How to get better at chess?

[terpkristin]

I'd like to get better at chess. I know the general rules (I know the moves that each piece makes, and know some of the funny rules like capturing en passant and castling, though could probably use a refresher on those "funny rules"). But I know next to nothing about strategy.

Can anyone recommend books, computer programs, iPod Touch apps, websites, or anything else to help me learn more strategy and hopefully get better?

/tk

[sabotai]

I bought Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition off of Steam awhile back ($20). I play it off and on, but I just never really got that into it. Has a lot of tutorials that seem to cover a good amount of topics and gives a lot of info on the games you play. I didn't really like the interface, though.

[cuervo72]

Playing certainly helps. I played for a bit on GameKnot a few years ago, and just playing improved my game (I hadn't played in many years). I think they have puzzles too.

I can't say on books...I think the ones I read growing up may have even been outdated then (and I can't remember them anyway...). "My System" by Nimzowitsch seems to be popping up in a lot of lists I'm seeing though.

[rowech]

I firmly believe the single best way to get better when you're first starting is to continually play versus yourself making sure to continually be trying different things. If you know how to keep notation yet, keep it as you play and mark with stars or some other like symbol to show where you were debating other moves and make a small note of other things you were considering. That way you can go back, play it to that spot, and try the different approaches and see where they lead.

The second thing I did when I first learned to play would be to get a book on classic matches, openings, etc. and make say the first 10 moves and play from there making sure to pay attention what the player was trying to do to begin with.

I must say I've been playing since I was five and probably started doing these two things when I was maybe seven or eight because I didn't really have opponents to play (other than my dad who never found the time). Times have changed and it's quite possible a program like Chessmaster with all it's tutorials are a much better approach.

[rowech]

I would avoid playing on yahoo and the like because many people on there enjoy playing speed chess. WHile it can be fun, it's just not a good way to get better.

[larrymcg421]

I use Chessmaster as well, but I always play the games out on a board, because I've noticed I pick things up better that way than when staring at a screen.

[QuikSand]

There was a while when I thought I might have enough interest to try to get good at chess. (I was wrong) But the things that got me moving in the right direction were something like:

-Find some way to take a game seriously (my big downfall when playing *any* computer opponent)

-Find someone to talk to about chess (doesn't even need to be really serious, but thinking about the game helps a lot)

-Stop playing like a dumbass (i.e. stop playing with dumbasses, and find opponents who will take the game seriously and not just "miss" things...dumb shortcuts are a distraction from truly improving your game)

-Learn a bit about openings and the history behind specific ones - it's a part of the game that is fairly approachable even for a novice player, and can get you thinking about styles of play, and what's important in the game overall (e.g. control of the middle of the board)

[fpres]

I agree with the remark about playing as many games as you can. I liked FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) a few years ago as a place you can usually find a game against a human or a computer.

Some books I like...

-- Yasser Seirawan's Winning Chess series -- I've read Winning Chess Openings, Winning Chess Strategies, and Winning Chess Tactics but there are a couple of others in the series.

-- Jeremy Silman's The Amateur's Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery

-- Polgar's 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games for a ton of practice boards

[flounder]

One great resource is Dan Heisman's Novice Nook columns (http://www.chesscafe.com/heisman/heisman.htm) at chesscafe.com. Lots of great stuff in his archives, a lot of it geared toward the adult player.

[tyketime]

As you start to dig down to the next layer of training, you will hear two terms - strategy & tactics. Tactics are a specific sequence of moves with a material gain in mind.. Strategy is a longer-term idea attempting to better your position

I can recommend a couple software titles:

1. The best title for tactics I ever came across was Chessbase's Intensive Chess Tactics by Renko. Thousands of examples to practice with. I think he even came out with a sequel.

