a game and a puzzle and I would feel the same if I learned how
to solve a puzzle by memorizing solutions from a book.

~~~
tikhonj
Hmm, I had a similar outlook (although with Magic rather than chess :P), but
got over it. Learning theory isn't like looking at the solution for a puzzle,
it's like learning specific problem-solving skills. It doesn't take the
challenge away but rather enables you to play at a higher level which, with a
decent game, is going to be deeper, more interesting and more challenging.

Now I think of learning enough theory to get to an intermediate level (at
least) is more like a ticket to play the game at all: the game I play now is
qualitatively different from the game I used to play and broadly better. To be
sure, it was still fun when I was floundering around, but competitive play
with a high-level mental framework (and yes, some specific information
directly copied from others) leads to far higher replay value.

I'm sure chess is the same.

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zappo2938
Lichess.org is fun too. I'm not much of a chess player but I sometimes find
the chess puzzles to be fun at
[http://en.lichess.org/training](http://en.lichess.org/training)

~~~
cmdz0rd
That is really useful, I like assortments of puzzles like these. They keep my
brain sharp.

~~~
Scarblac
[http://chesstempo.com](http://chesstempo.com) is the state of the art for
tactics puzzles auto-adjusted to your strength.

~~~
HardDaysKnight
And for the ability to review already seen problems using spaced repetition.

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ryporter
This site has promise, but I think the training section needs to become
smarter. I worked through about 20 problems. None of them were challenging for
me, but that's because I'm not in the target market (I'm about the same
strength as the site's creator). However, what concerned me was that they
didn't become more challenging at all. The difficulty seemed to randomly vary
from one problem to the next. Given the capabilities available to an online
system, the training exercises should quickly adapt to the level of the
student.

Personally, while growing up, I spent many, many hours with a book of tactics
by Maxim Blokh that had a numeric value assigned to each problem,
corresponding to its difficulty. Telling the student the difficulty level is
less than ideal (and can be avoided online), but the ability to focus on
problems just outside of my "comfort zone" was an invaluable training tool.

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jochs
Your username rules don't allow hyphens but you don't lint them out of
Facebook names :(

Cool site, though!

~~~
mikeyouse
I have a space and an accent in my name.. Linking to FB completely prevented
me from signing up. After getting the initial error, nothing else would work.

~~~
quinndupont
Yeah, me too. I can't tell if the system if just getting hammered, or if it is
a problem with the FB integration.

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mulligan
There was some chess tutorial going around online that I failed to properly
bookmark. The tutorial was premised on the fact that for casual fun games, you
shouldn't have to memorize a bunch of strategic openings and instead adopt
some of the older methods of playing before everyone memorized everything.

Does anyone remember this and have a link to it?

~~~
gk1
That's usually the recommended way of learning chess:

1\. Basic moves and tactics

2\. Advanced tactics

3\. Strategy

4\. End game (when few pieces are left the board)

5\. Middle game

6\. And finally, openings

~~~
hibikir
When I was taught by a GM, and the way I teach kids, start a bit different.

-Basic moves and tactics -Very simple endings (RR+K, then Q+K, finally R+K). Without this, many games between kids just can never even finish! -Strategy -Basic opening theory: Nothing memorized to even 5 moves, but evaluation of the first 2 or 3 opening moves in basic lines, built upon the basic chess knowledge we had been taught. This way we avoid very short games that teach little, because white was silly and started with G4, or moved their queen 5 times in a row.

After that, kid's games look like chess: They have a beginning, a middle and
an end in a sensible number of moves and many moves are about gaining
material. Once we reach that point, we really can start talking about higher
level topics. It's only then were openings are left for the end, because
understanding things like tension and weak squares is far more useful. Kids
probably have played over a hundred games too, so they can also start to see
patterns, so they start having to have some intuitions about combinations all
by themselves.

