Chess

[PurpleLight]

One of the most important things to learn when you're beginning is tactics, namely the various tactical operations such as forks, pins, skewers, discovered checks etc.

I think this tactical strength applies universally right from the very beginning level all the way to the very top. A really good book if you are first starting out is "Winning Chess Tactics" by Yasser Sierawan.

I also think if you're serious about learning getting a membership on a site like ICC for 50 bucks a year is pretty clutch.

After you learn basic tactics and start to develop more sophisticated thought on the game, play standard time controls (15 minutes+) only and analyze every game after you play it in chessbase with or without an engine to help and if you work hard like this it should make a fairly big difference fairly quickly.

[dandy_don]

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Thanks Dandy, looking into it now.

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My pleasure.

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One of the most important things to learn when you're beginning is tactics, namely the various tactical operations such as forks, pins, skewers, discovered checks etc.

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FWIW, the "Academy" section of the Chessmaster game has a lengthy exercise on the practice of finding "forks, pins, skewers, discovered checks etc.". Also, this site does this as well.

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I also think if you're serious about learning getting a membership on a site like ICC for 50 bucks a year is pretty clutch.

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I'll look into it. Thanks.

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...analyze every game after you play it in chessbase

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The Chessmaster game has this function as well, but I hate to run it because it's depressing hearing how bad I played [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img].

dandy

[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).

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By this I didn't mean anything about the level of the problems really.

My most important chess teacher used to say "imagine the position had a box around it on the back page of the newspaper, you'd definitely find the right move. So why miss it over the board?". But that's partly because in the newspaper you are expecting a clever or beautiful trick. If you do that in these positions you will end up going wtf in the likes of this one, and lose valuable time.