2. Convekta Strategy 2.0 (there may be a newer release now... I bought mine 5 years or so ago).

I think the best way to learn is to play, play, play. If there is a local chess club, seek that out. I bought the latest version of Fritz (you can use Chessmaster, Shredder, Rybka, any of the main software playing programs). But not to play against (although I did on occasion). I then joined the Internet Chess Club, and played many games online. You get a "ranking" so you can then play against similarly skilled opponents. I would then take all the games I played (vs human or online), and replay them again in the Chess Software (Fritz). Most of these packages have an "analysis mode" and gives you a relative score of the game at any time during the match. When I would replay the game, I would pay attention to the score. If it dropped by more than a point (usually each piece has a value: pawn = 1, bishop/knight = 3, etc), then that means I made a blunder (mistake). Look to see what the mistake was, what were you thinking at the time, etc. I found this to be the absolute best way to improve my game. This truly is one activity where if you spend the time necessary, you can greatly improve from your mistakes.

Sorry I got long-winded there...

[DaddyTorgo]

cool idea tyke!

[Airhog]

My favorite book ever:
Reassess Your Chess By Jeremy Silman

This book teaches you how to analyze a position, and how to plan your sequence of moves based on the position you are in. An excellent read

[Celeval]

I've been playing a ton on chess.com lately. Free (although there are cheap memberships that get you other stuff), correspondence chess with generally 3-day-per-move timers, puzzles, etc. I've certainly improved in the few months I've been playing.

[MJ4H]

I used to be pretty heavily into chess. Took a loooong break from it, and I'm currently in "get back into it" mode.

Went to a USCF tournament this past weekend, in fact, where I placed in a tie for 4th.

So here's what I recommend for beginners/some experience players:

Go read post #8 in this thread. Perfect recommendations for books. However, I would do them in this order:

5334 PBG first. What this is is almost no text at all. Just chess diagrams. The beginning of the book is just easy mate in one puzzles. Start with the first one and solve it. It should take about 10 minutes to solve about 25-30 of them. They are easy but get a little trickier fairly soon.

Work through the book a few puzzles every day. Or more. But do it. Understand what is happening in the position and why the tactics work.

Now, while you are working through that book, grab Seirawan's Winning Chess Tactics book. That whole Winning Chess series is fantastic for beginners/some experience players looking to get better. The Tactics book is first, though.

Later, the How To Reassess Your Chess book is great, the Amateur's Mind book is great, but both of those might be a little advanced yet. Winning Chess Strategy might be a bit better to get to first.

I would stay away from My System. It isn't really written for people that are just starting to want to get better, in my opinion. Read it later, sure, but not until after several other books.

As far as playing, I think the best thing is to play correspondence games. Flat out forget blitz and even longer live games. You don't need to learn under time pressure. Chess.com is pretty good. It's annoyingly commercial, in my opinion, but it's usable. If you want to pay money to get the extra features like the opening explorer and tactics trainer (both of which you can use in a severely gimped fashion for free) then it is actually really good. Personally, I don't pay for online chess. Just a rule of mine. Books and live tournaments, fine.

Oh and chess.com has an iphone app you can install to play your correspondence game moves from wherever. I love that.

The last thing may be the most important. Already mentioned in this thread, but I'm going to elaborate on it. Study your own games and learn from them. Computer analysis is a great tool, but I think it is important for you to try to analyze a game without it first. Go through move by move and look at the actual move played and what other options there were. Even write it down. Why is one move better than another? Is there a tactic? A positional reason? After you have completed your own analysis of a game, check it with the computer. I think it does far more good to do it like this than just use the computer from the beginning.

I would be thrilled to death to have some active chess topics on this board if there are other players here. I've even seen games played on other boards between strong players where the players give their thoughts in spoiler tags (which the audience reads but the other player does not). Awesome, awesome, awesome learning tool for everyone, including the players, and fascinating to follow for the audience.

For people that want to play live, I still play in FICS (www.freechess.org (http://www.freechess.org)) as Gorgonian. I'm logged on there way too much, frankly. Stop by and say hi and maybe we can play a game.

[claphamsa]

gameknot chess has games at varying times... so you can play a move a day games if you want.

[Celeval]

If anyone is interested, I'm kdonnelly007 on chess.com (which has a working facebook component now, too, from what I gather).

[Marc Vaughan]

I used to play semi-competitively when I was in my late teens and found that playing against a lot of different opponents really helped keep strategies fresh and your thoughts adaptable.

