New answers tagged learning
0
You cannot apply pressure on an opening. You apply pressure on a weakness which may or may not occur in the opening.
Sorry there is no magic way to win a pawn in the opening or the other guys would already have been doing that and there would be no point to ever playing the game.
If you have an edge in position you might be able to apply pressure to win ...
2
Assuming it's black to move this is a very simple win. White has the opposition and a strong king position. I would recommend reading up on the opposition. White can effectively "push" the black king back because black has no alternative. A decent endgame player will see this as a win almost instantly.
6
It's possible to win a pawn in the opening, but because it is the opening (i.e. heavily analyzed), you can't do it by force. You can only do it if the other side lets you.
The Two Knight's Defense with 4. Ng5 is effectively a pawn-up opening for White, although it's not obvious. You might want to take a look.
[FEN "rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/...
6
I am sorry to say that the answer is "no", there is no "easy way" to apply pressure and win a pawn in the opening, otherwise, at the top level of chess, the game would be won every time. That is what positional chess is about: You gradually improve your position until the opponent can no longer save all of the material.
A theorem of chess is that you must ...
7
In the picture, it could be either the two simply agreeing to the draw, or black resigning, depending on who has the move. Both are typically followed by a handshake.
White to move is a draw.
[FEN "8/3k4/5p2/3K1P1p/7P/8/8/8 w - - 0 1"]
1. Kc5 {The only move} Kc7 {Again the only move.} 2. Kd5 Kd7= {Both sides are forced to repeat here, and it is a draw.}
...
1
An opening repertoire for someone who has no time to study should not aim at getting an advantage, but aim instead to create situations in which you feel at home and in which your opponent will have difficulty taking you out of that "comfort zone"
As White the combination of d4 and Bf4 has been called the businessman's opening for just that reason. As Black ...
1
At that rating level, you’re better served by playing simple openings and concentrating on getting better at chess in general, so any opening, offbeat or mainline, that requires weeks or months of study is suboptimal.
Spend your chess study time learning chess tactics and endgames, spend enough time on the opening to understand what you should have played ...
-1
At 1500 openings are not your problem. Trying to play tactical slash and burn is a problem and a poor strategy for improving. You may like them but they are not the best approach. And when you play someone better they will skin your cat quickly.
Go for solid openings off the main lines that everybody plays. Use principles to guide your moves not ...
0
Facing the chessboard, the Queen should be on the fourth square of the first rank (row) and the colour of the Queen should be the same as the colour of that square. (If the colours are different, rotate -90 or +90 degrees the chessboard.)
The King of a given color is on the square immediateley next to the square of the Queen of the same color and that is ...
4
I recommend Dan Heisman's "The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book" which has 30 amateur heavily annotated games grouped by useful sections like "Too Fast" and "Too Slow" for time management. If you are often mystified by GM commentary like "...and Black is clearly better." then this book may be for you.
Most of these are in the 1400 - 1800 range. ...
7
Even at 1700, the vast majority of your mistakes are going to be tactical errors...especially at the faster controls. The only way around that is to start studying and practicing.
There may be some people, who can benefit from online tactics, but am of the belief that they lend themselves toward the trainee being shallow, and often the answers are the ...
0
Everybody hits their maximum. That may depend on talent, study, playing, amount of time available, as well as interest in getting better. So while most players improve at first, they all hit their limit. And then when they get really old they start to come back down.
200-300 is a fairly narrow range of results that accounts for the randomness of that ...
2
It may sound little counter intuitive, but taking little break from chess can help you. Invest time into other hobbies. Also, watching games of older masters (Tal , Morphy, etc.) , who play quite attractivly, attacking chess also sparked some extra joy in me and reminded me why I have started to play this game after all. :)
2
You are playing way too many games at once! Stop doing that!!
Better yet, stop playing completely, and start studying until you are much stronger. 1400 online is a pretty low rating compared to the complete set of all chess players, and very low to those who compete online, and even lower for those who play OTB tournaments.
What is your prioritized ...
