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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I've been fiending for something intellectually engaging outside work that isn't just more programming, and also for competition (that isn't smash bros), chess seems like an attractive choice, but I have no idea how to "get into it" decently. Is there the equivalent of like, smash wiki, for chess? Or similar to Sonicfox's YouTube videos? Or any good books for total beginners to get into the strategy of it?

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I got very interested in chess after downloading the 'Magnus Trainer' app. I hadn't particularly been looking to improve my chess playing (I knew the rules but rarely played and had never studied strategy before), but I'm a sucker for any app that promises to make good use of 'playing with my phone on the bus' time.

The app is a mix of minigames and interactive tutorials. I moved through them quickly because they're all bite-sized enough to do in spare minutes while waiting in line etc. The tutorials are short, single topic, interactive lessons that introduce a concept, give an example from tournament play, and sometimes quiz you about what the next move should be.

The minigames seemed dumb at first, (and I still hate Dream Escape) but after playing them a few times in order to continue advancing through the lessons I came to see them as well designed "wax on, wax off" style drills. 'Poker Face', looks like a memory game but it's actually teaching you to quickly evaluate which player would benefit more from exchanging pieces. Beach Bounty helps you instantly visualize where a piece could be n moves in the future. Flight Control, where you try to quickly tap the appropriate square when shown the coordinates in standard chess notation, seemed pointless until I tried reading books about chess and found the notation slowing me down. Once I'd drilled the coordinates enough that they were second nature, I could visualize them as I read instead of constantly referring to a diagram and counting the squares.

In my lay opinion, Magnus Trainer is a brilliant bit of educational technology. It's not teaching you anything you couldn't learn elsewhere, but it felt easy and fun to me. If I hadn't stumbled across it I don't think I ever would have delved as deeply into chess as I did.

If you are just starting out, and you know the rules and played a few games, I'd recommend these youtube videos [1] by John Bartholomew. Youtube has a bunch of other good videos for beginners, e.g. chessnetwork, st louis chess club, etc. Also, I wouldn't bother learning strategy until you get to like >1500 rating or so. If you get really good at tactics, you can get to 2000 without having much strategic understanding.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9iOeK_jvU

John is amazing, that fundamentals series was a huge help for me. Climbing the Rating Ladder is also explicitly for beginners and really good, he plays longer time controls and fully explains his thought process and line calculations as the games progress. So much good content on his channel.

Yeah, his lecture on pawns helped me a lot. Literally I never thought about pawn structures or pawn breaks before that lecture, and thinking about that improved my game tremendously.

For beginners I'd recommend Agadmator's channel [1] (not mentioned here yet? I can't believe it). Regular dude that reviews recent & famous games, mainly for tactics and strategies. His channel and SC Saint Luis's [2] (particulary GM Finegold videos, guy's hilarious) are what made me come back to chess after decades.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/AGADMATOR [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub

You could also look into learning Go and playing on https://online-go.com/. Although, if it's all the same to you, Chess will be more popular so you'll be able to find games easier, and you'll be able to find real people to play with easier. Still, it's fun to learn Go and start to see the emergent complexity of the game from such simple rules.

The Chess club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis has a lot of great videos on youtube for beginner/intermediate players, and Ben Finegold is also hilarious.

I'll thrown in another youtube recommendation, IM Eric Rosen has a good mix of recorded streams and instructional videos on specific themes, all with extremely relaxed commentary. He plays the London System a lot which is a solid opening for newbies.

https://www.youtube.com/user/RosenChess/videos

For youtube, I recommend ChessNetwork. He's a self taught GM that explains his thoughts as he plays. He also has a beginners series to get you in the proper mindset. Really good guy, but a bit mysterious...

For actual playing I recommend something fast like 3min/0increment or 2/1. It kinda of resembles a video game at that point, where your knowledge and speed is helpful, you get to play a lot of games since they're short, and you don't have to live with your mistakes for very long if you mess up

blitz/bullet is absolutely atrocious for improving, 15+10 is the shortest time control you should be playing if you're seriously trying to get better.

I think that's a bit limiting as a minimum, 10+2 sounds more reasonable for a new player's introduction to a faster pace chess where they still have an opportunity to calculate lines; 15+* is certainly a great time control to play though.

that's fair, anything over 10 minutes with increment is good enough while you're figuring out if you actually enjoy the game or not

I feel like 5 minute blitz forces me to think on my feet and see things quickly. It might end up being self limiting but I can see that my blunder rate has been declining. I get relatively immediate feedback which has to be good for something ;) As a rank beginner that's something. I enjoy it and I don't need a large open time slot to play a game.

I should play longer games I guess. I do much better on puzzles when I have time to think through the move. Donno if the lichess ratings are comparable but my puzzle ratings are much higher than my blitz ratings...

Jerry, aka ChessNetwork, is an NM (national master), not a GM. Besides that, I highly recommend him and his tutorial series as a learning resource for anyone below 2000

I actually actively dis-recommend watching videos on something as a way to "get into" participating in a competitive activity. It's a substitute for actually doing things like practice and competition. Like, some research can be done for like what tools to use or where to play, but doing too much research and not enough actual engagement is a huge trap people fall into.

There are lots of cool books- I have a strong preference for ones like Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess which present problems or walk through games with somewhat conversational commentary.

There are a lot of good suggestions (based on my admittedly limited experience) in this thread: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books-for-a-beginner...

