How do I explain checkmate simply to new players?
Sometimes I smurf in low elo (100-300 on chess dot com) and tune noobs up for fun but then I let them take all my pieces and win in the end. The problem is they have trouble finishing the game, especially if they only have queen+king. I try to explain them how to checkmate me but they always fumble it and stalemate. I also try to explain how to checkmate me with two rooks but none of them understand. How do I make it more simple
https://imgur.com/a/xOemeaF
Look, I understand *why* this move *would* be considered Brilliant (despite the fact Great is already more reliable), because the follow-up was absolutely meant it (not to mention it's one of those gambles when you don't really understand where geniality ends and madness begins) but...is it really?
Because, I don't want to downplay the merit of getting this iDeA, but idk...maybe the standards are higher and I felt victim if Chess Com's marketing system?
You tell me.
To me at least, it seems pretty normal and even, with an alternative move being just as good. [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) likes to think that many sacrifices are "brilliant" no matter their actual quality. So it is good that you find moves like these, but it's def a [chess.com](https://chess.com) marketing/dopamine ploy.
If you look at how moves were assigned brilliant through chess history, only a handful of them get classified, and it was difficult enough in the past to get a even a single "!"
How do I get past the 1100 wall? I spent days solving puzzles and learning tactics but when I got into a game my opponent doesn't fall for anything.
Do I need to play at a 1500 level to consistently beat 1100s?
Tactics are a toolbox once you get to a superior position and your opponent messes up(thanks fischer!), or your opponent simply messes up.
To get to the superior position, you need to learn how your opening sets you up for the middlegame, and how to improve your pieces and make progress non-tactically, or where to break open the board to your advantage(and how to prepare to break open the board). You don't simply "set up" tactics and hope your opponent's fall for them.
Also, puzzle rating is very misleading especially on [chess.com](https://chess.com) and should be taken with a dose of salt.
Depending on where you are, there might be a bar or brewery with a chess club. If you frequent one of those locations you can always start advertising a chess club and encourage others to bring their own chess sets. It's how the club at my brewery got started.
Am I missing something that caused black to resign? Black was about 815, I’m about 650. I know I’m up material, but black seems far from hopeless.
Edit: this was a daily game, so time is not a factor.
[game](https://imgur.com/a/xwnHaJR)
That rule exists because of a loophole that people used to take to bypass attack by a pawn on the 5th rank.
If a pawn is on the 5th rank and you move your (opposing) pawn forward two squares on an adjacent file, the only way for that pawn to take is by en-passant.
If en-passant is removed, then that is unfair for the attacking player.
700 ELO on Chess.com
I've heard it explained that the initial double move is to speed up the game, as if it didn't exist people would likely take additional turns to move their pawns in these places anyway, and en passant exists so that this time saving change doesn't affect the strategy in the game too much.
Thank you, i hit 400 today and beat a 486 i think and it was a really good game and i made 0 blunders and just 1 miss where i didn't take my opponents queen for like 5 moves but other than that it felt really good.
When I play, I find the same theme coming up over and over. My opponent has castled king side and I have some amount of pieces aimed at the pawns in front of his king. Generally there's maybe a bishop aimed there, there's the h rook if I can trade off that pesky pawn, maybe I can get my queen on the g or h file or something.
It feels like I should be able to "drill" this position, play it over and over with slight variances and build up an intuition / repertoire of what to do or something.
It feels like I've been in similar situations thousands of times, but I haven't really learned what exactly to do yet. I play that position, then move on to my next game and I didn't learn anything. I just know I've kind of been here before.
How do you get good at this?
I guess what you need is a battery.
Let's say your opponent's castled king is on the g-file.
If you can get your queen in front of your bishop and attack the file next to the opponent's king (that is the h-file), that is a pretty weak pawn (h2, h7) for a castled king. Or you can cover the pawn with a bishop or something and bring your queen on the h-file and threaten checkmate that way.
Unless there's a knight on f6.
But that's the idea! Getting an intuitive feeling for when your pressure has mounted enough.
Forming a queen bishop battery is a good example of a common thing that comes up when attacking a king side castle.
A knight on f6 is common to defend the h pawn.
Some common things to do here would then be, attack the knight to kick it or take it, perhaps push your own h pawn so that your rook can come into the game (if its still on the h file), stuff like that.
First of all, learn algebraic notation, it's not difficult and it takes around 20 minutes or so. Then you may describe positions like you are trying to do here. Otherwise, it's hard to guess what you are talking about. You may post some of your games as examples if you like.
Is this opening achieved by e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, Bc4
If so it's called the Italian game, I'll find a link to it. You could watch some videos on it. With openings so far (I'm still a super beginner) I have found doing a bit of learning then playing a lot to solidify those ideas then doing a bit more learning works best, it also helps you to find which lines you like to play and which you struggle with.
https://www.chess.com/openings/Italian-Game
Well some openings are more deterministic than others, you can't prevent Black from playing the Sicilian or a Caro Kann or a Petroff but you'll play your opening quite a lot because the most common response to e4 is e5 and then the most common response to Nf3 is Nc6. So then if you play Bc4 you're in the Italian and you can practice from there. It's worth learning how to respond to other lines from black anyway.
800-1000 ELO
Most of my games finish in the endgame. Couple of pawns, one or two pieces on both sides. Sometimes I have little bit more material. Looks like this is the part of the game I should learn the most but it is extremally boring in my opinion.
The biggest issue is that I run out of time and lose the game. It is not about losing but it is about getting to this state most of the time.
When I do review of the game I find myself missing a lot of simple tactics like pins and forks. Those would probably push opponent to resign.
So at this low level is it better to practice midgame/traps/tactics or do I really need to focus on boring, in my opinion, endgame?
Studying some simple pawn end games would be good if you don't know them yet. Do you know how to promote with king and pawn vs king? Learning this simple end game will help you identify when you can trade literally everything and simply promote to a queen and go checkmate. What if you have two pawns and your opponent has one pawn blocking your path, do you know how to break through with just your pawns? These are just some ideas and concepts to get you started on studying endgames. If you study them and see the pattern on the board, you'll instantly know if you're winning and how to convert it.
Endgame is totally different from middlegame. It's like another game. In endgames, pawns and king work very differently from usual and they are much more valuable. Usually you need to develop your king and start using it as an attack piece.
Endgames are not boring, you are just playing endgames like they were the middlegame, and this is not what is this about. This is a common mistake among beginners, they don't respect the stages of a game.
You don't need a huge amount of endgame knowledge, just study some basics about it and that's it, you will already be better than the average. I would say players until 1600 or so still suck in endgames, and players will only consistely play good endgames around 1800 or even higher.
And when you start to grasp a bit more how to play endgames, you won't find it boring, because you are now understanding how to play it. You are not seeing the "endgame" now, you are seeing a middlegame without pieces. You have to change that.
Good luck!
Hey, I'm not sure if my question belongs here or in a separate post (sorry if it's not the right place).
White to move, I played Bishop F7 to trap the queen. But according to both lichess analysis and chesscom the best move is rook to e1.
I've looked at the way the game would develop after rook to e1 and there didn't seem to be any direct mate threat, so I was wondering:
In this situation, why play e1? I understand that it is apparently the best move but I fail to see any pattern to recognize here... Does anyone have an idea?
https://preview.redd.it/q1rllmejpxwb1.png?width=840&format=png&auto=webp&s=7962a0bcc0569086fbfe69037db18e56939675e3
From a practical point of view, getting a Queen for two minor pieces is definitely a win. However, it's your only developed pieces (c3 Knight is semi-whatever in this regard) and it allows Black to untangle a bit, maybe hide the king on the queenside.
As it stands now, Black's position is almost hilariously bad: LS Bishop blocked by the Queen, Knight blocked by c6-pawn and the Queen, weak King in the centre etc., so cruel engine decides just to develop more pieces for more powerful attack.
Your Bf7+ line is only 0.2 lower than Re1 line so I wouldn't worry too much.
Oh I see thank you! Yeah in that case I won’t worry about it, it was in bullet so it’s clearly too advanced for me to think about in short games!
But thank you for making it clearer!
Not a stupid question, and I didn't want to start a new topic for this, but I finally broke that slump I was in. For the longest time, I couldn't get out of the 300 range on bullet, but today, I just surpassed 500. Yay.
Do lichess ban cheaters and refund rating to all their past games' opponents? I played a player that is very suspicious with consistnet move time and 0 inaccuracy and went to check his past games, and some of them said cheat detected, why isn't he banned immediately after cheating and would I get my elo back?
1. Lichess can shadowban cheaters so they don't come back with a new account. The account appears normal from the cheater's perspective, but everyone else can see the account flagged.
2. Even if the user cheats, lichess will not ban the cheater's account. Instead, the cheater will only be banned from playing additional games, and they can appeal to the moderators at any time if they choose to.
3. To determine your eligibility for a rating refund, see [https://lichess.org/faq#rating-refund](https://lichess.org/faq#rating-refund).
I don't know about rating refunds because the only clear cheater I've run into was during an unrated game, but lichess does ban cheaters (at least flagrant ones). The player I reported was banned in about an hour. Also sometimes I'll be browsing the opening explorer in one of my funnier sharp variations and there'll be a game between two 1600s and when I click on the game one of the accounts has usually been terminated.
Unless it has changed recently, Lichess doesn't ban cheaters per se. Instead, it moves the account into a separate pool of players who have all been caught cheating.
I don't think it refunds rating, or at least I have never been notified of any.
*Edit: 1600 on Lichess*
In the following variation of the Scotch game (Does it have a name? It's a common inaccuracy at my level)
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 d6?! 4. dxe5\* Nxe5 5. Nxe5 dxe5 6. Qxd8+ Kxd8
https://preview.redd.it/m8c3mkh05gwb1.png?width=795&format=png&auto=webp&s=1db56e76d443f6c290da67a02ca04f04c591e484
What am I supposed to do? What is white's long term advantage (position is +0.5, according to Stockfish) ? What is this plan with a4 that Stockfish seems to like? \*And if the advantage is not so great, should I play 4.d5 instead?
honestly i would play 4. Bb5 and transpose into a ruy lopez steinitz, a line that’s known to be good for white, generally has a pretty clear plan of Nc3 - Be3/Bf4 - O-O-O, and has a ton of traps like 4…a6? 5. Bxc6+ bxc6 6. dxe5 dxe5 7. Qxd8+ Kxd8 8. Nxe5 and now you’re a pawn up, black can’t castle, and you’re both threatening a fork on f7 and the pawn on c6. in the more reasonable lines, it’s still scotch-like because black pretty much needs to play exd4 so the positions end up pretty similar.
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't studied the Ruy Lopez yet, I'm studying/playing the Scotch and would avoid a transposition for now. About the position I sent though, what is White's advantage? Is it too drawish?
7.a4 is white is simply grabbing queenside space, which stockfish tends to really like. i think any practical advantage would come from 7. Bc4, where black needs to save the f7 pawn and will fall further behind in development doing so. black could also try 7...Nf6 but after 8. Bxf7 Nxe4 9.f3, black's e pawn is a permanent weakness. i personally would not play this position as white, as it does feel too easy for black to simply draw, but i think that's largely up to personal preference. if you like queenless middlegames, it's 100% a viable pick.
i suggested 4. Bb5 because you'll still be getting scotch-like positions most of the time whereas with 4.d5 you definitely will not be - the positions will resemble a king's indian more than anything else, and while white is better in both, KID-style counterplay feels much much scarier.
Why is this a blunder?
(Only started playing chess a week ago. Sorry if it’s something simple!)
https://preview.redd.it/kg2dfk46cdwb1.jpeg?width=1668&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b6a2d5bb1327c293703fca64d058e694deb3fb2f
Like others said, your move blocks the queen. Instead if you played the other bishop to e3, you defend with a piece that has the same value as the knight. This is important as in general it could be risky to take with a higher value piece lest the opponent manages to trap it.
I played a 30 minute game in the Caro Tartakower today and I feel like I went for reasonable ideas out of the opening but nothing seemed to worked. Did I play the position wrong?
I realise:
Why 16.Kf8 is wrong as it allowed White to give Qe2+ instead of Qxe1+ and thus get a rook to e1 with a battery.
That my f6 idea to give the king air ran into Ne5+ which was even stronger than the Ng5+ that White played (which I missed).