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ivanhoe
I've been using chesscademy.com for like a year or more, they have excellent
chess strategy puzzles. Problem is however that site has some annoying little
bugs on touch devices that I've reported a few times and got zero response
from owner, and AFAIK they still haven't fixed them. Also I've noticed that
some puzzles started repeating quite often, which all led me to conclusion
that this project has been abandoned?!

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blub
This is for more advanced players:

When I played chess I liked Chessbase's products. They have their fingers in
many pies, including engines, interactive trainings, game databases etc. Most
of the content is created by IMs/GMs and is very good quality.

Unfortunately everything they do is Windows-only. Playchess, their online
chess portal is on iOS and it's absolute crap compared to the Windows client.

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pmoriarty
Chess is relatively easy to learn, but incredibly difficult to master
(especially if you're just starting out but are old enough to be reading HN).
It can also be really addictive. Many have made it in to a complete obsession.
Reminds me of math in some ways, for its depth, beauty, and difficulty.

~~~
EC1
I entered that obsession. Then I realized just how long it would really take
me to even get decent and stopped. Now I simply respect chess from a distance.

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tomasien
I've gone to chessacademy.com before to see if this existed and it didn't.
Thankful it does now!

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catshirt
psst- it still doesn't ;)

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tomasien
haha like codecademy before it! They get so mad when you say "Code Academy"
too - still wonder why. That domain HAS to be available.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Woah, I didn't know. I _always_ thought it's "Code Academy" and everyone else
around me referred to it this way. I hate it when people go too clever just to
be cool.

~~~
tomasien
Love Codecademy and they're good natured about it and can laugh at themselves,
but they WILL correct you if you say it as two words :)

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trusche
For me, an invaluable companion for learning openings has been
[http://www.eudesign.com/chessops/](http://www.eudesign.com/chessops/). The
design of the site is unchanged since ca. 1995, but it works well.

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
in terms of openings I would also suggest

[http://www.shredderchess.com/online-chess/online-
databases/o...](http://www.shredderchess.com/online-chess/online-
databases/opening-database.html)

and

[http://chesstempo.com/chess-openings.html](http://chesstempo.com/chess-
openings.html)

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sawaali
Is there anything similar for Go?

~~~
civilian
I'm about to start tutoring with a teacher in Go. We're going to be doing
similar things. My weekly homework includes:

1\. 30 minutes of problems a day.

2\. Play 5 rated games (i.e. games that COUNT with 30+mins on the clock for
each player) and record game

3\. Give a detailed review of my thoughts of 3 of those games

4\. Memorize any professional game and, at the start of the weekly tutoring
session, replay it from memory for my sensei.

But in a more informal setting here's what I'd recommend:

1\. Immediately after finishing an in-person game, ask to review the game with
your opponent from memory. Hopefully get a stronger player to watch you two
reviewing the game, and maybe replay the game on a new board so that you can
check the true board position to jog your memory.

2\. Do problems! The Elementary Go series from Kisiedo is good, as is the
"Graded Go problems for beginners" series.

There are a handful of great Go teachers who post things on youtube. Nick
Sibicky teachers at the Seattle Go Center and his videos are amazing.
[https://www.youtube.com/user/nicksibicky](https://www.youtube.com/user/nicksibicky)
Haylee is a korean professional who plays online and posts her videos.
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1kQNoWIH85dB_Vxka9g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1kQNoWIH85dB_Vxka9g)

Get strong!!!!

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sivanmz
First time I tried chess on my phone. Fat finger is a usability problem with
irreversible consequences. I had to abandon a game.

Maybe drag and drop is not the best interaction model here.

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SimeVidas
Tried sign in via Facebook. My username wasn’t accepted :(

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tomasien
I've been using this the last couple of days, it is GREAT. I've been playing
chess almost my whole life and I've learned so much.

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tofupup
... is it me or is a facebook login required?

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Goodbro
Good job. Does it have online PVP?

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lintiwen
can't even sign up after login with facebook. frustrated and go back playing
chess on my ipad.