I've just started on Chess after not playing since I was a kid. And I didn't play much back then either. lichess has pretty decent tutorials, puzzles, etc. which will definitely help you get to a point where you can play like a novice ;)

There are endless resources on YouTube including lectures from grand masters on various topics from various chess clubs.

I've mixed lichess training, actual playing, and their tutorials with YouTube videos and I'm having a lot of fun and improving slowly. I can recommend Ben Finegolds' lessons as fun and instructive and various other members of the club he belongs to also have good lessons.

Just be warned, it's very addictive!

I agree with others that watching chess youtubers/twitch streamers is a good way to get into it. I recently compliled a list of youtubers that I have found to be very instructive and fun to watch (instructive meaning they play longer time controls and are good at explaining their thought process while they play):

https://catswhisker.xyz/log/2018/12/16/instructive_chess_you...

Genuinely curious - what makes chess such an intellectually engaging game over more "fun" games such as dota2 or StarCraft? These have all of the same Dynamics plus some. They are so dynamic, in fact, that the odds of just seeing the same "opening move" (hero picks) occur in two separate games are ridiculously low. Sure there aren't decades of documentation on the strategy and history of modern video games, but that isn't to say they aren't more complex.

Chess is not real-time, and it's intellectually very "pure" in that your ability at the game is not influenced by any ancillary skills- APM, hand-eye coordination, rapid scanning of multiple windows of screen when managing, say, multiple RTS expansions, etc. Your win or loss is never going to be driven by "I couldn't click fast enough" or "I mis-clicked in the heat of a battle".

Also, at least in my opinion, the very limited nature of the total set of states relative to the total set of states in something like an RTS lends itself to repeat engagement and analysis. You can, and likely will, see exactly the same board position in more than one chess game. You almost never going to see exactly the same game state in multiple SC games. That changes the dynamics of post-game analysis and skill development, IMO.

(Don't get me wrong, I enjoy both- but I do enjoy them differently.)

> Your win or loss is never going to be driven by "I couldn't click fast enough" or "I mis-clicked in the heat of a battle".

True with 1 exception, 1/0 (all moves in 1 minute per side) bullet, some of the really strong players at that use high end/high accuracy gaming mice because with so little time even a slight decrease in move time pays off.

I don't play anything less than 15/15 or 20/10 though and your point holds for that.

>Also, at least in my opinion, the very limited nature of the total set of states relative to the total set of states in something like an RTS lends itself to repeat engagement and analysis. You can, and likely will, see exactly the same board position in more than one chess game.

This makes it reactive, rather than proactive. Reactive judgments are driven more by depth of knowledge, habit, and memorization. Whereas proactive judgments are driven more by predictive/entrepreneurial reasoning. Both seem equally driven by calculated risk with a little psychology involved.

Ancillary skills are important in start craft, I'll give you that. But at least in DotA those skills could be learned by anyone relatively quickly. I don't play video games any more so no other examples come to mind unfortunately.

Turn-based strategy games such as the Civilization and Total War series are probably good examples to compare chess with. Aside from the potential asymmetries (which can be removed), they are both 'purer' than RTS games and less deterministic than chess. In 1v1s, they're probably a better test of predictive reasoning than chess.

Genuinely curious - what makes chess such an intellectually engaging game

I don't know, but it is very addictive. It's a 'fight to the death', but in a realm of ideas. There's a neverending amount to learn, so many different types of situation can arise in a game, so many varieties of strategy and tactics, unlimited, it seems.

I'm not sure what you mean 'these have all the same Dynamics plus some. They are so dynamic'. There is a fairly common chess variant, Chess960/Fischer Random, where the pieces are shuffled before starting, and you will rarely see the same opening move. But it hasn't taken over from normal chess, which seems the better game to most people. The opening move won't be new, but after a few moves you're in uncharted territory.

https://www.chesstactics.org/ a free online book, I learned quite a bit from it.

ChessNetwork on YouTube is an entertaining channel to help you get excited about learning more. Jerry's enthusiasm for chess is infectious.

In terms of books, Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan is a great introduction to the game and first layer of strategy, tactics, openings, etc.

John Bartholomew's "Climbing the ratings ladder" video series on YouTube is a nice entry point, obviously looking at the lower part of the ratings ladder (e.g. 1000-1500).

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

Thousands of books, hundreds of websites, millions of videos. Of course with numbers that large the quality varies a lot. Chess has been popular for a long time. To get really good requires a lot of hard study, so most people who get good end up writing a book to try to get some payback for their effort. As a result there are probably more books on chess than all other games combined.

Haha yup, that's what my cursory googling resulted in. Hopefully some HNers have traveled this path before and have some favorites... judging from replies so far, that seems to be the case.

Build up your Chess by Artur Yusopov (3 books in each level, 3 levels from novice through to master strength).

Fundamental Chess Endings (Muller and Lamprecht)

Fundamental Chess Openings (Sterren).

A good games database - The best free one is this http://caissabase.co.uk/ (It's my project so I might be biased but it is the best free one I've found, it exists because I couldn't find a great free one that was always updated at least monthly) and Chess DB software (ScidVsPC is open source).

That and playing and analyzing your own games is all you'd need (apart from a massive commitment to improvement) to get to Category A (1800-2000USCF.

If you feel like throwing in another (cheap) book I like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mammoth-Book-Chess-Books/dp/1845299... as it's a weighty dense cheap book you can throw in a bag and not care about getting beat up.

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