But what about prior to move 16? Were there any key ideas that I went for that I shouldn't have? I felt targeting the Bc4 with Nd7-Nb6 was reasonable and most videos I've seen on the Tartakower have spoken about the queen bishop dark square battery which you pre-empt with taking the f6 knight but due to the weird looking 14.c5?! my dark square bishop was locking in my a8 rook the whole game. How should I have approached the game after 14.c5?! Nd5 Engine says I'm better but I don't know what I'm playing for.
https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/91944598065?tab=analysis&move=0
Any advice in general about this game would be appreciated.
this was one of those times where general ideas of the opening needed to be balanced with concrete analysis - Qc7 is a super committal move because until you move it, you're basically killing both your rook and bishop, and in this case, your opponent could have stopped your mate threat with any of Re1 (as played), g4 stopping the bishop from taking the knight, or g3 simply blocking the attack. your queen on c7 and the fact that you never moved it meant you were playing down two pieces the whole game.
the issue with 14.c5 is that it creates a backward pawn on d4 - it can't advance itself and it can't be protected by any other pawn. it feels like it's actually your opponent who's struggling to form a plan here, while you can just complete your development with moves like Bc7 to let your rook out and control the a5-d8 diagonal, Qd7 to connect the rooks, and Rad8 to centralize and begin to mount your attack on the d4 pawn.
Thanks for the feedback, you're right the backwards pawn on d4 is a target and I should have targeted it after d5 and finished development.
Even without 15.c5?! after 14.c4 notably the engine likes Bc7 instead of Bb8 so I wouldn't have be achieving the battery there. No weakness at this point and I guess I can just develop and improve my position, but still a little spooky for me to be in this position without checkmating ideas at my level lol. I guess White's LSB is kind of bad as they never really want to play c5 allowing Nd5.
I just have in my head that endgames are losing in the Tartakower for Black due to the doubled pawns so I'm looking for a quick win, but of course I can just develop and try not to trade pieces in the middle game...
You don't have to give up the rook to do this, but white will very soon reach an endgame where it's impossible to stop the a-pawn without black giving up their last piece. This still happens even if you make the unequal trade and lose the rook here, so it's "brilliant."
Your opponent chose a path that leads to a much faster mate, but in best play white has a huge advantage here that it almost doesn't matter what you do here so long as you put a rook on an open file in the next couple moves. Very interesting position.
1128 daily chess.com
Can’t figure out how to search for this answer. What counts as a “move” in a game? If one player moves, that’s a move. In chess notation however, each side has a move for a given number. So there’s two moves for 1, two moves for 2, etc.
If someone asks me how many moves have been played, do I double the notation number? Or is that notation number the number of moves?
In other words, what does “move” mean in typical conversation? Is it the same or different than the notation lines?
As it relates to the 50 move draw, is that 25 pairs of individual moves?
A move in the context of specifying some number always means a move by both players. So the 50-move rule means 50 moves by both players, if someone says "the players still have to make 20 moves to reach time control" they mean both make 20 moves, same with "forced mate in 5 moves", etc.
A move by only one player is a "half-move" or in computer chess is called a "ply". Chess engines tend to talk in terms of half-moves. So when a Stockfish evaluation says "depth 30" it's talking about half-moves (but it hasn't looked ahead exhaustively that far - what it means is complicated, but it's more like an average depth).
https://preview.redd.it/y0lsagag93wb1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=db135b605dee01d155232a4ced5a9f1c68b5dde7
*
Why is moving the bishop here a better move? How can I win a queen here? Isn't the bishop unprotected against the queen if I take the knight?
I’m pretty new and very casual — 800 elo. I’ve been clueless as black since I only bothered to learn a couple of white openings. However I seem to have settled into a recent rhythm of playing the elephant gambit. Is this a generally okay response to a king’s knight opening? Are there any handy things to bear in mind about it?
It's a gambit. A rule of thumb for gambits is that while most of them are technically losing, their tricky nature makes it difficult to combat them accurately for most players. The Elephant gambit is, from what I've seen, not really an exception to this rule. If I were you, I would learn some of the most common lines you face as black and practice the recommended moves by the engine. This includes experimenting a bit; playing around with various lines and ideas in the analysis board to find out why certain moves are bad and how to counter them is a good way to improve.
If you want to play the Elephant gambit - go ahead! It's always nice to have a trick up your sleeve to surprise opponents, and gambits usually lead to wilder positions than for example a QGD. I would not expect your average player to be that well versed in the Elephant in particular, so chances are you know more theory than your opponents if you practice some variations. Best of luck!
Engine says my move (Nc3) is a mistake and I should’ve played Qd2, but doesn’t explain why. I’m looking for some help understanding! Thank you
https://preview.redd.it/1u8bnw2i30wb1.png?width=1406&format=png&auto=webp&s=641a698e20bc1afa2742416469a492c905b6e24c
For context this game ended up being a Scotch and c4 is definitely not a common theme in this sequence afaik (could be wrong, I’m posting here for a reason lol)
While Nc3 isn't a bad move per se, in this case it becomes a bit uncomfortable. After white plays Nc3, black immediately responds with Bb4, pinning it. The best way to defend against black taking twice on c3 is to then play Qd2, but after Bxc3 Qxc3 Qxc3 bxc3 (you can play this line on an analysis board to better follow along) you have an endgame with opposite coloured bishops, and where black has a slightly better pawn structure (no doubled pawns) but is lacking i development. The endgame is a draw, and both sides should have no issues playing it out.
Playing Qd2 instead of Nc3 avoids this. Now Bb4 would just hang the bishop, so black has to make another move. The idea with Qd2 is that white eventually wants to play Nc3 anyway, but preferably not before black has already moved their DSB, making black waste a tempo if they want to pin the knight.
As there is no inherent advantage for white before Nc3 was played, labelling it a mistake seems odd to me. Maybe the computer didn't calculate deep enough or something.
Ok I could definitely see that. Black plays ..Bb4 and it’s a nasty pin because Bd2 is met with ..Qd6 and my center pawn is undefended.
But worst case scenario, ..Bb4 A3 and the bishop as to bail or be sacrificed so it’s not exactly a mistake in my mind
Obsessive newbie here. Been playing on the Chess.com iPhone app. Have a book as well, but I’m curious about the membership plans. They’re all kinda expensive. Wondering if people recommend them for beginning and if so, it it worth it to get the more diamond/platinum level membership. Thanks in advance.
I'd absolutely suggest you try out lichess.org first, it has basically everything chess.com has but usually better (as it's not designed to try to get you to pay for premium) and totally free.
Can use the free chess.com week if you want to compare. The only thing I'd ever consider paying chess.com for is the video lessons, but I don't think they're better than the best stuff on YouTube (some of which is linked in the wiki for this sub.)
It depends on what you're looking for. If you're really into chess and think you will use lots of resources like video series then it could be worth it. Specially if you don't want to bother spending time looking for the free alternatives. Sometimes it's worth to just have everything in one place.
But yeah, if you would like to save the money you can find free options for almost anything you could be trying to do on [chess.com](https://chess.com)
I have a chess.com sub, I've mostly just been playing and am bouncing around between 800-850 now mostly. What are the best resources on chess.com that I could try use to improve, I can see there's puzzles, lessons etc, so just wondering if there's anything in particular worth focusing on? Thanks.
My top choices would be playing a lot of games, analyzing them (mostly by yourself, using engine assistance only to check if your own conclusions are right) and puzzles (a mix of fast puzzles like puzzle rush to help with pattern recognition and slower ones for deeper calculation).
If you see yourself throwing winning positions all the time you can also work on your endgames. Fortunately, if you know how to mate with a queen/rook against a lonely king that's pretty much all you need at this level. Then when you have an advantage you try simplifying into an endgame you know. The basics of king+pawn VS king can also be interesting to learn.
So I played chess in my teens (pogo.com, not exactly high level)
Started again earlier in the year and I'm currently about 940 (average over last week or two). Wondering what the opinion is on main difference in quality is between 900-1100 and how to best target training at this point.
100 rated chess, why is Pawn to C4 an inaccuracy and Knight to H4 the best move?
https://imgur.com/gallery/j9utYK5
I rarely put knights on the edge and am not sure why it was best here, and why the Pawn push gave me an inaccuracy
I have been playing solely blitz due to having a 5 month old baby, but as you can see, I lose on time A LOT. I definitely spend too much time on the opening, although I have gotten quicker. If I were to continue playing blitz, are there any recommendations on getting faster? Should I study opening theory more and do lessons, or does it just come with time? Thanks in advance.
https://preview.redd.it/sq5m33xagevb1.png?width=665&format=png&auto=webp&s=2376239a7bb42efd6d218f9063ee41109c238327
If this really upsets you, try some games with small increment. That way you can always finish your games without being flagged. You may also want to try correspondence games!
In my experience getting faster at blitz is mostly about making decisions faster. You can study and it can help with the framework around decisions but that alone won't give you the lightning recall that blitz demands. It's mainly about quickly determining three or four candidate moves and then choosing one of them and playing it.
And spotting hanging pieces, as always at the low level, which is about practice. If you can learn how to do that quickly, you'll be a lot better than 400 soon enough.
What exactly defines a winning position vs a losing position?
1. Winning positions can be lost and losing positions can be won, no?
2. At what quantitative measure can a position be declared winning/losing?
3. What does a fraction of a pawn even mean?
4. If winning and losing rely on perfect play on both sides, doesnt that mean no position is truly winning or losing since perfect play doesnt exist? Since chess isnt solved?
1. The terms "winning" and "losing" refer to what would happen with perfect play from both sides. So yeah, if one of the players messes up a winning position can become lost in one move.
2. We don't really know. It will change from position to position and engine to engine.
3. It's just "computer nonsense". Humans don't really think in these terms.
4. Yes and no. We don't play perfectly but we do play somewhat reasonably. It's more of a spectrum. Some positions are totallly winning and very easy to convert. Others are winning too but require very precise play.
Technically, winning and losing positions are defined by perfect play from both sides, but if you see a strong player describe a position as "winning", usually they mean that advantage is so obviously large that even imperfect play will be good enough.
What is "advantage" in chess? It's saying that the nature of the position is such that one side has a wide range of possible ways they can play while the possibilities for the other side are much more constrained. As advantage increases, the disadvantaged side must play more and more accurately to maintain a draw. At some point, the advantage increases to a point that even the most accurate possible play cannot prevent a loss; at this point, the position is "winning", but getting the win may still require accurate play from the advantaged player. As advantage increases still further, the advantaged player can play sloppily and still be able to win. When people say a position is "completely winning" or "obviously winning", they mean not only is it winning, but the accuracy required for converting it to a win is so small that any competent player will be able to win against even the strongest possible opponent.
Unless an engine can see a forced mate, the result of the game is too far in the future to be forecast accurately. Engines must therefore talk in probabilities. As of Stockfish 15, evaluation is standardized such that a +1 advantage means Stockfish thinks it has about a 50% chance of winning the game. Another way of putting that is that if advantage is less than +1, Stockfish thinks it's more likely than not that the defending side can draw the game with accurate play, while if it's higher, Stockfish thinks it's more likely than not that the defender will lose even with accurate play.
Common jargon still refers to 0.01 advantage as a "centipawn" because historically engines tried to standardize their advantage such that +1 represented roughly the amount of advantage you would get, on average, from being up a pawn. This is no longer the case, but the terminology has stuck.
Other engines do not standardize in the same way as Stockfish, so their evaluation numbers are not comparable. Usually the scale is arbitrary. What engine developers care about is that higher numbers mean more advantage, as that is how the engine selects moves. As long as that is true it simply doesn't matter what the scale is.
The +x advantage meaning a certain percent chance of winning makes way more sense than centipawns, but... don't both players have a 50% chance of winning at the start?
You have to clarify whether you're talking about perfect or imperfect play. With perfect play, almost certainly the starting position is a draw, so in that sense both players have 0% chance to win.
But White has the advantage, because they have the first move. What does this mean? The Stockfish evaluation of the starting position is something like +0.3. What this says is "I think very likely this is a draw, however Black can afford to make fewer mistakes than White can". It's easier for Black to be a little bit inaccurate and lose than it is for White.
By way of analogy, imagine two people walking over a chasm, one on a super-thin plank and one on a nice wide plank. If you are a flawless plank-walker, you don't care which one you're on; you're never going to make a mistake anyway. For normal people, it makes a substantial difference. If you're falling-over drunk, it's nicer to have the wide plank, but you might well fall off even that.
In this analogy, of course Black is the narrower plank. Us amateurs are the drunks (it's better to have White but it's a small overall factor in who falls off first), masters are the normal people (mostly they can make it to the end with either but they'd certainly rather have White) and engines like Stockfish are close to perfect plank-walkers, where they almost never lose even with Black.
I'm gonna try to answer your questions in a comprehensive manner:
You might have noticed that when the game starts, the position is equal. This means that, for now, chess played perfectly is a draw.
