How to Get Good at Chess, Fast (2013)

1) Practice just above your level (enough to be difficult and stretch, but not demoralizingly hard). Get a coach to help you find this range. Do this as many hours per day as you can tolerate, and the number you can tolerate should go up over time.

To quote the book, practice:

"It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it's highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports;"

2) Be clear about your goals and motivations. These will help you get through the difficult hours in 1)

The book is excellent and lays out the basics about getting good at anything. (Notice that I'm not saying anyone can be world chess champion. The book argues that it would be highly unlikely that any chess champion would get that way without applying these principles.)

A lot of what is discussed here is the what and how to practice. These are very valuable questions that I gloss over by saying, find a coach. Presumably a coach would know this. Knowing what to practice, and designing practice is a skill in itself.

I make the same kinds of mistakes, allow positional concessions or just straight-up blunder because I overlook tricks in the lines I thought were safe.

Building up that mental repertoire of tactical and positional patterns by solving puzzles and reviewing well played games is essential, no matter what level. It's like building a huge in-memory cache of correct answers so you quickly solve problems at the board.

"While the Baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play go." -- Edward Lasker, chess grandmaster

"Chess has only two outcomes: draw and checkmate. The objective of the game . . . is total victory or defeat – and the battle is conducted head-on, in the center of the board. The aim of go is relative advantage; the game is played all over the board, and the objective is to increase one's options and reduce those of the adversary. The goal is less victory than persistent strategic progress." -- Dr. Henry Kissinger, quoted in Newsweek, 11/8/04

"What's happening with chess is that it's gradually losing its place as the par excellence of intellectual activity. Smart people in search of a challenging board game might try a game called go." -- former Wold Correspondence Chess Champion Hans Berliner, The New York Times, Feb 6, 2003

Learn to play: http://www.usgo.org/learn-play

The Seattle Go Center has events multiple times a week: http://www.seattlego.org/

The original article pretty much nails it as a guide, in my opinion. Highly recommended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6791742

1) Get good ressources. He mentions a few books, but they may not be best suited for you. There are also a lot of other tools, like training websites, programs, video guides, classes. Reason is: Instead of experimenting out the best path through some ideas, you can read about them and get that realisation much faster. Having better ressources and knowing how to use them may cut 80% of your time to achieve a certain goal.

2) Find the right better players. Not everyone that plays better can also transfer some of that to you. And some people are simply just not right for you.

Where books etc are the way to learning the right thing (instead of everything), the right teacher is about giving you better feedback. You can only see your own lacks and mistakes so far. A lot of your stupidest mistakes you simply don't even see as a mistake. For instance, one of my major problems in hitting (kung fu training) was that I slightly lean back while stepping forward. How could you even realise that without a teacher/experienced friend?

Find good resources, find good teacher, learn from the mistakes/experiments of others what is the right path, then do it a lot, then get feedback from the right person, then continue exercise and feedback sessions for a few years. Recipe to learn anything.

It was such a bummer for me to explain to my son that you don't really have a choice of moves in the opening...

A little study of openings definitely improves your games, but in ordinary Chess the opening is about as interesting as bowling or watching golf on TV.

However, Chess is less fun than alot of other options because it does take more practice to get really good and it's less social than board games (e.g. Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, etc.), card games (Poker, Hearts, Bridge), or online video games.

The plus side is the logical planning and longer term strategy boost from study. The downside is that it's not going to help social interactions as much and alot of what it teaches is contrary to alot of what you need to pick up now, which is how to navigate among many different groups some of whom may be working for or against you. In many ways, running a raid in an MMO teaches you more useful skills than what it takes to get a really good ELO rating.

1) best app for Mac (once upon a time I'd care if it was pretty, but not so much now) for computer chess? 2) best communities for 'beginner-enthusiast' and online games?

This is all rather trivial stuff.

While, I don't disagree with everything that the author says, I think that it should be acknowledged that his claim is pretty much unfounded. There are those who have not done any (or all, or much) of these things and their rating is above 1800, and there are those who have done all of these things and their rating never comes close to 1800.

Beyond that the author does not seem to be aware of the well-known debate on this subject.

There are at least, broadly, two views on chess improvement. One side, as represented by Silman and Aagaard, argues that chess "meta-knowledge" is key. A player must first look at the characteristics of the positions (e.g., understand Silman's imbalances), and with this understanding, and only then, can a suitable move be found. This group usually advocates a "thinking process" as well. The other side, as represented by Watson and Hendriks, argues that it is only the moves themselves that are important, and the correct move in many cases contradicts the "rules" of strategic analysis. For this group, only "concrete analysis" of a position (i.e., looking at the moves without prejudice) has any possibility of leading to a good move. In this "concrete analysis" group, at least Hendriks (if I understand him correctly) argues that in a tournament situation where there are significant time restrictions, and experimentally moving the pieces is not allowed, only knowing the position itself, or similar types of positions, can help the player find the correct move.

So, we have the "meta-knowledge" group advocating the learning of strategic and tactical ideas, and then applying that knowledge to a given position with proper thinking technique. Accordingly, this group believes that if you want to improve your chess, you need to learn more strategic and tactical ideas, applied with an improved thinking technique.

And we have the "concrete analysis" group advocating the learning of the correct move in specific positions. Accordingly, this group believes that if you want to get better at chess, then you must learn many hundreds, even thousands, of positions.

The truth is probably somewhere between the two extremes. My own experience is that as far as tournament OTB play is concerned, I have benefited more from the concrete analysis approach than anything else.