Chess

[98romaine]

Anyone recommend a chess strategy site for a beginner? Anything out there like 2+2?

Good book for a beginner?

Thanks...

[WhiteKnight]

www.chessgames.com
Extensive database of games with kibitzing.

Jeremy Silman's "Reassess Your Chess" seems to fairly well-regarded for the beginning/intermediate player. Alternatively, get a book of tactical problems and work your way through them.

[swingdoc]

www.chesspublishing.com - go to the forums - is pretty much exactly like 2+2, only it's far less active. The bulk of the discussions revolve around opening theory (as do the bulk of chess books really), but they have a pretty decent endgame discussion. Unfortunately, most of the stuff there requires a reasonably high base understanding of chess.

I cannot urge beginners strongly enough to start their chess study by working through Lev Alburt's Comperehensive Chess Course
Volume I

There are 7 volumes total. This will give you a great foundation to build on in every single facet of the game. If you happen to find volume I at the bookstore, browse through it. I think you'll be surprised at how completely elementary it is. This is extremely good. Americans tend to have a very hit and miss way of learning chess (because of the scarcity of chess in schools, etc) and really learning all the basics right from the beginning will save you a ton of painstaking and fruitless labor later. Just one example, I hadn't realized that memorizing the chessboard (i.e. what color is d4, what 2 diagonals does it lie on, what rank, what file?) is critical to complex play.

[-zero-]

On a related note, what are the best free and best membership sites to play on?

[swingdoc]

Best free site has to be FICS

Best membership site is either ICC or PlayChess

I think all of the above have time controls from game in 1 min to game in hour(s) plus. For correspondence chess where each person has one or more days to move, I currently use QueenAlice. I know there are a ton of other really good sites, I just don't have any personal experience with them.

[smilingbill]

suggestions so far are all good, a nice free site to work on your tactics (essential foundation for chess skill) is the Chess Tactics Server

[RoundTower]

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suggestions so far are all good, a nice free site to work on your tactics (essential foundation for chess skill) is the Chess Tactics Server

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Thanks. This is pretty cool, I didn't know about this. This could be great for your bullet chess especially because of the choice of problems (i.e. sometimes there is no trick you just have to play the obvious move quickly and be sure it is best).

[clowntable]

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I cannot urge beginners strongly enough to start their chess study by working through Lev Alburt's Comperehensive Chess Course


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I'd like to add here that one should never judge a book by its cover [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[dandy_don]

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone recommend a chess strategy site for a beginner? Anything out there like 2+2?

Good book for a beginner?

Thanks...


[/ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
On a related note, what are the best free and best membership sites to play on?

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but I recently purchased a copy of Chessmaster, 10th Edition and it has a huge arsenal of learning tools as well as an "Online Play" section that goes through the Ubisoft website.

I'm still in the kiddie pool when it comes to chess and have yet to venture over to the online arena, but this has to be one of the best tools out there for learning chess--someone else will have to rate the online games.

You can download a small portion of the game from Yahoo games for a trial session, but the CD (actually 3 CD set) has so much more including an "Academy" that is narrated by Josh Waitzkin and Larry Christiansen; a database of "Famous Games" in history; a "Training" mode; and again an online arena.

If you can spare +/-$20.00 (I paid $17.33 shipping and all from one of the "New and Used" suppliers off Amazon called "select2go"), it's well worth it. Here is a link to the CD on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/UBI-Soft-Chessmast...5087&sr=8-1

dandy

[-zero-]

Thanks Dandy, looking into it now.