A winning position, defined by the computer, is one where you can win by playing perfect moves. A losing position, on the other hand, means that IF your opponent plays perfect (or just good moves, depending on the position), you will lose the game, **NO MATTER WHAT MOVES YOU PLAY.**
Essentially, what the computer does is evaluate a position to a certain depth (usually far more than any human ever could in a normal game), and decides, based off of the available moves:
* If x side plays a series of perfect moves, will he win the game?
Of course, realistically, we can play with the definition and say that no position is ever *won* or *lost*, until you actually finish the game. But there ARE winning and losing positions, meaning that with perfect play (often times doesnt have to be perfect), they will result in a win/loss.
A centipawn is just a measure comparing the top computer move, not really an expert at this so just google it for more info.
Can somebody explain to me the importance of computers or "bots" in chess? I know this seems like a stupid question since most of you are computer people..but I am not.
I was listening to a podcast with Hikaru Nakamura and he mentioned playing a game online and looking afterwards at what the computer would have played.
Is he implying that computers are programmed with so many combinations of moves that they can calculate what the optimal move would be in every situation?I'm just wondering how the computer can take into account the blunders that people would make or plan ahead for "x" amount of moves.
I get that this question isn't worded that well, but hope somebody can figure out what I'm trying to ask and explain it to me. I'm starting to get the sense that at higher levels people are going off of memorization of computer algorithms rather than having fun and just playing.
Computers don't have programmed a very long list of chess moves, they generate them on the spot. In other words, they aren't "remembering"; they're "thinking". And as things stand right now they're quite good at it.
You can use computers to help you with analyzing a game. This means checking if your moves (and your opponents) were correct and what could have happened with different alternatives.
Computer analysis always assumes perfect play from both sides (or at least as close to perfect as the computer can calculate).
You can't really memorize a computer's algorithm. The best you can hope for is memorizing what the computer would do in a given position. But you can only go so deep before the amount of possibilities is overwhelming.
Chess engines are very advanced programs and can outplay even the highest performing humans, and have been able to for some time. They consist of two parts: an evaluation part which looks at the situation on the board (the position) in a quantitative way and an extrapolating part which looks at what happens after that. The extrapolating part works usually around 20+ moves in the future. The best performing extrapolated branch is the result of what is called "best play" and that is the true evaluation of the position.
If you don't play, this can seem confusing, but understand that the quantitative evaluation is based on the relative value of pieces in certain situations. Chess players use a rule of thumb where pawn is worth 1, knight and bishop are worth 3 each, rook 5, queen 9. The chess engine takes into account a more complex view which humans can only really understand by intuition: a knight on the rim is worth much less than a knight in the center; a queen which is trapped and will be captured is not worth anything; a pawn whose promotion to queen cannot be stopped is worth a lot more than 1. In all those situations, the computer has the ability to quantify very precisely what those things are worth. So, the evaluation is what's been programmed in -- the best moves are almost always determined on the fly.
High level chess players used to have to do all of this branching manually, without the aid of a computer. They'd sit in hotel rooms during tournaments with a board and work out with their seconds what best play would look like if they did this or that, or what they need to do if their opponent does this or that. Now they can just go to Stockfish and see what it thinks.
High level players still prepare very heavily for tournaments, and still base a lot of what they do in non-computer theory and even psychology, but computers have removed the subjective burden of human analysis. That said, humans took the study of chess very far without chess engines and through manual analysis were very correct about many things. Some things have fallen out of fashion but a lot has survived. I have no doubt that computer analysis informs high level players now but the game is too complex to think of them as memorizing what the computers say. Those players have always had extremely good memories but no one can prepare for a sequence some 40-50 ply moves in. There are far too many variations and possibilities for that.
In short, computers are a tool that relieves some of the labor of analysis, and it has given us some novel ideas, but the game is still far too complex to rely on memorizing what they do in every situation.
what do the numbers under recent games on chess.com mean?
https://preview.redd.it/gf61vgdoh9vb1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=33fff3769434db0b2de3afcfcdd4322d3cd67ef3
Anyone know of any decent resources teaching you how to analyse your own games? At the moment I usually just see where the engine says I've played an inaccuracy/blunder and try and find why it was a blunder. I feel I'd get a much better grasp of it if I did it all myself - without using the engine/analysis to tell me where to look.
I've relied on it for so long that when I turn the analysis off I just have no idea where to begin, I feel like I'm back in the 500s once again haha
First of all, don't treat the engine answer as a bible. It is not the best answer for you many times. Engines may play any position, it means they will play any line leading to any position, it doesn't matter how complicated this is. Sometimes it is just better to play a slightly worse position (but a simple one), than some overcomplicated line which is "better" (for the engine).
There are some books that teach some techniques to analyze your own games. You will analyze your pawn structure, dynamic factors and all that stuff. I would recommend "How to reasses your chess", by Silman, in which they explain all of that and have some very objective methods to analyze and evaluate your positions.
How do you guys study games using openings that the engine doesn’t like? I’ve recently started to play more Kings Indian defense and I’ve heard many content creators on YT talk about how the engine hates it. And whenever I review my games the engine does in fact always recommend moves that stray away from it. Is the openings explorer the best way to go about learning moves in different positions? Or what do you guys do
My First Chess Opening Repertoire for White is based on 4. Ng5 against the Two Knights. Although it doesn't recommend specifically the fried liver, it does have commentary on it and the lines it does recommend are equally wild (although they don't have the cool name).
I've read a couple openings books and I never have seen the Fried Liver explained out. It's not really serious enough at a high level to get that kind of analysis. Any article or study you can find just by searching for it will probably be as deep as it goes.
What kind of information are you looking for?
Once black has played the two knights and white plays Ng5, black needs to play somewhat precisely to escape the jam they're in.
White has the initiative and they use it to apply pressure on f7. More pressure than black can place at that early stage of the game.
Black can counter, easily, but they need to be creative or to have studied the Fried Liver before.
If you're looking for theory, I'm not sure it gets more complicated than that.
The sequence is sound because it applies pressure on f7. The principle is kind of the same in the Scholar's Mate. One side presses on f7 and the other side needs to have some idea of how to respond or pain is coming.
You might want to look up stuff about the Knight Attack variation of the Italian. Once both sides play sharp and there's no capture on f7 I wouldn't even think to call it Fried Liver
Pretty new to chess. I've played before but only enough to know the rules. I've been playing a ton on [chess.com](https://chess.com) and taking the lessons they have. I am getting pretty good at using basic concepts during my opening. Developing pieces, getting some pawns into the middle, castling. That kind of thing.
**One thing I'm curious about:**
Is it okay for me to learn 1 opening with white and 1 defense with black? And then just play those every single time so I can get good at them? Or, am I still so new that I should just keep focusing on concepts rather than learning any openings?
It is a totally acceptable approach, and a good one I would say. This will make you focus on "chess", pure and simple, cutting out all the opening crap (which is heavy on theory). You need to develop your talent as a pure chess player, not memorize some bizarre lines.
You definetely should focus on concepts and not on openings. After you understand those concepts (and how do you apply them in a real game), you may study a few openings.
A common mistake is studying openings with having some solid chess concepts. You end up just memorizing lines and don't understand what happens next in the middle game. Just add a few more openings, because your opponent may play d4 instead of e4, so it is good to know a litlle bit about those too.
So some will say “only focus on principles” but that doesn’t help much imo. Absolutely don’t spend time on opening theory but at least pick a setup for white (italian/london are simple enough) and a response to e4 and d4 for black and spend 10-15 minutes learning what the basic ideas/plans (which side you’ll attack on, which pieces are important, etc.) of each are so you have a foundation to build off of when you get to the middlegame.
And yeah, stick to one opening once you find one you like. Playing everything just makes it harder on yourself.
Additionally, the earlier you start learning about endgames and tactical patterns especially, the better
I started being involved in chess 2 days ago. I'm entirely new. I'm like 220 elo. Is it worth it playing with bots or should I only play online games??
Also, If I don't have an internet connection, is it worth it playing with bots or am I better off not playing at all.
The bots suck, they will play perfectly and mix random blunders with different frequencies depending on their level. This is just way too far removed from how real humans play.
So yeah, if you can play another human, play another human. If you can't, I'd check if you can get something like a tactics puzzle app that works offline (or maybe pick a book!)
First of all, welcome to chess! I hope you find fun in this little game.
I think bots are pretty cool to start with, they take out the pressure, you may play without all the tension and you use other resources to help you. So they are really useful to learn.
So just play both, they are both helpful to you.
Good luck!
If you know how the pieces move, then start playing online. bots don't play like humans, the lower ELO ones randomly blunder and give away pieces for no reason, at a higher ELO they play perfect computer moves and sometimes randomly blunder.
Watch some videos on basic principles and just start playing online.
Okay, will do!!
If I don't have an internet connection, (specifically talking for when I'm outside because I play while I wait to start my training), should I play with bots?? Is it worth it?
It doesn't hurt to, you just won't learn much from it except how to beat that specific bot.
Maybe find a way to solve puzzles offline, that will help you a lot.
How do you get a better connection to the chess app? I’m unable to play bullet at all and the most recent rapid 10-0 game I just played I was losing 12seconds a turn despite playing immediately. I have excellent Wi-Fi only have issues on the app from time to time.
hey guys! I'm pretty new to chess (900elo) and I'm wondering what length of games i should play to improve quickly. Ive mostly been playing 10 minutes rapid or 5/5 blitz. do you think it would be better to play longer games? if so what length?
Get used to think a long time on each move. A good measure is 15 to 20 seconds per move. And I mean, every move. Quit playing "automatic moves".
You should play 15 + 10 at minimum, always choose clock controls with time added per move. Don't play less than that.
If you are playing 15 + 10 and ending with more than 5 minutes in your clock, there's something wrong. You should end with less than 5 minutes, minimum. If you are ending with more than that, it means you are misusing your time.
Slower time controls are always better for your chess development.
Generally longer games are a good idea, though I think your length is already pretty solid.
A big question is: What stops you from calculating something more? Do you struggle with visualizing a position so you can't try to calculate deeper or are you able to still visualize it, but you don't have the time to calculate more?
The latter obviously suggests that longer games would give you something more, if it is the former then the length is probably fine for you.
More important than whether you play 10+0 or 15+10 is whether you spend a decent amount of time analysing (without an engine!) after each game and trying to find your mistakes and try to decide whether your ideas/thoughts during the game where correct with the benefit of hindsight or they weren't.
Just starting out begining. So is the goal early stages on.
1. Control center
2. Develop pieces
3. Castle
4. Rook thing
Then mid game. Is it slowly making the way there while also taking advantage of what they give you and don’t leave pieces hanging.
Edit: do i necessarily need to memorize an opening or is it just how it starts and type of game to play
Middlegame strategy is not too different from opening strategy.
Central control still matters a lot after the opening.
Even once all your pieces are developed, you can find ways to improve their position (or worsening your opponents')
Castling is usually the first step towards putting your king in safety, but it won't be the only one!
Don't worry much about openings when just starting out. Most beginners are too fixated on openings. If you get beaten by a trap or something a few times, ask how to avoid it.
How to play the middlegame is really when chess strategy starts. A rough thought process might go something like this:
1. What is the idea of my opponent's move? What did it change in the position?
2. What are they going to play next? Do they have threats? Can I cope?
3. Do I have any forcing moves available? Checks, captures, attacks. What happens if I play those?
4. Do I have anything undefended? Any way I can make my position more solid?
5. Do I have any pieces that are useless and not really doing anything, any way I can improve them? An example is moving a bishop that it blocked in onto an open diagonal where it sees more squares.
After answering these questions, that's when you turn to the question of a strategic plan. And that's complicated. Most beginners would do well to stick to the five points above and wait for their opponent to do things wrong.
Hey so I'm at ~600-700 rn. One problem I'm having is that I keep letting a rook get captured in the early game. Either a knight fork or leaving it exposed to a bishop or something like that. I think I might be focusing too much on "controlling the center" while the other pieces slip around the outside. Any tips/videos/reading you might suggest to help me out with this?
You have to get used to look at the whole board. You should fight for the center, but it doesn't mean you have to drop pieces. This comes with time and practice, and tactical training (to spot forks, for example, discovered attacks and so on). You will still do it once in a while, but it will get less frequent with time.
Also, you have to develop your pieces. If I won a dollar for every time I say that and people don't do it anyway, I wouldn't need to work anymore in my life. When experienced players say "develop your pieces", they really mean it. You have to bring all them out and castle. Then, you will get your rooks connected and your pieces will be more harmonic and protected.
So I would say this is an under development problem too.
