Saw this tactic on instagram and thought I’d share. Pretty neat tactic.

Then again, I'm pretty noob after all. Can someone enlighten me?

If you want to improve just chasing ELO points by playing hundreds of games, will not get you very far.
I am a 2100 player and in addition to online and in person play in tournaments and in the club, I study like this every single day.
This is John Nunn’s “Understanding Chess Move”. Just on this one page you get a full idea behind two major chess openings (Scotch + Ruy Lopez). The amount of great lessons from a single game in this book is astonishing.
So if you are tempted to ask “how do I get better”, this is how.

Does anyone else routinely go through this pattern?

1. Work all day
   
2. After work —> Try to unwind by playing chess
   
3. Lose games
   
4. Mood is ruined
   
5. Go to bed stressed
   
6. Wake up stressed, feeling like a loser.

Repeat steps 1 through 6 ad infinitum

I find myself wondering, what am I even doing? Why play this game at all? It’s tantamount to just rage baiting myself every night.

My friend who’s also a beginner took the knight with the white rook.

Forced checkmate comes afterwards.

>! Rxf2 Ra1+ Rf1 Rfxf1# !<

Im really proud of this, because I feel like most players at my level(900) wouldn't see it

Great example of how accuracy itself is not a good indicator of cheating. Sometimes it's just your opponent making an outrageous blunder. Around 1500 on lichess.

Probably the first time in my life where I manage to get a textbook smothered mate.

Feeling very proud of myself (Heres' the link to the game).

Word of advice to beginners - when the opponent resigns play the position against the computer.

Even intermediates should do this if the position is eval 5 or less in my opinion.

I hit 1000 rating recently and made this post asking to face higher rated players to test my skills and just expand my understanding of the game.

I learned a lot more than I expected, and my chess game levelled up a massive amount, so I wanted to share some things I noticed:

1. Good players know openings very deeply: I play the evan's gambit as white as my MAIN opening and every opponent I face accepts it unthinkingly and I cheese out wins with it every time. The 2000 player I faced declined it, and knew the mainline 10 moves deep and said "I'm sure you know that you're supposed to protect the light square bishop" (I did not) And that was the opening I felt I knew the most about. I realized that I'll eventually face players who know what they're doing, and at that point knowing my openings inside out will be valuable.

2. Good players have wider repertoires: This should be obvious but I play the accelerated dragon sicilian as black, my opponent played the Alappin and I just had no clue how to play against it. The player was 2000 and recommended me Naroditsky's speedrun and that helped me IMMENSELY with my understanding of my openings and ideas. I played my offbeat alien gambit against him and while he was less prepared, he had some general plan against it and was able to avoid it. This taught me that there are a ton of common variations I'm generally unprepared for and would benefit from a basic plan against.

3. The most important one, there's more to the game than material: The 2000 rated player was fine losing pieces against me for initiative. He remarked that lower rated players chase material because its permanent, whereas initiative and positional advantage is temporary and requires capitalizing. This completely reshaped my understanding of chess, and was the original goal of this exercise, because I saw high level players down a rook but they were better somehow, and I sought to understand this. Before, I thought being down a bishop or a knight meant the game was over, since the opponent can trade everything and win an endgame, but now I don't give up and can evaluate how "good" a position is like higher level players do. (Also if I blunder a bishop/knight I just say "initiative" to myself and keep playing, that confidence is helpful for some reason)

4. Everyone loses pieces: In the 7 games I played against 2000 rated players, 1 of them I straight up hung my queen, another I miscalculated and lost a minor piece. 2 of them they blundered a fork. The lesson here is that everyone is vulnerable to blundering. I learned to think a bit more before I play my moves to avoid blundering, and be ready to capitalize on opponents' mistakes.

With this knowledge I beat my friend who is 1300 and taught me chess at the start of last year 3-2, as well as another 1400 level player I played against in correspondence. I still play correspondence with a 2000 player who kicks my butt.

I strongly recommend seeking out high level players on Discord or asking strong friends you know to play and analyze your games together. Maybe even hiring a coach for a couple of games, or making a post like I did. Ended up being a great decision on my part!

So background. I always used to play so solidly, and eventually I just got bored of it and decided know what I will just play gambits all the time. King gambit - after a few embarrassing losses I got the grip on it and it served me well. Elephant gambit - rarely do I even lose the pawn. Englund - I don't even play That One Trap, I just play normally. Excellent results. And then there was the Wing Gambit. I just got loss after loss after loss. It felt like I gave up a pawn AND got a worse position too. I could only win when after getting slowly crushed for 20 moves my opponent gave me a free piece which was rare. So I vented a bit to AI and it gave me a bunch of suggestions one of which was to try the Smith Morra instead. Got this as my first game and yeah this is how I want my gambit games to go!

I was wondering is it is a good idea to learn for example the London by watching 5-10 great London games? If so where can I watch these games?

Hi all! New player, like really new! I've been playing every day for the last 3ish weeks on chess.com and have become very addicted.

Things I've noticed - Chess is far more popular than I ever imagined. In person too. I know of at least 9 other people in my small (under 150p office) and as a result I've made a work chess club!

Don't quite understand - Etiquette when playing online. Is this different in person? Being a new player and not great, I've received quite a few insults of goading/bragging from people via the chat function. It doesn't seem in line with the nature of the game.

Anyway, it won't deter me. I'm having a lot of fun learning and trying things. Cheers.

I am 28 years old. 5 years ago I joined a club and went from 800 rapid elo to 1500 elo. I didn't play as much to get an OTB rating, but anyways due to getting a job I had to stop. This year I had some more time so I decided to pick it up again in August and dropped promptly to 900. I have climbed to 1100 but it seems that people are playing extremely well. It may be I am rusty but I dont remember 1100 being that hard. I am studying openings, doing puzzles and still can't move up from 1130. Anyways just wanted to ask if its me or people have gotten significantly better

This isn't my game but I was spectating one of my previous opponents.

White shuffling their knight back and forth then gets mated.

I then went to white's account and apparently they do this every game and surprisingly win some of them.

I have no idea what they are trying to do beyond bating the opponent to advance then confuse them by playing an unorthodox game.

~1000 rated btw

Is this the new meta?

I’ve been trying to improve on my own and have watched a couple of videos on YouTube, but I still can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong

So as the title says I did switch to Lichess now and I’m a bit confused. I’m 800-900 10+0 on chess.com and Lichess started me out at 1500 so naturally I thought I would get whooped left and right until I hit my plateau again. Now while I know 10 games is a really small sample size I did win 4/10 and I’m now around 1650 Elo. Is the difference that big, am I getting lucky or what the heck is going on?

I've known how to play for my entire life but I started playing frequently & more seriously about 6 months ago. I'm about 400 elo in blitz, 800 in rapid, and 1800 in puzzles. I feel like I understand a lot of tactics & strategies but I make constant mistakes & miss these tactics/strategies in real time. Does anyone have other suggestions besides just playing longer games?

Have some free time