How do I improve, Can I even improve?

In my opinion chess goals are like all goals. They should be SMART. Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic,Timely. The most important thing is to have fun and don't expect too much too quickly. You have years ahead of you. At your level I played, learned basic tactical patterns and checkmating/endgames. I learned the very basics of strategy and opening principles.

You have no idea of how good you will be; who knows years down the line you may develop into master material or not. Hopefully you will still want to learn more about the game, but most of all still enjoy playing. Chess is hard but, in turns, satisfying abd frustrating.

@synposis. You can improve like any other subject chess needs hard work and i belive there is no natural talent it all work. To be honest i started playing chess 6 years ago and i was much dumber about 700 lichess rating my training puzzles was 1000. Look now! How did i imporove? First play with people who are higher than u and play casual no rated this way u are not streeses it might seem silly but try to play 2000s look u be happy about your performance second take chess like school like learn for future not fun. Watch others on lichess tv. If you like i can help u by playing with u no fee just for sake of improvement :) because i was in your place 6 years ago:)

fastest way to improve for you would be to search the local club of your hometown ! :)

Hi OP. I thought exactly like you did. You can definetly improve. Theres plenty of ways to improve. Try and do some puzzles everyday, play longer time controlled games & review with the engine at the end to see what you could have done better. Theres a lot of good chess books out there that might be useful. I'm currently reading Logical Chess by Irving Chernev. Main thing is just keep at it and you will see improvement. Best of luck!

Firstly, thank you to everyone who has replied with help/advice and most importantly encouragement, you guys (and girls, don't want to offend anyone :)) have been so welcoming and helpful.

I will not quote and reply to every single post individually as that would take a long time and as it is a Bank Holiday here in the UK I have plans to enjoy this rare shining orb in the sky, that legend has it some refer to as the Sun :)

Last night I purchased a few books off the Bay, namely:

What it takes to become a Grandmaster
Chess For Dummies (Seems appropriate!)
Chess Words of Wisdom - The Principles, Methods and Essential Knowledge of Chess

That should keep me busy for a while!

I also searched out my local club, after the suggestion by @RegisLakrids

There are two, one at the University who meet Tuesdays at 7:30pm and another who meet at a Social Club on Mondays at 7:30pm
So this is something I will certainly look in to once I have started to show some improvement.

@synposis #1:

"I am over 40..."

What should i say: I'm over 60.

Good reading: "The Soviet Chess Primer" by Ilya Maizelis. See www.qualitychess.co.uk/ebooks/Soviet_Chess_Primer-extract.pdf. An all time classic.

It is surprising what he considers to be "basic".

But i guess learning to play chess is a bit like learning to play jazz: It can't be learned from books (only).

And hey: The day will come that you drill a bigger fish.

My tiny little pleasure of the day:



May be the next 10 games i get it straight in my face again.

Here are some tips for general improvement;

1) Get one book for positional play,a tactics book and an endgame book and study those.

2)Play long games!I can't stress enough how important this is for newbies (30 minutes or longer).U must increase increase your understanding of this game first...speed comes later.

3) Do tactics puzzles here and on chesstempo...and take your time on those.

4)Do endgame studies/composed problems.

5)And some common sense things;Don't play tired/stressed out,sleep well,good diet,exercise etc.No brainers of course but you'll be surprised don't follow these guidelines.

Hope this helps...and I wish you a good journey :)

@synposis #1:

I see myself in your post. You said you end up just defending and reacting to your opponent's moves, and this is me exactly. I really struggle to take the initiative and try to launch attacks, instead just becoming obsessed and paranoid about defence, no doubt seeing "phantom" threats that aren't really there.

It seems that I'm around your age (give or take a few years), and I started playing chess a couple of years ago. For what it's worth, here's my experience and advice, which has got me to 1500 classical:

(1) Play long games. I'm truly terrible at bullet and blitz, but much better at classical. Have you got time, say on the weekends, to play a 45+45 or 60+30 game? Give yourself time to think. It can be hit and miss finding an opponent for these longer time controls, but if you can, the games can be really worthwhile. (You may already play such games, so if you do, disregard this) :)

(2) Do a "blunder check" before each move. Before moving a piece, ask yourself:

- Am I moving the piece to an undefended square? Can my opponent just take it?

- What am I "undefending" by making this move? For example, suppose my queen on d1 is the sole defender of one of my knights on b3, say, and suppose my opponent has a rook on b8 attacking the knight. If I move the queen to d2, say, the knight is losing its defender, and my opponent may be able to take it.

- Following this move, has my opponent got any checks? If so, can I deal with them? Is my opponent threatening to capture anything? If so, is it adequately defended?

- Am I leaving myself vulnerable to any forks, pins or skewers?

(3) Further to this last point, familiarise yourself with potentially dangerous alignments or configurations of pieces. For example, your king and queen lined up on the same rank or file could be vulnerable to a skewer if your opponent can get a rook to that rank or file; two rooks line up on the same diagonal could be skewered by a bishop.

In particular, watch out for knight forks; learn the configurations of two pieces which could lead to them potentially being forked by a knight, and look out for these patterns during your games: for example, two pieces at the opposite corners of a 4x2 rectangle, of a 4x4 square, of a 5x3 rectangle, on the same rank or file with one or three squares between them could potentially be forked by an opponent's knight.

If any two of your pieces are arranged in one of these patterns, make sure that you're aware of it, and before each move, ask yourself whether your opponent can exploit it.

(4) Be aware of the coordination of your pieces; try not to have your pieces and pawns getting in each other's way.

(5) Watch your pawn structure; try to avoid having doubled pawns, isolated pawns, etc

(6) If you haven't already, watch John Bartholomew's Chess Fundamentals and Climbing the Rating Ladder videos on Youtube; they're brilliant, and helped me a lot.

(7) Lastly, and most importantly, enjoy your chess. At the end of the day, regardless of whether I win or lose, if I enjoy a game, then that game was worthwhile. I'm never going to make master level, or anything remotely close to it, but I hope I never lose the enjoyment that I get from chess. Whether you're rated 900 or 1900, have fun.

Good luck in your chess journey :)

Play slower. You play 10+0 games, that is OK, but at the very end you have more than half of your time left on your clock. Do not hurry. Take your time and think your moves through. In a 10+0 game you should think about 10 seconds per move.

@Dave155

Thank you for such an informative post with so much content, Just today I played a game against an opponent and within the first 10 moves I identified a knight which was going to cause me problems, sure enough this knight went on to exploit my position and had me scrambling for position and ultimately cost me the match.
No doubt I would have lost anyway, but straight away I could see this was an issue and struggled to defend this situation after the first opening moves.
The opponent was rated 800+ higher and easily destroyed me. But at least I was aware the knight was going to exploit me, I just could not do anything about it :(

@tpr
I totally agree, I seem to have a better rating on classical as opposed to rapid/bullet and so on.
Being a novice who has only been playing two months there is no way I can evaluate the position so quickly and the time restraint causes me to make stupid blunders which better rated players can easily exploit.