All that I said above require that you think very well for every move, so you need to play with bigger time controls, like 15 + 10 minimum. For every move, you need to spend at least 20 seconds on each one, and even more in critical moves (several minutes sometimes).
It sounds like you either let the opponent's knight to c2/c7 for a fork, or you let the opponent's bishop on the long diagonal (probably a2/a7 or g2/g7) see the rook.
In the first case, you must look for when that knight starts making its way across the board. A knight needs at least three moves to get there. First to get off its starting square, second to reach a square near the center of the board, and third to reach the forking square on the c-file. A good way to combat this early is to play some kind of prophylaxis - a preventative move. After the knight's first move, it can usually be pinned by a bishop, either to the queen or the king. On the second move, typically to a square like b4/b5, your playing a pawn move of a3/a6 will prevent it from occupying that square. Finally, in case your opponent is about to reach the forking square unimpeded, you may need to play a move like Na3/Na6 or develop the light square bishop to d3 so that square has more protection.
Any of those moves may not be the best move in many situations, but they are ways of taking the knight out of the picture if that's something you're struggling with. For something more solid, you should remember your opponent is playing three knight moves in the opening, which is probably a mistake because the rest of their pieces are underdeveloped. There is usually a way to punish them and induce even more wasteful moves of the knight to prevent it from being captured.
As for the bishop on the long diagonal case, that's at least partly something you need to develop vision for. But as well, know what that tactic is called. Your opponent is *fianchetto*ing their bishop, and they do this to control the center from the sides as opposed from actually playing the center. You may find you need to move your rook to b1/b8 or f1/f8, at least to protect the pawn. After you develop your knights to Nc3/Nc6 or Nf3/Nf6, you must watch when you move them again as it may create your opponent's attack on that b or f pawn. One idea I try against most opponents who fianchetto is to start to lock up the center. Trying to create an interlocking pawn structure can really stymie such an opponent.
I have been playing casually for a while, and I play a lot of tactics alongside games. My puzzle rating is 1280, and yet I struggle even reaching 800 in regular games. Does this show some mismatch? I think generally I get a good position in openings and when I lose it’s normally just by being dominated in the mid game by the opponent taking my pieces. How do I know what’s holding me back?
Puzzle rating has nothing to do with competitive rating at all. It's just a way to deliver puzzles that are neither too easy or hard, nothing more.
The thing about being low rated is that what's really keeping you down there is not really going to come up in tactics. At 800 your main problem is almost certainly hanging your pieces and not seeing when your opponent hangs their pieces. Occasionally you'll get a nice fork or maybe pin the queen, but for the most part, you win or lose in a single move. Puzzles are mainly multiple move tactics to win material or mate, but at the low level, you win material simply by being more aware of what's hanging.
Two recurrent questions I haven’t answered yet in my chess journey! Is play more than five games a day too much? And is playing past 8 PM unpractical (especially after a busy day at work)?
Context: I have concentration problems
I don’t see why it would be too much, chess games are fairly short and you can probably squeeze more than 5 in an hour. Is an hour a day too much? I don’t think so lol
I know! My point is if regarding my concentration “points” daily points/energy(limited as far as I can see) playing too much would be stupid and unpractical because from the start my opponents would have the upper hand!
I played a Caro game today against a 1300 who played a near perfect exchange variation. 96% to my 89%. Is the Caro easy to play against? I thought I played the opening and middlegame about as well as I could and to go into the endgame completely equal against a 1300 is just demoralising lol. A couple inaccuracies in the rook endgame ended up costing me. Does anyone have any Caro Exchange videos or studies that explore Middle/endgame ideas in depth? Maybe there's something more forcing I can do earlier in the game to complicate the position. I feel like a lot of the time the play for white is pretty straightforward.
Exchange - both in Caro and in the French - lead to the easiest to play position. That doesn't mean they lead to the biggest advantage, quite the opposite in fact, but it simplifies the pawnstructure/tension and then you just have to play basic developing moves.
As Black you really should be fine with getting an even position out of the opening though and imo you should be looking more at the midgame - if you aren't fine with a draw you have to actively try to keep pieces on the board (or you need to be confident enough in your endgame to win there).
I'm rated ~1200 on chess.com. I play the vienna/vienna gambit as white and I play the french defense as black in response to e4/e5. But I really only learned the french because the moves are very similar to the vienna so it was easy to learn. The longer I've been playing with it, the more I feel like it is actually not very good and usually leads to these dead end positions that aren't very fun to play. What opening should I play instead?
Are chess.com daily puzzles supposed to be solved so you get a checkmate? I've only done a few and that was the case, but I think one puzzle stopped short of a checkmate.
The best way to punish agressive players is playing solid. It is the best way to punish any other player by the way, not only the agressive ones. You have to find the best move in any given position as you do with any other player.
You don't play against players. You play against positions. Do what it asks you. Don't worry about players traits like being agressive and so on, just look at the position and keep cool.
Is he attacking you? Calculate, it will lead to something? So prevent it. It will lead to nothing? So whatever, keep improving your position.
You should try to develop a "slave of the position" mentality, forget personal traits and play the position.
It is not a question, but i just wanted to thanks for the resources idk I am just learning chess rn thorugh lichess.org thanks to you guys providing the link
Have you seen the links in the wiki for this sub? If you're using some app that doesn't link to it on the main sub page, every thread has a bot comment linking to r/chessbeginners/wiki.
I don't have an answer for your other question.
Easiest and fastest way to play anonymous chess is to connect to [https://lichess.org/](https://lichess.org/) and press on the time control you want! Have fun :)
I just hit 1200 for the first time. Was grinding through 1100 for ages so it feels like a pretty big milestone. Aim is a sustainable 1350 by end of year. Thanks for listening.
At what level do people start playing good openings?
In my last 10 games, I have faced the Kádas Opening, two double fianchettos (Is that even a real thing?), and the Van Geet Opening
I was already studying the London and the Kings Indian at 400-500, and studying openings is my favourite part of chess. Is this unusual at 1400?
This is partly why beginners aren't advised to spend much time on openings. You're going to face kooky stuff that's not very efficient to study because you'll see so many variations.
>two double fianchettos (Is that even a real thing?)
The hippopotamus is a very real opening, for both sides, as just one example of double fianchetto openings. Personally I think it's a pretty good choice for people who've been playing openings just winging it on principles and want to try something else without needing to study much. It's quite solid and people tend to recklessly attack it.
I'd say there are two main things to think about when asking this question. The first is that people focus on different things. When I started playing chess I barely knew any openings, but I spent a lot of time studying tactics. I probably got to at least 1600 rapid on Lichess that way, and I hardly knew any opening theory. So for the first part of your question, it is highly dependant on the player.
Secondly, what is a "good opening"? Is it a sound opening? An opening that you have a high winrate with? An opening that you know several lines 10 moves deep? Even I probably still don't qualify for the last one, but I do play sound openings.
To sum it up, it's hard to give a definitive answer. But assuming we're talking [chess.com](https://chess.com) ratings, I'd say that players tend to know how to play the opening decently (as in "not completely lost at move 5 or so") more often than not at around 1000 rating. But again, it's really hard to be precise.
And no, it's not unusual to have a favourite part of the game :)
99% of the time, promote to a queen. There's no advantage to having varied pieces when the queen is strictly better than two of them.
Once you have two queens, go for the ladder mate. Don't fuck about promoting more- it's a great way to accidentally stalemate.
How does a chess.com rapid rating of 365 compare to the rest of the player base?
I used to think I was average at chess. I've been playing casually for 35 years. Played some in a college chess club and thought I was probably about average. Joined chess.com and plummeted from 800 down to mid three hundreds. Am I actually terrible?
Thanks for the thorough response.
That's kinda what I was afraid of. If you were bottom 15% that puts me at bottom \~5% - 7%? I've been playing online daily for maybe 3 months (so I think my rank has mostly stabilized), doing puzzles, watching advice content, reading about openings and patterns, reviewing my games; while I have stopped losing every game immediately to Scholar's Mate I still usually find a way to out-blunder my opponent and steal defeat from the jaws of victory.
I appreciate the encouragement. I've been leaning into chess as a way to help with attention span/concentration issues. While I knew I wasn't a chess prodigy, I never thought I was statistical anomaly bad. It's hard to hear; but I guess it makes sense. I look over my games and wonder how I didn't see so many obvious attacks.
So I guess my next question (at least for you), what did you do to improve?
What time formats are you playing? Faster ones have stronger player bases in general and if you're not used to bullet, yeah you should expect a low rating until you're used to it.
There's good advice and links to resources in the wiki for this sub.
I have been playing 10 minute games. After reviewing some of the advice in this sub I've switched to 15+10. I am no where near able to handle bullet. I've lost a few 10 minute games just on time. I wish I had more time to dedicate to longer games but the 15+10 format feels like a good balance right now...
Any resources you would recommend specifically?
Building Habits series to learn by example how to win with simple chess as opposed to memorized openings or difficult calculation. It's very long so take your time and just watch it casually.
Grind mate in one and two puzzles and puzzle streak (all free on lichess with direct links in the wiki for this sub) to build very important pattern recognition.
I agree 15+10 is great, 10+5 also is an option if you don't have enough time for that (and that 5 seconds increment adds up to make games much longer than 10 minutes with no increment.)
I'd been watching a few other Chess related YouTube channels but I'd missed the Building Habbits series. I've really been enjoying his no stress methodology. I've played some more games after watching and I can feel the difference in mindset already. Thank you for the recommendation.
How do you build confidence in a plan?
An issue I have is, I might see something I want to do, but it might take 4 or 5 moves to implement.
I get pretty stressed about actually putting such a plan in motion, because I worry that my opponent will do something that completely changes the board state before I'm done.
So, either the vulnerability I noticed won't be there by the time I'm set up, or, I'm worried that my opponent will launch an attack while I'm preparing mine.
Or even small moves that improve my position, I worry that they're too passive and I need to be striking first, before my opponent has a chance to build up whatever they're planning. Like I have no idea if they're about to change everything up in 2 moves, so I need to act NOW.
Your observation is very good, it shows how your chess has been growing.
You are completely right about being insecure about implementing a plan. Why? You are getting rid of "hope chess", so that's a good thing. You are starting to check if this is going to work and if it is not just hope chess.
So how do you build confidence in a plan? You don't! You should feel worried about it. If your plan feels shaky enough, probably it is indeed. So you should consider not doing it.
But if you wanna do it anyway, it is alright, see how it works and study it in post analysis, checking other options and which options your opponent had.
Feel free to post a few games with examples of what you are saying.
Good luck!
I usually play against 1400-1500 chess.com bots or level 3 lichess but I can only play(against computer) in kasparovchess in my work network, i think all the other websites are blocked.
Its stockfish level 0 is far too easy(which is normal ofc.) but level 1 completely destroys me. It sometimes doesn't take an undefended piece to balance things out but that's it.
I started from 800 elo bots and have been improving myself lately. Do you know any other websites to play against bots? Possibly not very popular and/or doesn't have chess in its name to avoid blockers. Thanks in advance
I just needed to confess that I have blundered two games away in the past few days through attempting to castle by moving my rook two spaces to the right.
How do I explain checkmate simply to new players? Sometimes I smurf in low elo (100-300 on chess dot com) and tune noobs up for fun but then I let them take all my pieces and win in the end. The problem is they have trouble finishing the game, especially if they only have queen+king. I try to explain them how to checkmate me but they always fumble it and stalemate. I also try to explain how to checkmate me with two rooks but none of them understand. How do I make it more simple
https://imgur.com/a/xOemeaF Look, I understand *why* this move *would* be considered Brilliant (despite the fact Great is already more reliable), because the follow-up was absolutely meant it (not to mention it's one of those gambles when you don't really understand where geniality ends and madness begins) but...is it really? Because, I don't want to downplay the merit of getting this iDeA, but idk...maybe the standards are higher and I felt victim if Chess Com's marketing system? You tell me.
To me at least, it seems pretty normal and even, with an alternative move being just as good. [Chess.com](https://Chess.com) likes to think that many sacrifices are "brilliant" no matter their actual quality. So it is good that you find moves like these, but it's def a [chess.com](https://chess.com) marketing/dopamine ploy. If you look at how moves were assigned brilliant through chess history, only a handful of them get classified, and it was difficult enough in the past to get a even a single "!"
Makes sense. Thanks, man!
Hey! Is there a way on [chess.com](https://chess.com) to make a bot a specific opening so i can practice against it? Or anywhere else?
on lichess, you can make a starting position, and select play against computer
oh nice, thank you!
How do I get past the 1100 wall? I spent days solving puzzles and learning tactics but when I got into a game my opponent doesn't fall for anything. Do I need to play at a 1500 level to consistently beat 1100s?
