Good luck!
My colleague from another time zone struggled to recommend a book for my level and kinda laughed (albeit politely). But now we can play a quick game in our work breaks online. Thank You Lichess! canned applause
Edit: DO THE PUZZLES!!! (sorry, tired)
The rating of the computer on Lichess is also kinda weird, you can't really rely on those. I'm a pretty weak player (I have only played a bit online recently), I did beat the level 3 computer on Lichess when I concentrated well enough on a game, but I'm certainly not 1400 against real humans.
I too have noticed the blunders. What is the first level where you estimate it plays consistently?
Playing against humans, even significantly stronger ones, is so much more fun and rewarding. It's just way more exciting when both sides can capitalize on smaller mistakes, so the game becomes about building and maintaining an advantage. Or setting up a tactic that feels great to pull off.
The computers will usually not yield any incremental advances at all (and they won't fall for tactics) until they make a dumb move that invalidates all the advantage they built up. Whether you win or lose depends mainly on how often the latter happens, and learning how to make that happen is both opaque/unfun and useless for playing against humans.
The computer will be able to find optimal plays that require looking ahead several turns ahead while blundering obvious moves (e.g. capturing a piece that's clearly hanging after you used that same piece to capture their piece). Or they'll constantly move the same piece over and over again.
I would compare it as: lichess - best move, best move, best move, completely random move that does absolutely nothing chess.com - best move, good move, best move, blunder that seems patronizing given previous moves
I've only played a handful of games against real people online, but those games weren't anything like either lichess or chess.com's computer players.
Some subjects in the 20 or 25 chapters are: Time management, the more time you spend at a move, the less merit there is, while that time might be important in the endgame. There is a chapter about chess as a game of chance, like, you play a tournament and make 5 out of 9. Next year at the same tournament, you make 4 out of 9. Did you play worse? You might think so and rationalize that thought to become some truth to you, but really, it is just one game that might have been decided by one move. The same for winning or losing rating points, which can be a plus or a minus based on just 1 game difference, that doesn't make your last 3 months bad or good.
Book recommendations are always welcome. I'll usually check out anything that's 200 or so pages. My days of reading 1000 page books of small print on cheap paper however are over.
Mostly it was not helping to improve at my level at all, they were sort of pointless exercises in my level. What helped were chess king exercises apps where you solve simple situations that are not even puzzles.
But they are common in game and made you start noticing opportunities and own mistakes in game. E.g. at super beginner level, you improve a lot.
Honestly the puzzles on chess.com are better than lichess. The lichess ones just seem to have limited scope, I'm not sure why.
That said the interface is good and if you're finding them too easy then your puzzle rating should be rising to the point where it's offering you puzzles you'll find more challenging.
I'm at 2100 puzzle and they seem to sort of level off.
Over the years I've been bitten for weeks at a time by a bug that fetches a batch of puzzles at a time on mobile, and then loops through those 50 puzzles repeatedly instead of fetching more.
Even when not bugged, this behavior of 'fetch N puzzles at once' heavily encourages rating ping pong, you get a batch of easy puzzles, get them all right so your rating jumps more than it should, then a batch of hard puzzles and get crushed. I found I only ever progressed on lichess after grinding meaningful improvement slowly on chess.com, then coming back to lichess to 'catch up my rating'.
I also quite like Chess.com's Puzzle Rush.
I really need to take a look at the source code, I'm sure I would learn a lot.
To each their own, though.
It is good once in a while to get the feeling of getting better at a game by putting in some time and effort. Scrabble looks like just the thing for someone who finds chess too abstract and deterministic.
Could you point me to where/how I can do this? It is definitely something I'd like to see! Thanks
https://lichess.org/insights/atabotix/acpl/variant ^^^^^^^^ user name