1
Learn Basic Tactics
When playing against other beginners, basic chess tactics are very effective — and a lot of fun.
If you don’t know about discovered attacks, pins, skewers, and forks, learn about them.
Winning Chess Tactics by Seirawan is a great resource.
Attack the King
Focus on attacking the king when you can. Beginners’ defenses are weak enough ...
3
Start reading some books for beginners such as those by Seirawan. The idea is simply that the author will often explain the rationale behind a move in the book, and just by reading those you will be exposed to tactical and strategic motifs that you will see occurring in your own games.
Also, reserve a little time during your study hours for solving puzzles....
3
This answer is a little indirect but it helped my wife get a better grasp of chess and now no longer sees any board state as just a bunch of useless moves.
If you have someone you play with regularly ask them to give you a handicap by verbalizing what they are thinking on their move.
-ex: "I can move my pawn up two getting control of the center, putting ...
4
Study more and play less.
Learn about pawn structure.
Play over GM games to see what they do.
Some common ideas may occur to you to try.
Look for weaknesses you can attack.
Look for your weaknesses you could defend better.
Can you attack the king? Can you expand for space? Can you put pieces on squares with more mobility closer to the enemy? Can ...
6
Note: everything I'm saying is assuming you're playing white. Everything is also true for black, you just have to reverse the rank numbers. I'm also using algebraic notation; if you're unfamiliar there are a lot of resources.
In the opening, your goal should be to control the center with pawns (if your opponent lets you, play d4 and e4 as your first moves), ...
11
Advice I give to complete beginners is to place your pieces so that they point at your opponents king. Ignore any pieces and pawns between your pieces and the King. When playing against another beginner who has no plan this is a good strategy. This strategy has the benefit of helping learn about the power pieces exert across the board even when seemingly ...
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The tip I learned from Jeremy Silman's "Reassess your chess" series was that, if you can't find a weakness in the opponent's position, you should actively be trying to create a weakness.
For example, in closed positions it happens pretty often that all your pieces are developed and in "good" positions, but you still have no attack. When this happens, you ...
5
The strategy is a very deep concept which requires creativity and understanding. It is important to understand the mechanics of certain types of positions and this can be achieved by looking at different varieties of top grandmaster games especially ones where the players have a different type of style. Sometimes even then you have to look at the tiny ...
11
The general rule of thumb is improve the worst placed piece. I would be reluctant to move pawns without any purpose because you are likely to create a weakness. I would rather make a do nothing move, it is often could be a rook move on a back rank, as long as it really don't do anything; this move you can always "undo" (unlike the pawn moves!).
Wrong plan ...
15
Some typical things to look out for in the middle game in order to develop a plan... This assumes that it is a relatively quiet position without any imminent tactics that need to be taken care of first.
Are all my pieces developed and on active squares (if not, how can piece activity be improved?)
Does my oppenent have any weak pawns (typically isolated ...
35
This is very hard to answer since the question is very broad, but in the opening, always ask yourself "what piece haven't I moved out yet?" If you move pieces twice or three times in the opening, and I am developing each one after only one move, soon you will be fighting with only two or three pieces against me with 5 or 6. You will not win that way.
Other ...
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"PhishMaster's Complete Guide To Improvement": What to study, and how.
Every player has times where they "plateau", and have trouble moving on, but they usually get past it eventually if they are continuing to study. Sometimes, it is a matter of patience.
Here is a set of comprehensive answers to questions I previously gave in various chunks, that are now ...
5
To ease the burden of typing, what I do is this: I have a file containing chess-related commands I have run. I keep this file in a directory I can easily find. Most times I want to do a chess-related command, it's a slight variant of one I ran earlier, e.g. to run Popeye on some other input file. So I'd replace the old input file name with the new one, ...
6
For those interested, you can download the exe from https://sourceforge.net/projects/popeye-chess/
There's no reason to alter the name of the executable.
You have to enter command prompt. On windows this is done by running cmd.exe, or you can use a dos emulator.
When you're in the folder which contains the popeye.exe file, you can start the program by ...