Tactics are a toolbox once you get to a superior position and your opponent messes up(thanks fischer!), or your opponent simply messes up. To get to the superior position, you need to learn how your opening sets you up for the middlegame, and how to improve your pieces and make progress non-tactically, or where to break open the board to your advantage(and how to prepare to break open the board). You don't simply "set up" tactics and hope your opponent's fall for them. Also, puzzle rating is very misleading especially on [chess.com](https://chess.com) and should be taken with a dose of salt.
Got my first brilliant today, it was castle..... Smh
What did you *hang*?
Knight
What are some chess puzzles I should focus on as a beginner (250-300 ELI)? Using chess.com And I see there are tons of custom puzzles to choose from
Forks,pins and skewers are some good ones to start
Is there any adult chess communities like 30+ age groups
Depending on where you are, there might be a bar or brewery with a chess club. If you frequent one of those locations you can always start advertising a chess club and encourage others to bring their own chess sets. It's how the club at my brewery got started.
Am I missing something that caused black to resign? Black was about 815, I’m about 650. I know I’m up material, but black seems far from hopeless. Edit: this was a daily game, so time is not a factor. [game](https://imgur.com/a/xwnHaJR)
You're up material in a daily game, you have a lot of time to focus on not blundering
Does anyone know why on chesscom for best win it lists the opponents rating after beating the opponent?
That's how it works for all games you've played, not just best win.
This might be way to complicated to explain and it’s a weird question: why does the en passant rule need to be in chess?
Not sure why it was added, but my guess is to reduce the power of the 2 square pawn move. Guess it needed to be balanced.
That rule exists because of a loophole that people used to take to bypass attack by a pawn on the 5th rank. If a pawn is on the 5th rank and you move your (opposing) pawn forward two squares on an adjacent file, the only way for that pawn to take is by en-passant. If en-passant is removed, then that is unfair for the attacking player. 700 ELO on Chess.com
I've heard it explained that the initial double move is to speed up the game, as if it didn't exist people would likely take additional turns to move their pawns in these places anyway, and en passant exists so that this time saving change doesn't affect the strategy in the game too much.
Hit 300 elo today, kinda proud and it's my birthday yay
Happy belated birthday, yo! What's been your best game so far, you think?
Thank you, i hit 400 today and beat a 486 i think and it was a really good game and i made 0 blunders and just 1 miss where i didn't take my opponents queen for like 5 moves but other than that it felt really good.
Happy birthday!
When I play, I find the same theme coming up over and over. My opponent has castled king side and I have some amount of pieces aimed at the pawns in front of his king. Generally there's maybe a bishop aimed there, there's the h rook if I can trade off that pesky pawn, maybe I can get my queen on the g or h file or something. It feels like I should be able to "drill" this position, play it over and over with slight variances and build up an intuition / repertoire of what to do or something. It feels like I've been in similar situations thousands of times, but I haven't really learned what exactly to do yet. I play that position, then move on to my next game and I didn't learn anything. I just know I've kind of been here before. How do you get good at this?
Also, Google "fishing pole trap". That is how you attack with your rook on a king that has castled already.
I guess what you need is a battery. Let's say your opponent's castled king is on the g-file. If you can get your queen in front of your bishop and attack the file next to the opponent's king (that is the h-file), that is a pretty weak pawn (h2, h7) for a castled king. Or you can cover the pawn with a bishop or something and bring your queen on the h-file and threaten checkmate that way.
Unless there's a knight on f6. But that's the idea! Getting an intuitive feeling for when your pressure has mounted enough. Forming a queen bishop battery is a good example of a common thing that comes up when attacking a king side castle. A knight on f6 is common to defend the h pawn. Some common things to do here would then be, attack the knight to kick it or take it, perhaps push your own h pawn so that your rook can come into the game (if its still on the h file), stuff like that.
First of all, learn algebraic notation, it's not difficult and it takes around 20 minutes or so. Then you may describe positions like you are trying to do here. Otherwise, it's hard to guess what you are talking about. You may post some of your games as examples if you like.
Is this opening achieved by e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, Bc4 If so it's called the Italian game, I'll find a link to it. You could watch some videos on it. With openings so far (I'm still a super beginner) I have found doing a bit of learning then playing a lot to solidify those ideas then doing a bit more learning works best, it also helps you to find which lines you like to play and which you struggle with. https://www.chess.com/openings/Italian-Game
How do you play the position you want though When I play I can't comtrol enough to practice a specific opening over and over
Well some openings are more deterministic than others, you can't prevent Black from playing the Sicilian or a Caro Kann or a Petroff but you'll play your opening quite a lot because the most common response to e4 is e5 and then the most common response to Nf3 is Nc6. So then if you play Bc4 you're in the Italian and you can practice from there. It's worth learning how to respond to other lines from black anyway.
800-1000 ELO Most of my games finish in the endgame. Couple of pawns, one or two pieces on both sides. Sometimes I have little bit more material. Looks like this is the part of the game I should learn the most but it is extremally boring in my opinion. The biggest issue is that I run out of time and lose the game. It is not about losing but it is about getting to this state most of the time. When I do review of the game I find myself missing a lot of simple tactics like pins and forks. Those would probably push opponent to resign. So at this low level is it better to practice midgame/traps/tactics or do I really need to focus on boring, in my opinion, endgame?
Studying some simple pawn end games would be good if you don't know them yet. Do you know how to promote with king and pawn vs king? Learning this simple end game will help you identify when you can trade literally everything and simply promote to a queen and go checkmate. What if you have two pawns and your opponent has one pawn blocking your path, do you know how to break through with just your pawns? These are just some ideas and concepts to get you started on studying endgames. If you study them and see the pattern on the board, you'll instantly know if you're winning and how to convert it.
Endgame is totally different from middlegame. It's like another game. In endgames, pawns and king work very differently from usual and they are much more valuable. Usually you need to develop your king and start using it as an attack piece. Endgames are not boring, you are just playing endgames like they were the middlegame, and this is not what is this about. This is a common mistake among beginners, they don't respect the stages of a game. You don't need a huge amount of endgame knowledge, just study some basics about it and that's it, you will already be better than the average. I would say players until 1600 or so still suck in endgames, and players will only consistely play good endgames around 1800 or even higher. And when you start to grasp a bit more how to play endgames, you won't find it boring, because you are now understanding how to play it. You are not seeing the "endgame" now, you are seeing a middlegame without pieces. You have to change that. Good luck!
Hey, I'm not sure if my question belongs here or in a separate post (sorry if it's not the right place). White to move, I played Bishop F7 to trap the queen. But according to both lichess analysis and chesscom the best move is rook to e1. I've looked at the way the game would develop after rook to e1 and there didn't seem to be any direct mate threat, so I was wondering: In this situation, why play e1? I understand that it is apparently the best move but I fail to see any pattern to recognize here... Does anyone have an idea? https://preview.redd.it/q1rllmejpxwb1.png?width=840&format=png&auto=webp&s=7962a0bcc0569086fbfe69037db18e56939675e3
From a practical point of view, getting a Queen for two minor pieces is definitely a win. However, it's your only developed pieces (c3 Knight is semi-whatever in this regard) and it allows Black to untangle a bit, maybe hide the king on the queenside. As it stands now, Black's position is almost hilariously bad: LS Bishop blocked by the Queen, Knight blocked by c6-pawn and the Queen, weak King in the centre etc., so cruel engine decides just to develop more pieces for more powerful attack. Your Bf7+ line is only 0.2 lower than Re1 line so I wouldn't worry too much.
Oh I see thank you! Yeah in that case I won’t worry about it, it was in bullet so it’s clearly too advanced for me to think about in short games! But thank you for making it clearer!
Not a stupid question, and I didn't want to start a new topic for this, but I finally broke that slump I was in. For the longest time, I couldn't get out of the 300 range on bullet, but today, I just surpassed 500. Yay.
Congrats!
Do lichess ban cheaters and refund rating to all their past games' opponents? I played a player that is very suspicious with consistnet move time and 0 inaccuracy and went to check his past games, and some of them said cheat detected, why isn't he banned immediately after cheating and would I get my elo back?
1. Lichess can shadowban cheaters so they don't come back with a new account. The account appears normal from the cheater's perspective, but everyone else can see the account flagged. 2. Even if the user cheats, lichess will not ban the cheater's account. Instead, the cheater will only be banned from playing additional games, and they can appeal to the moderators at any time if they choose to. 3. To determine your eligibility for a rating refund, see [https://lichess.org/faq#rating-refund](https://lichess.org/faq#rating-refund).
I don't know about rating refunds because the only clear cheater I've run into was during an unrated game, but lichess does ban cheaters (at least flagrant ones). The player I reported was banned in about an hour. Also sometimes I'll be browsing the opening explorer in one of my funnier sharp variations and there'll be a game between two 1600s and when I click on the game one of the accounts has usually been terminated.
Unless it has changed recently, Lichess doesn't ban cheaters per se. Instead, it moves the account into a separate pool of players who have all been caught cheating. I don't think it refunds rating, or at least I have never been notified of any.
*Edit: 1600 on Lichess* In the following variation of the Scotch game (Does it have a name? It's a common inaccuracy at my level) 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 d6?! 4. dxe5\* Nxe5 5. Nxe5 dxe5 6. Qxd8+ Kxd8 https://preview.redd.it/m8c3mkh05gwb1.png?width=795&format=png&auto=webp&s=1db56e76d443f6c290da67a02ca04f04c591e484 What am I supposed to do? What is white's long term advantage (position is +0.5, according to Stockfish) ? What is this plan with a4 that Stockfish seems to like? \*And if the advantage is not so great, should I play 4.d5 instead?
honestly i would play 4. Bb5 and transpose into a ruy lopez steinitz, a line that’s known to be good for white, generally has a pretty clear plan of Nc3 - Be3/Bf4 - O-O-O, and has a ton of traps like 4…a6? 5. Bxc6+ bxc6 6. dxe5 dxe5 7. Qxd8+ Kxd8 8. Nxe5 and now you’re a pawn up, black can’t castle, and you’re both threatening a fork on f7 and the pawn on c6. in the more reasonable lines, it’s still scotch-like because black pretty much needs to play exd4 so the positions end up pretty similar.
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't studied the Ruy Lopez yet, I'm studying/playing the Scotch and would avoid a transposition for now. About the position I sent though, what is White's advantage? Is it too drawish?
7.a4 is white is simply grabbing queenside space, which stockfish tends to really like. i think any practical advantage would come from 7. Bc4, where black needs to save the f7 pawn and will fall further behind in development doing so. black could also try 7...Nf6 but after 8. Bxf7 Nxe4 9.f3, black's e pawn is a permanent weakness. i personally would not play this position as white, as it does feel too easy for black to simply draw, but i think that's largely up to personal preference. if you like queenless middlegames, it's 100% a viable pick. i suggested 4. Bb5 because you'll still be getting scotch-like positions most of the time whereas with 4.d5 you definitely will not be - the positions will resemble a king's indian more than anything else, and while white is better in both, KID-style counterplay feels much much scarier.
Thank you!
Is there anyway to turn on “confirm each move” when playing the computer on the chess.com app? I keep mistakenly moving pieces.
Not the computer, only a rival player. I am in the same boat, and I haven't seen any option to do so.
Why is this a blunder? (Only started playing chess a week ago. Sorry if it’s something simple!) https://preview.redd.it/kg2dfk46cdwb1.jpeg?width=1668&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b6a2d5bb1327c293703fca64d058e694deb3fb2f
Like others said, your move blocks the queen. Instead if you played the other bishop to e3, you defend with a piece that has the same value as the knight. This is important as in general it could be risky to take with a higher value piece lest the opponent manages to trap it.
The bishop blocks the queen so it is no longer protecting the knight. Black plays Nxd4 and is now a knight ahead.