On top of that I always liked doing chess 'puzzles' as well personally.

(if you really want to 'geek out' one of the things I used to do to train myself with regards to thinking moves ahead was to play on a computer chess board but to remove all the pieces and rely upon my memory to tell me what pieces are where - if you think about it when you're thinking moves ahead you're pretty much doing the same thing, just to a lesser extent ... )

PS - I have to admit I haven't played in ages against anyone apart from my eldest son; everyone at SI basically refused to play against me after a while and I've always found on-line opponents too flaky to really enjoy anything but a 'speed' game (which isn't particularly my forte).

[JediKooter]

Knight jumps queen!

Bishop jumps queen!

Pawns jump queen!

*Gangbang*!

[MJ4H]

I used to play semi-competitively when I was in my late teens and found that playing against a lot of different opponents really helped keep strategies fresh and your thoughts adaptable.

On top of that I always liked doing chess 'puzzles' as well personally.

(if you really want to 'geek out' one of the things I used to do to train myself with regards to thinking moves ahead was to play on a computer chess board but to remove all the pieces and rely upon my memory to tell me what pieces are where - if you think about it when you're thinking moves ahead you're pretty much doing the same thing, just to a lesser extent ... )

PS - I have to admit I haven't played in ages against anyone apart from my eldest son; everyone at SI basically refused to play against me after a while and I've always found on-line opponents too flaky to really enjoy anything but a 'speed' game (which isn't particularly my forte).

I practiced playing blind for a few months. My theory was basically what you are saying: I thought it would help my visualization skills. I did ok at it but I stopped because I never really felt it helped me in that area. I just got a little better at playing blind.

[Passacaglia]

I used to play semi-competitively when I was in my late teens and found that playing against a lot of different opponents really helped keep strategies fresh and your thoughts adaptable.

On top of that I always liked doing chess 'puzzles' as well personally.

(if you really want to 'geek out' one of the things I used to do to train myself with regards to thinking moves ahead was to play on a computer chess board but to remove all the pieces and rely upon my memory to tell me what pieces are where - if you think about it when you're thinking moves ahead you're pretty much doing the same thing, just to a lesser extent ... )

PS - I have to admit I haven't played in ages against anyone apart from my eldest son; everyone at SI basically refused to play against me after a while and I've always found on-line opponents too flaky to really enjoy anything but a 'speed' game (which isn't particularly my forte).

There's an awesome scene in Searching for Bobby Fischer where the kid's instructor asks him some question about the board, then knocks down all the pieces before he can answer.

[terpkristin]

Thanks a lot for the tips, guys! I'm going to try to find the 5334 Problems and the Winning Tactics book and check out the chesscafe.com columns. As far as playing, guess I'll try to find an iPod Touch app to play since at my house (with the Oz-monster), there's no chance that pieces will stay upright for more than say 5 minutes. Do the apps that let you play online also let you play offline (maybe against another human passing it back and forth)?

/tk

[MJ4H]

You can do that with the chess.com app, yes. You have to click "play computer" then go into settings and set both players to Human instead of one to Human and one to Computer.

[MJ4H]

So, in the interest of getting better at chess, I made a little video. I recently finished a game of chess with Celeval. I play through the game in the video and talk about various moves and what I was thinking during the game. I try to cover a few basic ideas so that those of you that are just starting can get an idea of some basic concepts. Also, you can get an idea of how to think about the game, ie what you should or could be thinking about trying to accomplish or prevent.

Anyway, I'm considering making a bunch of these types of videos, and may very well do it (with opponent permission) for my FOFC tournament games.

The video is longish, so I had to break it into 3 parts. The first part is embedded here. To continue, you'll have to follow the related videos or whatever.

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-m2t0vpSdjY&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-m2t0vpSdjY&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

Please let me know what you think of the idea, game, and video execution.

Also, one of you guys tell me if I can win that ending. I don't think I can.

[Scoobz0202]

Is the advice in this thread, and mainly the long post you had MJ4H, good for somebody that doesn't even know the rules? Should I just be able to find a site that has the rules of which pieces can move where and what not and then be able to jump right into your rec's?

