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Will anyone here besides me admit they've never won a game of chess, ever, not once? Even against some random little kid who only knows how the pieces move, at Thanksgiving?

I have this suspicion that some part of my brain is damaged and I'll never be able to play chess. I've made many attempts at learning, but have never improved over randomly moving pieces around the board.

Any advice on a resource that will help me at least not embarrass myself, even if I still can't win? "Play more chess" doesn't seem to be the answer. I don't think practice helps if you are practicing poor chess.




If you are really interested in chess then there are certainly ways to improve. All of them take work, but you don't have to give over your whole life. A little every day is enough.

I can't recommend http://www.chesstactics.org enough. Tactics are crucial, both for offense and defense. Read this for understanding, not to skim, and do the exercises. Again, do the exercises.

While going through the above, or after you've finished, do tactics on chesstempo.com or another site. You will miss a lot of them in the beginning, but practice makes perfect. It's crucial to your game to be able to just see certain positions jump out at you, and timed exercises will help immensely.

For playing practice, find an online site and be willing to suffer through some losses as your ranking settles in. Maybe you have never won a game, but believe it or not you are not the worst player ever. As your rating is found, you can match up against others on your level. There are several big sites, and a ton of others. I use chess.com.

Another thing to try is "correspondence" chess, where you can play out a game over days, weeks or even months. Why? Because you can play many such games at once, you can play a bit when you have time, you can play people all over the world (no time zone issues), etc. But perhaps the biggest thing is that when you have 6 or 12 games going, you have to be able to look at a board and find the best move essentially from scratch. This ability to look at a board for what it actually is right now (instead of in the context of your plans from 5 moves ago), is a very good skill to have.


I will definitely take a look at chesstactics.


On any of my commutes I'd just be doing chess tactics on my phone. After like a year I played some 100~ games. Won like 75 of them because I got really good at predicting moves and recognizing patterns. Seriously just nail out tactics day in and day out.

They are micro puzzles that increase in difficulty and isolate specific parts of the chess game, be it beginning, mid, or end game. Once you do a couple thousand of these, move on to a real board where every piece is in play.

Trust me, you'll get good fast, it just depends how much time you're willing to put in. Also, go to chess clubs. I go every Monday in my city and it's a huge help to get insight from veterans and pros.

Once you start even remotely understanding strategy and moves, you will get so addicted. Just need get over that beginners hump. I'm still shit by the way.


nice site - thanks


Hear, hear. I've instead tried to get better at everything but chess. e.g. playing StarCraft helped me learn basics of strategy that I wholly didn't understand the first 20 years of my life.

I've "known" how to "play" chess since I was young, so I couldn't see the forest for the trees. Learning strategy via a different vehicle helped me get past those roadblocks.

I haven't played a game of chess in probably 10 years but I know that if I came back to it, I could approach it from a much better informed viewpoint, since now I understand the high-level strategic elements that 7-year-old me didn't realize existed.


I started looking at openings, thinking that if I just started out with a well tested, accepted pre-canned opening, I'd be in a better position to start seeing some strategy.

It looked promising at first, but I still get creamed. At least it looks like I might know what I'm doing for the first few moves.


Except for a few traps, the opening is largely irrelevant to beginners.

Study endgames first, you learn how the pieces move.

Then study middlegame tactics to see how they work together.

Lastly you study openings to get to your preferred middlegame.


Just came to this thread to say how much of the article reminded me of my process of learning Starcraft.


I understand how you feel. I only learned chess properly when I was around 30 years old. Anyone should be able to at least learn chess to a standard where they can enjoy playing against other casual players.

See my previous comment for my recommendations on learning chess.


I'm in a similar boat: my brain just doesn't enjoy chess. I tried studying it, and it bored me to tears. Go feels better to me because it has far simpler rules, but significantly greater depth. (Or maybe I recognize the patterns more readily.) Poker feels better to me because making decisions in the absence of perfect information models real life.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1889323233/

Amazing beginner course. Read this book and Vol2 and you will be ahead of most tournament players on the fundamentals. USCF 2100+ at my strongest.


Practice helps if you can learn from the good and bad moves on both sides of the board. The article mentions analysis, have you tried that? Great players draw from a big pool of previous experiences and not only their own.


You should try playing Losing Chess then: http://www.chessvariants.org/diffobjective.dir/giveaway.html




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