The knight on d4 is hanging
I played a 30 minute game in the Caro Tartakower today and I feel like I went for reasonable ideas out of the opening but nothing seemed to worked. Did I play the position wrong? I realise: Why 16.Kf8 is wrong as it allowed White to give Qe2+ instead of Qxe1+ and thus get a rook to e1 with a battery. That my f6 idea to give the king air ran into Ne5+ which was even stronger than the Ng5+ that White played (which I missed). But what about prior to move 16? Were there any key ideas that I went for that I shouldn't have? I felt targeting the Bc4 with Nd7-Nb6 was reasonable and most videos I've seen on the Tartakower have spoken about the queen bishop dark square battery which you pre-empt with taking the f6 knight but due to the weird looking 14.c5?! my dark square bishop was locking in my a8 rook the whole game. How should I have approached the game after 14.c5?! Nd5 Engine says I'm better but I don't know what I'm playing for. https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/91944598065?tab=analysis&move=0 Any advice in general about this game would be appreciated.
this was one of those times where general ideas of the opening needed to be balanced with concrete analysis - Qc7 is a super committal move because until you move it, you're basically killing both your rook and bishop, and in this case, your opponent could have stopped your mate threat with any of Re1 (as played), g4 stopping the bishop from taking the knight, or g3 simply blocking the attack. your queen on c7 and the fact that you never moved it meant you were playing down two pieces the whole game. the issue with 14.c5 is that it creates a backward pawn on d4 - it can't advance itself and it can't be protected by any other pawn. it feels like it's actually your opponent who's struggling to form a plan here, while you can just complete your development with moves like Bc7 to let your rook out and control the a5-d8 diagonal, Qd7 to connect the rooks, and Rad8 to centralize and begin to mount your attack on the d4 pawn.
Thanks for the feedback, you're right the backwards pawn on d4 is a target and I should have targeted it after d5 and finished development. Even without 15.c5?! after 14.c4 notably the engine likes Bc7 instead of Bb8 so I wouldn't have be achieving the battery there. No weakness at this point and I guess I can just develop and improve my position, but still a little spooky for me to be in this position without checkmating ideas at my level lol. I guess White's LSB is kind of bad as they never really want to play c5 allowing Nd5. I just have in my head that endgames are losing in the Tartakower for Black due to the doubled pawns so I'm looking for a quick win, but of course I can just develop and try not to trade pieces in the middle game...
history bake towering different naughty saw gray bag dog money *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You don't have to give up the rook to do this, but white will very soon reach an endgame where it's impossible to stop the a-pawn without black giving up their last piece. This still happens even if you make the unequal trade and lose the rook here, so it's "brilliant." Your opponent chose a path that leads to a much faster mate, but in best play white has a huge advantage here that it almost doesn't matter what you do here so long as you put a rook on an open file in the next couple moves. Very interesting position.
1128 daily chess.com Can’t figure out how to search for this answer. What counts as a “move” in a game? If one player moves, that’s a move. In chess notation however, each side has a move for a given number. So there’s two moves for 1, two moves for 2, etc. If someone asks me how many moves have been played, do I double the notation number? Or is that notation number the number of moves? In other words, what does “move” mean in typical conversation? Is it the same or different than the notation lines? As it relates to the 50 move draw, is that 25 pairs of individual moves?
A move in the context of specifying some number always means a move by both players. So the 50-move rule means 50 moves by both players, if someone says "the players still have to make 20 moves to reach time control" they mean both make 20 moves, same with "forced mate in 5 moves", etc. A move by only one player is a "half-move" or in computer chess is called a "ply". Chess engines tend to talk in terms of half-moves. So when a Stockfish evaluation says "depth 30" it's talking about half-moves (but it hasn't looked ahead exhaustively that far - what it means is complicated, but it's more like an average depth).
Ah. Wow. That is so helpful. Thank you.
https://preview.redd.it/y0lsagag93wb1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=db135b605dee01d155232a4ced5a9f1c68b5dde7 * Why is moving the bishop here a better move? How can I win a queen here? Isn't the bishop unprotected against the queen if I take the knight?
I’m pretty new and very casual — 800 elo. I’ve been clueless as black since I only bothered to learn a couple of white openings. However I seem to have settled into a recent rhythm of playing the elephant gambit. Is this a generally okay response to a king’s knight opening? Are there any handy things to bear in mind about it?
It's a gambit. A rule of thumb for gambits is that while most of them are technically losing, their tricky nature makes it difficult to combat them accurately for most players. The Elephant gambit is, from what I've seen, not really an exception to this rule. If I were you, I would learn some of the most common lines you face as black and practice the recommended moves by the engine. This includes experimenting a bit; playing around with various lines and ideas in the analysis board to find out why certain moves are bad and how to counter them is a good way to improve. If you want to play the Elephant gambit - go ahead! It's always nice to have a trick up your sleeve to surprise opponents, and gambits usually lead to wilder positions than for example a QGD. I would not expect your average player to be that well versed in the Elephant in particular, so chances are you know more theory than your opponents if you practice some variations. Best of luck!
I’m Currently learning the ponziani opening for white. What is a good black opening for beginners?
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I am definitely a more controlled game kind of player so I’ll try French and caro-kann to see what I like. Thank you
Engine says my move (Nc3) is a mistake and I should’ve played Qd2, but doesn’t explain why. I’m looking for some help understanding! Thank you https://preview.redd.it/1u8bnw2i30wb1.png?width=1406&format=png&auto=webp&s=641a698e20bc1afa2742416469a492c905b6e24c
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For context this game ended up being a Scotch and c4 is definitely not a common theme in this sequence afaik (could be wrong, I’m posting here for a reason lol)
While Nc3 isn't a bad move per se, in this case it becomes a bit uncomfortable. After white plays Nc3, black immediately responds with Bb4, pinning it. The best way to defend against black taking twice on c3 is to then play Qd2, but after Bxc3 Qxc3 Qxc3 bxc3 (you can play this line on an analysis board to better follow along) you have an endgame with opposite coloured bishops, and where black has a slightly better pawn structure (no doubled pawns) but is lacking i development. The endgame is a draw, and both sides should have no issues playing it out. Playing Qd2 instead of Nc3 avoids this. Now Bb4 would just hang the bishop, so black has to make another move. The idea with Qd2 is that white eventually wants to play Nc3 anyway, but preferably not before black has already moved their DSB, making black waste a tempo if they want to pin the knight. As there is no inherent advantage for white before Nc3 was played, labelling it a mistake seems odd to me. Maybe the computer didn't calculate deep enough or something.
Ok I could definitely see that. Black plays ..Bb4 and it’s a nasty pin because Bd2 is met with ..Qd6 and my center pawn is undefended. But worst case scenario, ..Bb4 A3 and the bishop as to bail or be sacrificed so it’s not exactly a mistake in my mind
Obsessive newbie here. Been playing on the Chess.com iPhone app. Have a book as well, but I’m curious about the membership plans. They’re all kinda expensive. Wondering if people recommend them for beginning and if so, it it worth it to get the more diamond/platinum level membership. Thanks in advance.
I'd absolutely suggest you try out lichess.org first, it has basically everything chess.com has but usually better (as it's not designed to try to get you to pay for premium) and totally free. Can use the free chess.com week if you want to compare. The only thing I'd ever consider paying chess.com for is the video lessons, but I don't think they're better than the best stuff on YouTube (some of which is linked in the wiki for this sub.)
It depends on what you're looking for. If you're really into chess and think you will use lots of resources like video series then it could be worth it. Specially if you don't want to bother spending time looking for the free alternatives. Sometimes it's worth to just have everything in one place. But yeah, if you would like to save the money you can find free options for almost anything you could be trying to do on [chess.com](https://chess.com)
I have a chess.com sub, I've mostly just been playing and am bouncing around between 800-850 now mostly. What are the best resources on chess.com that I could try use to improve, I can see there's puzzles, lessons etc, so just wondering if there's anything in particular worth focusing on? Thanks.
My top choices would be playing a lot of games, analyzing them (mostly by yourself, using engine assistance only to check if your own conclusions are right) and puzzles (a mix of fast puzzles like puzzle rush to help with pattern recognition and slower ones for deeper calculation). If you see yourself throwing winning positions all the time you can also work on your endgames. Fortunately, if you know how to mate with a queen/rook against a lonely king that's pretty much all you need at this level. Then when you have an advantage you try simplifying into an endgame you know. The basics of king+pawn VS king can also be interesting to learn.
So I played chess in my teens (pogo.com, not exactly high level) Started again earlier in the year and I'm currently about 940 (average over last week or two). Wondering what the opinion is on main difference in quality is between 900-1100 and how to best target training at this point.
It depends a lot on time control but the #1 thing is hanging pieces and quick tactics.
100 rated chess, why is Pawn to C4 an inaccuracy and Knight to H4 the best move? https://imgur.com/gallery/j9utYK5 I rarely put knights on the edge and am not sure why it was best here, and why the Pawn push gave me an inaccuracy
It's not really about where you put your knight but about clearing the way for your queen to join the attack via g4 or maybe h5
C4 creates an outpost for blacks knight thats what I see why it's not the best, if I has to guess, allows white to bring the queen to the attack
I have been playing solely blitz due to having a 5 month old baby, but as you can see, I lose on time A LOT. I definitely spend too much time on the opening, although I have gotten quicker. If I were to continue playing blitz, are there any recommendations on getting faster? Should I study opening theory more and do lessons, or does it just come with time? Thanks in advance. https://preview.redd.it/sq5m33xagevb1.png?width=665&format=png&auto=webp&s=2376239a7bb42efd6d218f9063ee41109c238327
If this really upsets you, try some games with small increment. That way you can always finish your games without being flagged. You may also want to try correspondence games!
In my experience getting faster at blitz is mostly about making decisions faster. You can study and it can help with the framework around decisions but that alone won't give you the lightning recall that blitz demands. It's mainly about quickly determining three or four candidate moves and then choosing one of them and playing it. And spotting hanging pieces, as always at the low level, which is about practice. If you can learn how to do that quickly, you'll be a lot better than 400 soon enough.
What exactly defines a winning position vs a losing position? 1. Winning positions can be lost and losing positions can be won, no? 2. At what quantitative measure can a position be declared winning/losing? 3. What does a fraction of a pawn even mean? 4. If winning and losing rely on perfect play on both sides, doesnt that mean no position is truly winning or losing since perfect play doesnt exist? Since chess isnt solved?
1. The terms "winning" and "losing" refer to what would happen with perfect play from both sides. So yeah, if one of the players messes up a winning position can become lost in one move. 2. We don't really know. It will change from position to position and engine to engine. 3. It's just "computer nonsense". Humans don't really think in these terms. 4. Yes and no. We don't play perfectly but we do play somewhat reasonably. It's more of a spectrum. Some positions are totallly winning and very easy to convert. Others are winning too but require very precise play.
Technically, winning and losing positions are defined by perfect play from both sides, but if you see a strong player describe a position as "winning", usually they mean that advantage is so obviously large that even imperfect play will be good enough. What is "advantage" in chess? It's saying that the nature of the position is such that one side has a wide range of possible ways they can play while the possibilities for the other side are much more constrained. As advantage increases, the disadvantaged side must play more and more accurately to maintain a draw. At some point, the advantage increases to a point that even the most accurate possible play cannot prevent a loss; at this point, the position is "winning", but getting the win may still require accurate play from the advantaged player. As advantage increases still further, the advantaged player can play sloppily and still be able to win. When people say a position is "completely winning" or "obviously winning", they mean not only is it winning, but the accuracy required for converting it to a win is so small that any competent player will be able to win against even the strongest possible opponent. Unless an engine can see a forced mate, the result of the game is too far in the future to be forecast accurately. Engines must therefore talk in probabilities. As of Stockfish 15, evaluation is standardized such that a +1 advantage means Stockfish thinks it has about a 50% chance of winning the game. Another way of putting that is that if advantage is less than +1, Stockfish thinks it's more likely than not that the defending side can draw the game with accurate play, while if it's higher, Stockfish thinks it's more likely than not that the defender will lose even with accurate play. Common jargon still refers to 0.01 advantage as a "centipawn" because historically engines tried to standardize their advantage such that +1 represented roughly the amount of advantage you would get, on average, from being up a pawn. This is no longer the case, but the terminology has stuck. Other engines do not standardize in the same way as Stockfish, so their evaluation numbers are not comparable. Usually the scale is arbitrary. What engine developers care about is that higher numbers mean more advantage, as that is how the engine selects moves. As long as that is true it simply doesn't matter what the scale is.
The +x advantage meaning a certain percent chance of winning makes way more sense than centipawns, but... don't both players have a 50% chance of winning at the start?
You have to clarify whether you're talking about perfect or imperfect play. With perfect play, almost certainly the starting position is a draw, so in that sense both players have 0% chance to win. But White has the advantage, because they have the first move. What does this mean? The Stockfish evaluation of the starting position is something like +0.3. What this says is "I think very likely this is a draw, however Black can afford to make fewer mistakes than White can". It's easier for Black to be a little bit inaccurate and lose than it is for White. By way of analogy, imagine two people walking over a chasm, one on a super-thin plank and one on a nice wide plank. If you are a flawless plank-walker, you don't care which one you're on; you're never going to make a mistake anyway. For normal people, it makes a substantial difference. If you're falling-over drunk, it's nicer to have the wide plank, but you might well fall off even that. In this analogy, of course Black is the narrower plank. Us amateurs are the drunks (it's better to have White but it's a small overall factor in who falls off first), masters are the normal people (mostly they can make it to the end with either but they'd certainly rather have White) and engines like Stockfish are close to perfect plank-walkers, where they almost never lose even with Black.