3
Positional thinking is more abstract than tactics. If there could be an algorithm for positional thinking then positional thinking would be like tactical thinking and not something else. However, there are thinking steps like noticing weak squares.
I suggest starting with a pawn structure book. Soltis' "Pawn Structure Chess" is a classic and the book ...
2
My two cents on this is to study lots of classic games - chess.com articles by GSerper and especially Bryan Smith are an excellent place to start.
The book Chess Training for Post Beginners is also excellent (the title is misleading - I learnt a tonne when I was 2100) - gives you a review of all the main positional elements (bishop pair, good knight vs bad ...
9
Your first task should be to get better at tactics. It's one thing to understand what a pin is and why it works, for example, but it's quite another to be able to spot the circumstances under which it's advantageous for you to use it.
So my first advice to you would be to work out solutions to tactical puzzles found in books or software. There's a series of ...
29
@Arka Mukherjee, I find most players under 2100 weak tactically, so at 1200, you are certainly weaker than you understand you are. I do not say that to be mean, but just as a very logical person, who has been a reasonably strong player for over 30 years.
At your level, memorizing theory is mostly a waste of time. In 40 years of playing, I cannot tell you ...
9
at 1200 I strongly believe You are wrong about all your core assumptions about your understandings; or if you really have those strategic/positional understandings you must start to do tactics - at least 1h of puzzle solving per day will make best improvement for 1200 player anyway.
and forget about spending time on theory until you are at least 1800, ...
4
I have seen the materials in the program, and they are for players well below your level of play. I am not sure that they are even for a 1000 player since they are very basic. While he uses positions, they are more about teaching basic terminology and showing various themes, but on a very basic level.
For example, here is one position that you are to find 5 ...
2
I have found Silman's Lessons in Strategy 1 and 2, available at chess.com quite good. They do contain some "tactics" as well, but similar to as in a real game, you wouldn't know which positions have a tactical or a strategical solution. Besides, you might also be required to analyze whether the position resulting from the tactic will result in a strategic ...
1
This is what I do after I get out of preparation:
Check for threats against me
If none or I judge them to be insignificant:
Look for weaknesses in the opponents position and then look for tactics to attack them
If none:
Move a or h pawn (to create weaknesses and per Aronyan's advice: "If you don't know what to move, move a or h pawn")
...
2
There is a nice story attached to the 1960 Tal-Botwinnik match. They adjourned after 40 moves and began analysing the game so far. Botwinnik had got his Queen offside and Tal had numerous exciting sacrifices to look at but had not played any of them. In the analysis, Tal was trying to find out if any of them would have worked, but noticed after a while that ...
5
I am currently working through Karpov Move by Move One nice thing about this books is that it stops to ask a question sometimes. Often the question is "how do you access this position" and then goes on to discuss that answer. And of course reviewing Karpovs games is helpful for anyone thinking about positional play.
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I looked at my library, and opened up a number of books. The old Dvoretsky books really do not do this much, but the "School of Future Champions" and "School of Chess Excellence" series do have many sections that just say "white (or black) to play", and nothing more.
Other Dvoretsky books that do that significantly are "Recognizing Your Opponent's Resources"...
5
I think that the biggest myth about chess is the one that you actually pointed out in your question. I am talking about the one about learning openings before learning endgames. I am a strong believer that endgames contribute much to your play than openings and openings. As the great chess player Capablanca pointed out that Endgames can be studied ...
2
IM Eric Rosen has a YouTube channel in which he frequently posts stream supercuts and game analyses. His content is less focussed than other "learning resource" style channels, but his videos contain lots of information on different aspects of the game (particularly for lower level players).
His videos also happen to be very entertaining.
2
For an analysis of master games, check out agadmator's Chess Channel.
He shows why the "obvious" move shouldn't be played, and then explains the more subtle, but better move.
He keeps it interesting by sometimes adding jokes in, and sometimes asks the viewer what the best move is.
This channel is mainly for expanding knowledge, not learning how to play.
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