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Losing my patience with chess
I don’t know why, but I just can’t get good at Chess. I’ve played for a couple of years and my elo fluctuates drastically. I’ve been as high as 900 and as low as 750 playing rapid in the last two weeks on chess.com. I would just like to break 1000 for now, or heck, even just get into the mid 900’s.
Does anyone have any resources or tips for how to get better at this game? I’ve watched videos online, I’ve been doing the lessons and whatnot that are offered through chess.com as well. I’m just so incredibly frustrated and I’m tired of losing all the time.
Biggest game changer that I can think to recommend is to study openings.
Modern Chess Openings is the classic reference for that. I'm sure there are likely decent online versions as well. But the goal is to memorize as well as analyze. For that, having a physical board might work a lot better than playing on a screen. Just pick an opening line you like and start looking at the various counters and consequences.
I haven't really kept up in a long time. The ones I remember starting with were Ruy Lopez and the French Defense. It wasn't until I had some of the more common e4 e5 openings down pat that I started delving into the Sicilian. There are a lot of variations. The Sicilian alone probably takes up about a quarter of the edition of the MCO that I had. But honestly, it's doesn't matter too much what opening you end up picking as long as it's one you like. Study the heck out of it. Make that one opening a specialty for yourself. Use it as often as you can in-game. Even if someone is trying out a different opening on you, you might still be able to adapt positions from it, for instance.
Another general concept to keep in mind is that you don't have to read 10 or 20 moves ahead. If you can read 2 moves ahead with certainty, you're generally good. It's the "with certainty" that's the catch.
But yea, opening knowledge sets you up for the rest of the game. It makes a massive difference. After getting some openings under your belt, if you still have difficulty with mid game or end game, you'll have some better ideas on how to approach studying. End game studies are particularly fun imo. But ya gotta be able to get there first, and for that you need some openings.
I know some openings but I need to diversify a bit for sure. The biggest problem is that knowing the next couple of moves with certainty, and getting caught off guard by tactics that I feel like I should have seen. I appreciate the suggestions and I will certainly look through them. Thank you
If you're 800 then the last thing you should be doing is expanding your opening repertoire. You should focus on opening principles (not necessarily specific openings), learning to look for tactics (puzzles puzzles puzzles!), and simple end game principles (e.g. king opposition or exploiting weak back ranks).
My understanding is that, if you know opening principles, then pick an opening for white and two for black (one to respond to 1.e4 and one for 1.d4) and study the most common few moves for them. After that, you should focus on endgame study and tactics puzzles to practice ideas (forks, pins, skewers, checkmate patterns, etc, this site was nice to learn motifs and this site has tactics although a good curated book is better), as well as to analyze your game afterwards to see what went wrong. When analyzing your game, try to step through it yourself first before using an engine, and when you decide to use an engine, only look for blunders and missed tactics. A good book to read at your level is Logical Chess: Move by Move by Chernev. However, when reading any books, have a physical board next to you to actually go through any games and do any tactics puzzles.
That being said, I rarely go over 1100 in chess.com in rapid. The outline above is nice, but pretty rigid and unfun once you get into heavy tactics study, although I typically don't have a ton of time to devote to tactics study to see major improvements in addition to playing and analyzing the game. The biggest tip I have is to be ok with your level of play. If you don't know the ratings, do you have fun playing? I found that chasing a given rating led me to burnout and generally not having fun, and I only started to have fun once I was ok with my level of play and how slow it could be to improve.
It's also easy to think that chess is a measure of intelligence. It's not. Someone who is good at chess is just someone who is good at chess. If anything, what separates grandmasters from more casual players (besides the time spent on focused study) is how good their memories are. If anything, chess is some sort of measure of memory recall/pattern recognition, but even that misses the forest for the trees.
If you're having fun, then out of the above, I would just learn a common line or two in a couple of openings (stay away from the sicilian and don't go too deep in theory), common endgames (ex. do you know how to mate if you have a king and rook against their king?), and what a fork, pin, and skewer are, and just play. Take some time after a game or two and analyze them yourself to look for your blunders and missed forks, pins, and skewers. If you're really feeling adventurous, take screenshots of your missed tactics and checkmates to make personalizes tactics puzzles and study those occasionally. Or ignore what you want and just play. If you're not having fun, then there's really no point.
Rereading your post, are you playing people around your rating? I wouldn't stray more than, say, 50 elo above or below your current rating, if possible. Chess.com says the following:
If you're playing, say, 1000 rated players while you're only 700 - 900, then that could be why you're losing frequently.
When I look at the game analysis I usually have 60-80% accuracy, with 0-2 blunders each game. Sometimes it is worse than that, but I try to just not blunder. It’s difficult especially when the other player insists on playing a really slow positional game. I lose patience, or I end up running low on time trying to figure out how to break through without losing everything. Thank you for all of the suggestions. I will check them out, and the book sounds interesting.
In addition to what others have said about openings, I'd emphasize playing with longer/no time controls. Play the computer or friends on daily and really take your time and explore the positions you get. Rapid and faster time controls are good tests of how well you really know what you're doing but they're not great learning environments.
If learning with a buddy is helpful to you, I'm always willing to play and talk theory/ideas while we do it! I'm on chess.com, just DM me for my username if you're interested. I pretty much exclusively play three of my friends and occasionally the computer so my displayed rating is likely pretty inaccurate, but I'd guess I'm somewhere around 1100-1200 in classical and almost certainly lower than that in rapid (900-1000 maybe?). I'm just starting my study of specific openings so I doubt I have much of an advantage over you in that regard.
Either way, I wish you good luck! I totally understand being frustrated with the game, so don't feel it's just you struggling.
I fell off the Chess bandwagon recently as I haven't been actively playing. I play predominantly on Lichees, and I'm rated 1200 there. For improvement in your game, you need to be playing 10+15 or longer time controls. In these time controls you can think and plan. Playing Blitz is not going to help you improve, it relies mostly on your intuition, which if you don't train, turns into a feedback loop of ingraining bad habits.
My best advice, and it's still true at my novice level as well, is play soundly. What I mean by that is don't play dubious/trappy lines, and when in doubt develop your pieces. At this level you can almost always just wait for you opponent to give you a blunder. If you played soundly, then capitalizing on this blunder will likely win you the game.
It's hard to give advice without actually knowing how you play. Can you share a few of your games in this thread?