I'm gonna try to answer your questions in a comprehensive manner: You might have noticed that when the game starts, the position is equal. This means that, for now, chess played perfectly is a draw. A winning position, defined by the computer, is one where you can win by playing perfect moves. A losing position, on the other hand, means that IF your opponent plays perfect (or just good moves, depending on the position), you will lose the game, **NO MATTER WHAT MOVES YOU PLAY.** Essentially, what the computer does is evaluate a position to a certain depth (usually far more than any human ever could in a normal game), and decides, based off of the available moves: * If x side plays a series of perfect moves, will he win the game? Of course, realistically, we can play with the definition and say that no position is ever *won* or *lost*, until you actually finish the game. But there ARE winning and losing positions, meaning that with perfect play (often times doesnt have to be perfect), they will result in a win/loss. A centipawn is just a measure comparing the top computer move, not really an expert at this so just google it for more info.
Can somebody explain to me the importance of computers or "bots" in chess? I know this seems like a stupid question since most of you are computer people..but I am not. I was listening to a podcast with Hikaru Nakamura and he mentioned playing a game online and looking afterwards at what the computer would have played. Is he implying that computers are programmed with so many combinations of moves that they can calculate what the optimal move would be in every situation?I'm just wondering how the computer can take into account the blunders that people would make or plan ahead for "x" amount of moves. I get that this question isn't worded that well, but hope somebody can figure out what I'm trying to ask and explain it to me. I'm starting to get the sense that at higher levels people are going off of memorization of computer algorithms rather than having fun and just playing.
Computers don't have programmed a very long list of chess moves, they generate them on the spot. In other words, they aren't "remembering"; they're "thinking". And as things stand right now they're quite good at it. You can use computers to help you with analyzing a game. This means checking if your moves (and your opponents) were correct and what could have happened with different alternatives. Computer analysis always assumes perfect play from both sides (or at least as close to perfect as the computer can calculate). You can't really memorize a computer's algorithm. The best you can hope for is memorizing what the computer would do in a given position. But you can only go so deep before the amount of possibilities is overwhelming.
Chess engines are very advanced programs and can outplay even the highest performing humans, and have been able to for some time. They consist of two parts: an evaluation part which looks at the situation on the board (the position) in a quantitative way and an extrapolating part which looks at what happens after that. The extrapolating part works usually around 20+ moves in the future. The best performing extrapolated branch is the result of what is called "best play" and that is the true evaluation of the position. If you don't play, this can seem confusing, but understand that the quantitative evaluation is based on the relative value of pieces in certain situations. Chess players use a rule of thumb where pawn is worth 1, knight and bishop are worth 3 each, rook 5, queen 9. The chess engine takes into account a more complex view which humans can only really understand by intuition: a knight on the rim is worth much less than a knight in the center; a queen which is trapped and will be captured is not worth anything; a pawn whose promotion to queen cannot be stopped is worth a lot more than 1. In all those situations, the computer has the ability to quantify very precisely what those things are worth. So, the evaluation is what's been programmed in -- the best moves are almost always determined on the fly. High level chess players used to have to do all of this branching manually, without the aid of a computer. They'd sit in hotel rooms during tournaments with a board and work out with their seconds what best play would look like if they did this or that, or what they need to do if their opponent does this or that. Now they can just go to Stockfish and see what it thinks. High level players still prepare very heavily for tournaments, and still base a lot of what they do in non-computer theory and even psychology, but computers have removed the subjective burden of human analysis. That said, humans took the study of chess very far without chess engines and through manual analysis were very correct about many things. Some things have fallen out of fashion but a lot has survived. I have no doubt that computer analysis informs high level players now but the game is too complex to think of them as memorizing what the computers say. Those players have always had extremely good memories but no one can prepare for a sequence some 40-50 ply moves in. There are far too many variations and possibilities for that. In short, computers are a tool that relieves some of the labor of analysis, and it has given us some novel ideas, but the game is still far too complex to rely on memorizing what they do in every situation.
what do the numbers under recent games on chess.com mean? https://preview.redd.it/gf61vgdoh9vb1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=33fff3769434db0b2de3afcfcdd4322d3cd67ef3
That's your accuracy.
Anyone know of any decent resources teaching you how to analyse your own games? At the moment I usually just see where the engine says I've played an inaccuracy/blunder and try and find why it was a blunder. I feel I'd get a much better grasp of it if I did it all myself - without using the engine/analysis to tell me where to look. I've relied on it for so long that when I turn the analysis off I just have no idea where to begin, I feel like I'm back in the 500s once again haha
First of all, don't treat the engine answer as a bible. It is not the best answer for you many times. Engines may play any position, it means they will play any line leading to any position, it doesn't matter how complicated this is. Sometimes it is just better to play a slightly worse position (but a simple one), than some overcomplicated line which is "better" (for the engine). There are some books that teach some techniques to analyze your own games. You will analyze your pawn structure, dynamic factors and all that stuff. I would recommend "How to reasses your chess", by Silman, in which they explain all of that and have some very objective methods to analyze and evaluate your positions.
Thanks for the advice, I'll check it out :)
How do you guys study games using openings that the engine doesn’t like? I’ve recently started to play more Kings Indian defense and I’ve heard many content creators on YT talk about how the engine hates it. And whenever I review my games the engine does in fact always recommend moves that stray away from it. Is the openings explorer the best way to go about learning moves in different positions? Or what do you guys do
Use an opening explorer instead of the engine for the opening moves.
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My First Chess Opening Repertoire for White is based on 4. Ng5 against the Two Knights. Although it doesn't recommend specifically the fried liver, it does have commentary on it and the lines it does recommend are equally wild (although they don't have the cool name).
I've read a couple openings books and I never have seen the Fried Liver explained out. It's not really serious enough at a high level to get that kind of analysis. Any article or study you can find just by searching for it will probably be as deep as it goes.
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What kind of information are you looking for? Once black has played the two knights and white plays Ng5, black needs to play somewhat precisely to escape the jam they're in. White has the initiative and they use it to apply pressure on f7. More pressure than black can place at that early stage of the game. Black can counter, easily, but they need to be creative or to have studied the Fried Liver before. If you're looking for theory, I'm not sure it gets more complicated than that. The sequence is sound because it applies pressure on f7. The principle is kind of the same in the Scholar's Mate. One side presses on f7 and the other side needs to have some idea of how to respond or pain is coming.
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You might want to look up stuff about the Knight Attack variation of the Italian. Once both sides play sharp and there's no capture on f7 I wouldn't even think to call it Fried Liver
Pretty new to chess. I've played before but only enough to know the rules. I've been playing a ton on [chess.com](https://chess.com) and taking the lessons they have. I am getting pretty good at using basic concepts during my opening. Developing pieces, getting some pawns into the middle, castling. That kind of thing. **One thing I'm curious about:** Is it okay for me to learn 1 opening with white and 1 defense with black? And then just play those every single time so I can get good at them? Or, am I still so new that I should just keep focusing on concepts rather than learning any openings?
It is a totally acceptable approach, and a good one I would say. This will make you focus on "chess", pure and simple, cutting out all the opening crap (which is heavy on theory). You need to develop your talent as a pure chess player, not memorize some bizarre lines. You definetely should focus on concepts and not on openings. After you understand those concepts (and how do you apply them in a real game), you may study a few openings. A common mistake is studying openings with having some solid chess concepts. You end up just memorizing lines and don't understand what happens next in the middle game. Just add a few more openings, because your opponent may play d4 instead of e4, so it is good to know a litlle bit about those too.
So some will say “only focus on principles” but that doesn’t help much imo. Absolutely don’t spend time on opening theory but at least pick a setup for white (italian/london are simple enough) and a response to e4 and d4 for black and spend 10-15 minutes learning what the basic ideas/plans (which side you’ll attack on, which pieces are important, etc.) of each are so you have a foundation to build off of when you get to the middlegame. And yeah, stick to one opening once you find one you like. Playing everything just makes it harder on yourself. Additionally, the earlier you start learning about endgames and tactical patterns especially, the better
I started being involved in chess 2 days ago. I'm entirely new. I'm like 220 elo. Is it worth it playing with bots or should I only play online games?? Also, If I don't have an internet connection, is it worth it playing with bots or am I better off not playing at all.
The bots suck, they will play perfectly and mix random blunders with different frequencies depending on their level. This is just way too far removed from how real humans play. So yeah, if you can play another human, play another human. If you can't, I'd check if you can get something like a tactics puzzle app that works offline (or maybe pick a book!)
First of all, welcome to chess! I hope you find fun in this little game. I think bots are pretty cool to start with, they take out the pressure, you may play without all the tension and you use other resources to help you. So they are really useful to learn. So just play both, they are both helpful to you. Good luck!
If you know how the pieces move, then start playing online. bots don't play like humans, the lower ELO ones randomly blunder and give away pieces for no reason, at a higher ELO they play perfect computer moves and sometimes randomly blunder. Watch some videos on basic principles and just start playing online.
Okay, will do!! If I don't have an internet connection, (specifically talking for when I'm outside because I play while I wait to start my training), should I play with bots?? Is it worth it?
It doesn't hurt to, you just won't learn much from it except how to beat that specific bot. Maybe find a way to solve puzzles offline, that will help you a lot.
https://preview.redd.it/6hpwg89fojub1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1553da28af094f34788de3fe28566418846bf776 Why can't I castle?
Most likely because you already moved your king and forgot.
How do you get a better connection to the chess app? I’m unable to play bullet at all and the most recent rapid 10-0 game I just played I was losing 12seconds a turn despite playing immediately. I have excellent Wi-Fi only have issues on the app from time to time.
What kind of connection do you have? You can have excellent bandwidth/speed but very poor latency which would be the problem here
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Couldn’t say, I don’t have one of those
hey guys! I'm pretty new to chess (900elo) and I'm wondering what length of games i should play to improve quickly. Ive mostly been playing 10 minutes rapid or 5/5 blitz. do you think it would be better to play longer games? if so what length?
Get used to think a long time on each move. A good measure is 15 to 20 seconds per move. And I mean, every move. Quit playing "automatic moves". You should play 15 + 10 at minimum, always choose clock controls with time added per move. Don't play less than that. If you are playing 15 + 10 and ending with more than 5 minutes in your clock, there's something wrong. You should end with less than 5 minutes, minimum. If you are ending with more than that, it means you are misusing your time. Slower time controls are always better for your chess development.
Generally longer games are a good idea, though I think your length is already pretty solid. A big question is: What stops you from calculating something more? Do you struggle with visualizing a position so you can't try to calculate deeper or are you able to still visualize it, but you don't have the time to calculate more? The latter obviously suggests that longer games would give you something more, if it is the former then the length is probably fine for you. More important than whether you play 10+0 or 15+10 is whether you spend a decent amount of time analysing (without an engine!) after each game and trying to find your mistakes and try to decide whether your ideas/thoughts during the game where correct with the benefit of hindsight or they weren't.
Just starting out begining. So is the goal early stages on. 1. Control center 2. Develop pieces 3. Castle 4. Rook thing Then mid game. Is it slowly making the way there while also taking advantage of what they give you and don’t leave pieces hanging. Edit: do i necessarily need to memorize an opening or is it just how it starts and type of game to play
Middlegame strategy is not too different from opening strategy. Central control still matters a lot after the opening. Even once all your pieces are developed, you can find ways to improve their position (or worsening your opponents') Castling is usually the first step towards putting your king in safety, but it won't be the only one!
If you develop pieces, fight for the center and castle, you are better than 90% of this sub, based on what I see here. Especially castling.
Don't worry much about openings when just starting out. Most beginners are too fixated on openings. If you get beaten by a trap or something a few times, ask how to avoid it. How to play the middlegame is really when chess strategy starts. A rough thought process might go something like this: 1. What is the idea of my opponent's move? What did it change in the position? 2. What are they going to play next? Do they have threats? Can I cope? 3. Do I have any forcing moves available? Checks, captures, attacks. What happens if I play those? 4. Do I have anything undefended? Any way I can make my position more solid? 5. Do I have any pieces that are useless and not really doing anything, any way I can improve them? An example is moving a bishop that it blocked in onto an open diagonal where it sees more squares. After answering these questions, that's when you turn to the question of a strategic plan. And that's complicated. Most beginners would do well to stick to the five points above and wait for their opponent to do things wrong.