[terpkristin]

If you go to the Lifehacker link I listed in the other thread, there's a link to the basic chess rules, among other things. Specifically, for basics, I'd look at The Best Online Sources To Play & Learn Chess (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-online-sources-to-play-learn-chess/)

/tk

[Scoobz0202]

Thanks. Yea, I hadn't checked out the Lifehacker site yet so I probably should have scoped that out before asking. I have it opened in a tab, among ten other tabs from this thread, but haven't started the reading yet ;)

[lynchjm24]

FICS. Play a ton and there are great modes on the server. Mate with certain pieces, excellent puzzles where you can get the right moves.

I played a few thousand games last winter and was playing really well when my laptop died. By the time I bought a new one 6 months later I totally regressed.

[lcjjdnh]

Some other book recommendations based on books I still have sitting on the shelves back from when I was trying to learn the game. Those with more experience might be able to provide more insight into the usefulness.

Best Lessons of a Chess Coach by Sunil Weeramantry

Amazon.com: Best Lessons of a Chess Coach (9780812922653): Sunil Weeramantry, Edward V. Eusebi: Books (http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Chess-Coach-Sunil-Weeramantry/dp/0812922654/ref=pd_sim_b_31)

How Not To Play Chess by Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky
Amazon.com: How Not to Play Chess (9780486209203): Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky: Books (http://www.amazon.com/How-Play-Chess-Eugene-Znosko-Borovsky/dp/0486209202/ref=pd_sim_b_63)

Logical Chess: Move-by-Move by Erving Chernev
Amazon.com: Logical Chess: Move By Move: Every Move Explained New Algebraic… (http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Chess-Every-Explained-Algebraic/dp/0713484640)

[terpkristin]

Woohoo, I'm feeling good after the computer on "Strength 2" on the Chess.com iPod Touch app took 28 moves to mate me. :-\

Les sigh
/tk

[Scoobz0202]

Sitting down right now to do some heavy reading (online, have to figure out which books I'm going to get).

So far I've read which pieces can move which direction.
*wipes brow*

[path12]

I wish I'd noticed this thread and the tourney earlier, would have joined up.

Agree on the recs for the Seirawan books.

Haven't played a lot online but will check out chess.com and whatever that other one listed above were.......I used to play a ton in my teens and early twenties but haven't played much more than the occasional Chessmaster binge lately.

[Desnudo]

My dad gave me this book when I was a kid. Looks like it's out of print - a great and easy read for foundational stuff.

Amazon.com: Every Great Chess Player Was Once a Beginner (9780818402036): Brian Byfield: Books (http://www.amazon.com/Every-Great-Chess-Player-Beginner/dp/0818402032)

[Warhammer]

Is there a good chess game out there with an AI that is useable by kids?

[Marc Vaughan]

Is there a good chess game out there with an AI that is useable by kids?

Battle Chess style games always worked for me as a kid - they had animated pieces which 'fought' when you took another piece.

(imho most chess programs on lower levels will be adequate for kids playing)

[Young Drachma]

I bought Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition off of Steam awhile back ($20). I play it off and on, but I just never really got that into it. Has a lot of tutorials that seem to cover a good amount of topics and gives a lot of info on the games you play. I didn't really like the interface, though.

I did this too a few years ago when I wanted to get back into it and my reaction has largely been the same. That said, it's helped me understand some stuff I didn't before, because a book for chess would be a non-starter for me and I need to see it and play it to really get it.

[MJ4H]

If you want to get better at chess, go to Chess Tactics (www.chesstempo.com) and do an hour of tactical problems every day. Also do a search for a pdf file called "400 points in 400 days."

[Glengoyne]

My daughter 10, 11 later this month, has expressed some interest in learning Chess. I downloaded Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess from an abandonware site, because of all of the chess games I've ever tried on a computer, it was the one that tried to teach a beginner.

Once she's progressed some on that, I'll see what she thinks of the Chess puzzles and such.

[tyketime]

Is there a good chess game out there with an AI that is useable by kids?
Are you looking for kids to learn chess? Or do they know chess, and you want an AI to help them improve?

[Warhammer]

AI to help them improve (with a simple interface).