Having Fun with Chess

How I’d Learn Chess if Being Good Really Mattered to Me #

Below is how I’d approach chess if I really cared about being good at it. A lot of advice in blog posts are for intermediate beginners. This one is for my fellow absolute beginners (who don’t even know the names of the pieces).

1. Learn the pieces and how they move. #

Both Chess.com and lichess offer courses. I’d suggest using lichess because it is free and just as good as Chess.com. Don’t skip this step if you don’t know en passant or get constantly fooled by knight forks.

2. Learn chess notation as soon as possible. #

Algebraic notation is what everyone is using these days. I learned it by reading this wikipedia article but you might find a dedicated tutorial more helpful. Depending on how you enjoy learning, understanding descriptive notation might also be useful as old chess magazines and books pre 2000’s use this notation.

3. Learn very basic endgames: #

* Queen and Rook vs King
* Queen and Bishop vs King
* Queen and Knight vs King
* Queen and King vs King

A lot of beginners have a difficult time understanding planning. This is perhaps the number 2 reason I’ve heard from my friends on why they don’t play chess. They say they’re not good at it. This is a skill, and like all skills, some people may have natural strength that gives them a strong lead however it can be learned. And learning these basic endgames will give you an idea of planning for chess. It will also help you understand the strength of the pieces as well as how thy move.

4. Learn very basic checkmates #

* Fool's Mate
* Scholar's Mate

When learning these (as well as 3) make sure to write down the moves in chess notation. Learning these basic checkmates will help you understand what developing your pieces mean and why it is important.

5. Pick a course and stick to it. #

Don’t get stuck in tutorial hell. Find a list of the top I don’t know, 5 beginner chessable courses, books or whatever, pick one and then actually commit to completing it from beginning to end. All of the popular beginner courses are solid. You are so new that the nuances between them don’t even matter. I really enjoy Reuben Fine’s CHess the Easy Way and Jose Capablanca’s Chess Fundementals.

6. Solve tactics puzzles-preferably with pen on paper (or slate and stylus). #

Computers rush us. Pen on paper forces us to slow down our lizard brains. Don’t write anything down unless you’ve thought about it. Write down (in plain language) why you believe your solution don’t or do work. If you must use a chess board for visualization, use a physical chessboard.

IMPORTANT choose puzzles that are around your rating. I really like the puzzles from Predator at the Chessboard as they build up in difficulty. Do puzzles that are slightly too easy for you and slightly too difficult.

7. Learn an Easy Chess Opening #

I am not good at chess because I do not follow my own advice. What I mean by learn an easy opening is learn one that builds up on basic fundemental skills (like controlling the center and making sure our pieces are protecting each other). I really like the Ruy Lopez because it is very intuitive. Do not learn an opening that feels like it requires a lot of memorization and/or has ideas you can’t figure out.

I think even at the 800’s level, knowing some kind of opening can be useful otherwise you are throwing pieces about the board and hoping by the grace of God some good position will magically pop up.

8. Play Long Games and Think #

As a beginner, I can confidently say I suck at thinking and observing. Yeah knowing a few openings is useful and solving tactics puzzles are fun but if your board vision sucks then your games will probably also suck. As a newbie, actually going through the 'ol check list:

• checks
• captures
• threats

takes me forever. Especially the threats part. My puzzle rating score is much higher than my playing score. This is because in my games I am making a ton of basic blunders. Just getting better at knowing what you want to do and what your opponent wants to do will drastically help you improve.

To improve on board vision, play long games (30min+) and try as best as you can to actually use the full time (I am guilty of almost always taking less than 20min to play a game on chess.com). Use the ol computer science method of sitting a rubber duck next to you and explaining to it the reasoning for your moves.

9. Find a Community #

Here’s My Controversial Opinion and Mistakes #

Chess is a hobby and as such, the best way to tackle chess is the way that yields the most fullfillment. Someone will rightfully say “but you won’t improve!”. Who cares? In the beginning of my forray into chess, I made many mistakes that took enjoyment out of the game. They are as follows:

1. As soon as I downloaded chess.com, I jumped headfirst into 10 minute games. And like a slot machine player, I lost often and only grew more angry. I finally sucked up the courage to try the chess.com premium trial. It helped tremendously as I didn’t even know at that point how to castle or that pawns could move forward by two spaces on their first turn. Takeaway: learn the basics

2. I also foolishly went to a chess tournament after having only played for two months. I lost almost all my games (I recieved a point because my opponent didn’t show up). This is a mistake because tournaments definitely made the game extremely less appealing. I do not enjoy stress. I also had no endurance. Instead of going every week, I should have only gone once a month. If you thrive under pressure and a deadline, I’d suggest doing the complete opposite of me. I also did not know chess notation very well. Takeaway: Learn chess notation before going to tournaments and also only go often if you enjoy competition.

3. Someone recommended I choose a few openings for white and black and stick to them. I did that and I did improve dramatically in OTB but the game became mechanical. The whimsy was dissappearing. Takeaway: learn openings if you’re into that stuff.

4. Someone also suggested I use a computer engine to analyze my games. This did not help at all but it did make chess feel more like a job then something to do for fun. And considering I at that point still got confused by basics like en passent, the computer moves were magical-which means foreign to me. Takeway review your games with a good chess friend. Or with yourself and yes, with a computer but on the computer part, hold a large grain of salt.

My First Chess Game (on Chess.com) and some other Games #

Watching this is beautiful. I made many a pawn moves, did not develope any of my pieces and castleing was not a thing.

Note: chess.com starts you with a rating in the 1000’s. My true beginner rating was somewhere in the 700s.

This game is where my rating stopped plummeting and started stablizing. As you can see, I was consistent with the first game in not developing my pieces and never castleing. The number of blunders made is more than 10. Fantastic.

This game is from August 2021. It took about 3 months to get from 700s to 800s and honestly you could improve faster if you train yourself to slow down and actually think about what you’re doing. In this game, you can see I memorized some opening lines but didn’t really know what I was doing when I was “developing” my pieces.

This here is my most recent game (against someone my level). I have a better understanding of piece developement and my opponent does not. They moved a ton of pawns while I got my pieces active. But here too I made a bunch of mistakes. Move 9 makes no sense. E5 (preventing the bishop from going to F4) and then developing some more pieces would’ve made a lot more sense.

Here the engine says from moves 1-12 white is (most of the time) doing better. However I thought (correctly) that white was doing worse. This is because us 900s are not computers. White has more control of the board and had they started to move out their pieces would prabably be able to have more active squares than me too. But I think this is hard for us players to figure out. Had white moved on move 13 a3 (forcing me to eventually take) they would’ve recieved an open file and the opportunity to move out their bishop.

Gender and Chess #

In my area, chess has a very real gender disparity. I am the only woman in my chess club and for a while I was the only regular woman at the local Sunday chess tournaments.

I don’t go to the tournaments anymore because I find them too stressful (I cannot speak for why other women don’t go to them).

The area I live in have other game meetup groups such as scrabble and bridge. I think scrabble is a comparable game to chess in that it involves tactics and organized competitive bodies (USCF and NASPA) who employ the Elo system. Scrabble at the upper echelon also has a gender disparity which is similar to chess but at the club level, it seems to be more diverse. Why does this scrabble club have more women then the chess club?

I wonder if it is because scrabble (do to the sheer amount of proabablity and it being about making words) seems at least on first glance, more friendly.