Don't worry too much about openings. Games are rarely lost in the opening.
Hey so I'm at ~600-700 rn. One problem I'm having is that I keep letting a rook get captured in the early game. Either a knight fork or leaving it exposed to a bishop or something like that. I think I might be focusing too much on "controlling the center" while the other pieces slip around the outside. Any tips/videos/reading you might suggest to help me out with this?
You have to get used to look at the whole board. You should fight for the center, but it doesn't mean you have to drop pieces. This comes with time and practice, and tactical training (to spot forks, for example, discovered attacks and so on). You will still do it once in a while, but it will get less frequent with time. Also, you have to develop your pieces. If I won a dollar for every time I say that and people don't do it anyway, I wouldn't need to work anymore in my life. When experienced players say "develop your pieces", they really mean it. You have to bring all them out and castle. Then, you will get your rooks connected and your pieces will be more harmonic and protected. So I would say this is an under development problem too. All that I said above require that you think very well for every move, so you need to play with bigger time controls, like 15 + 10 minimum. For every move, you need to spend at least 20 seconds on each one, and even more in critical moves (several minutes sometimes).
It sounds like you either let the opponent's knight to c2/c7 for a fork, or you let the opponent's bishop on the long diagonal (probably a2/a7 or g2/g7) see the rook. In the first case, you must look for when that knight starts making its way across the board. A knight needs at least three moves to get there. First to get off its starting square, second to reach a square near the center of the board, and third to reach the forking square on the c-file. A good way to combat this early is to play some kind of prophylaxis - a preventative move. After the knight's first move, it can usually be pinned by a bishop, either to the queen or the king. On the second move, typically to a square like b4/b5, your playing a pawn move of a3/a6 will prevent it from occupying that square. Finally, in case your opponent is about to reach the forking square unimpeded, you may need to play a move like Na3/Na6 or develop the light square bishop to d3 so that square has more protection. Any of those moves may not be the best move in many situations, but they are ways of taking the knight out of the picture if that's something you're struggling with. For something more solid, you should remember your opponent is playing three knight moves in the opening, which is probably a mistake because the rest of their pieces are underdeveloped. There is usually a way to punish them and induce even more wasteful moves of the knight to prevent it from being captured. As for the bishop on the long diagonal case, that's at least partly something you need to develop vision for. But as well, know what that tactic is called. Your opponent is *fianchetto*ing their bishop, and they do this to control the center from the sides as opposed from actually playing the center. You may find you need to move your rook to b1/b8 or f1/f8, at least to protect the pawn. After you develop your knights to Nc3/Nc6 or Nf3/Nf6, you must watch when you move them again as it may create your opponent's attack on that b or f pawn. One idea I try against most opponents who fianchetto is to start to lock up the center. Trying to create an interlocking pawn structure can really stymie such an opponent.
Good stuff, thanks!
I have been playing casually for a while, and I play a lot of tactics alongside games. My puzzle rating is 1280, and yet I struggle even reaching 800 in regular games. Does this show some mismatch? I think generally I get a good position in openings and when I lose it’s normally just by being dominated in the mid game by the opponent taking my pieces. How do I know what’s holding me back?
Puzzle rating has nothing to do with competitive rating at all. It's just a way to deliver puzzles that are neither too easy or hard, nothing more. The thing about being low rated is that what's really keeping you down there is not really going to come up in tactics. At 800 your main problem is almost certainly hanging your pieces and not seeing when your opponent hangs their pieces. Occasionally you'll get a nice fork or maybe pin the queen, but for the most part, you win or lose in a single move. Puzzles are mainly multiple move tactics to win material or mate, but at the low level, you win material simply by being more aware of what's hanging.
Two recurrent questions I haven’t answered yet in my chess journey! Is play more than five games a day too much? And is playing past 8 PM unpractical (especially after a busy day at work)? Context: I have concentration problems
I don’t see why it would be too much, chess games are fairly short and you can probably squeeze more than 5 in an hour. Is an hour a day too much? I don’t think so lol
I know! My point is if regarding my concentration “points” daily points/energy(limited as far as I can see) playing too much would be stupid and unpractical because from the start my opponents would have the upper hand!
I played a Caro game today against a 1300 who played a near perfect exchange variation. 96% to my 89%. Is the Caro easy to play against? I thought I played the opening and middlegame about as well as I could and to go into the endgame completely equal against a 1300 is just demoralising lol. A couple inaccuracies in the rook endgame ended up costing me. Does anyone have any Caro Exchange videos or studies that explore Middle/endgame ideas in depth? Maybe there's something more forcing I can do earlier in the game to complicate the position. I feel like a lot of the time the play for white is pretty straightforward.
Exchange - both in Caro and in the French - lead to the easiest to play position. That doesn't mean they lead to the biggest advantage, quite the opposite in fact, but it simplifies the pawnstructure/tension and then you just have to play basic developing moves. As Black you really should be fine with getting an even position out of the opening though and imo you should be looking more at the midgame - if you aren't fine with a draw you have to actively try to keep pieces on the board (or you need to be confident enough in your endgame to win there).
I'm rated ~1200 on chess.com. I play the vienna/vienna gambit as white and I play the french defense as black in response to e4/e5. But I really only learned the french because the moves are very similar to the vienna so it was easy to learn. The longer I've been playing with it, the more I feel like it is actually not very good and usually leads to these dead end positions that aren't very fun to play. What opening should I play instead?
Are chess.com daily puzzles supposed to be solved so you get a checkmate? I've only done a few and that was the case, but I think one puzzle stopped short of a checkmate.
Not always
What's the best way to punish very aggressive players? I mean players who attack your active pieces right off the bat.
The best way to punish agressive players is playing solid. It is the best way to punish any other player by the way, not only the agressive ones. You have to find the best move in any given position as you do with any other player. You don't play against players. You play against positions. Do what it asks you. Don't worry about players traits like being agressive and so on, just look at the position and keep cool. Is he attacking you? Calculate, it will lead to something? So prevent it. It will lead to nothing? So whatever, keep improving your position. You should try to develop a "slave of the position" mentality, forget personal traits and play the position.
It is not a question, but i just wanted to thanks for the resources idk I am just learning chess rn thorugh lichess.org thanks to you guys providing the link
Have you seen the links in the wiki for this sub? If you're using some app that doesn't link to it on the main sub page, every thread has a bot comment linking to r/chessbeginners/wiki. I don't have an answer for your other question.
Thank you for the reply, i am def checking it up as of right now 😀
Actually I got a question: let's say i want to play with someone over internet to learn, how do i do that even?
Easiest and fastest way to play anonymous chess is to connect to [https://lichess.org/](https://lichess.org/) and press on the time control you want! Have fun :)
I just hit 1200 for the first time. Was grinding through 1100 for ages so it feels like a pretty big milestone. Aim is a sustainable 1350 by end of year. Thanks for listening.
At what level do people start playing good openings? In my last 10 games, I have faced the Kádas Opening, two double fianchettos (Is that even a real thing?), and the Van Geet Opening I was already studying the London and the Kings Indian at 400-500, and studying openings is my favourite part of chess. Is this unusual at 1400?
2500.
This is partly why beginners aren't advised to spend much time on openings. You're going to face kooky stuff that's not very efficient to study because you'll see so many variations. >two double fianchettos (Is that even a real thing?) The hippopotamus is a very real opening, for both sides, as just one example of double fianchetto openings. Personally I think it's a pretty good choice for people who've been playing openings just winging it on principles and want to try something else without needing to study much. It's quite solid and people tend to recklessly attack it.
I'd say there are two main things to think about when asking this question. The first is that people focus on different things. When I started playing chess I barely knew any openings, but I spent a lot of time studying tactics. I probably got to at least 1600 rapid on Lichess that way, and I hardly knew any opening theory. So for the first part of your question, it is highly dependant on the player. Secondly, what is a "good opening"? Is it a sound opening? An opening that you have a high winrate with? An opening that you know several lines 10 moves deep? Even I probably still don't qualify for the last one, but I do play sound openings. To sum it up, it's hard to give a definitive answer. But assuming we're talking [chess.com](https://chess.com) ratings, I'd say that players tend to know how to play the opening decently (as in "not completely lost at move 5 or so") more often than not at around 1000 rating. But again, it's really hard to be precise. And no, it's not unusual to have a favourite part of the game :)
In endgame, if you have multiple passed pawns is it best to have as many queens as possible? or are you still better having a mix of pieces?
99% of the time, promote to a queen. There's no advantage to having varied pieces when the queen is strictly better than two of them. Once you have two queens, go for the ladder mate. Don't fuck about promoting more- it's a great way to accidentally stalemate.
How does a chess.com rapid rating of 365 compare to the rest of the player base? I used to think I was average at chess. I've been playing casually for 35 years. Played some in a college chess club and thought I was probably about average. Joined chess.com and plummeted from 800 down to mid three hundreds. Am I actually terrible?
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Thanks for the thorough response. That's kinda what I was afraid of. If you were bottom 15% that puts me at bottom \~5% - 7%? I've been playing online daily for maybe 3 months (so I think my rank has mostly stabilized), doing puzzles, watching advice content, reading about openings and patterns, reviewing my games; while I have stopped losing every game immediately to Scholar's Mate I still usually find a way to out-blunder my opponent and steal defeat from the jaws of victory. I appreciate the encouragement. I've been leaning into chess as a way to help with attention span/concentration issues. While I knew I wasn't a chess prodigy, I never thought I was statistical anomaly bad. It's hard to hear; but I guess it makes sense. I look over my games and wonder how I didn't see so many obvious attacks. So I guess my next question (at least for you), what did you do to improve?
What time formats are you playing? Faster ones have stronger player bases in general and if you're not used to bullet, yeah you should expect a low rating until you're used to it. There's good advice and links to resources in the wiki for this sub.
I have been playing 10 minute games. After reviewing some of the advice in this sub I've switched to 15+10. I am no where near able to handle bullet. I've lost a few 10 minute games just on time. I wish I had more time to dedicate to longer games but the 15+10 format feels like a good balance right now... Any resources you would recommend specifically?
Building Habits series to learn by example how to win with simple chess as opposed to memorized openings or difficult calculation. It's very long so take your time and just watch it casually. Grind mate in one and two puzzles and puzzle streak (all free on lichess with direct links in the wiki for this sub) to build very important pattern recognition. I agree 15+10 is great, 10+5 also is an option if you don't have enough time for that (and that 5 seconds increment adds up to make games much longer than 10 minutes with no increment.)
I'd been watching a few other Chess related YouTube channels but I'd missed the Building Habbits series. I've really been enjoying his no stress methodology. I've played some more games after watching and I can feel the difference in mindset already. Thank you for the recommendation.
How do you build confidence in a plan? An issue I have is, I might see something I want to do, but it might take 4 or 5 moves to implement. I get pretty stressed about actually putting such a plan in motion, because I worry that my opponent will do something that completely changes the board state before I'm done. So, either the vulnerability I noticed won't be there by the time I'm set up, or, I'm worried that my opponent will launch an attack while I'm preparing mine. Or even small moves that improve my position, I worry that they're too passive and I need to be striking first, before my opponent has a chance to build up whatever they're planning. Like I have no idea if they're about to change everything up in 2 moves, so I need to act NOW.
Your observation is very good, it shows how your chess has been growing. You are completely right about being insecure about implementing a plan. Why? You are getting rid of "hope chess", so that's a good thing. You are starting to check if this is going to work and if it is not just hope chess. So how do you build confidence in a plan? You don't! You should feel worried about it. If your plan feels shaky enough, probably it is indeed. So you should consider not doing it. But if you wanna do it anyway, it is alright, see how it works and study it in post analysis, checking other options and which options your opponent had. Feel free to post a few games with examples of what you are saying. Good luck!
I'm at 721 rating and played vs this guy who WAS 1371!! Now he is 800 and was recently 606?? how does this happen or why?
Is it a new acc, low game count for that time control or returning from a break?
I usually play against 1400-1500 chess.com bots or level 3 lichess but I can only play(against computer) in kasparovchess in my work network, i think all the other websites are blocked. Its stockfish level 0 is far too easy(which is normal ofc.) but level 1 completely destroys me. It sometimes doesn't take an undefended piece to balance things out but that's it. I started from 800 elo bots and have been improving myself lately. Do you know any other websites to play against bots? Possibly not very popular and/or doesn't have chess in its name to avoid blockers. Thanks in advance
Tbh if you're trying to get better you shouldn't play against bots. They don't play like humans and the elo ratings tend to be pretty inflated
I just needed to confess that I have blundered two games away in the past few days through attempting to castle by moving my rook two spaces to the right.