How to reduce inaccuracies

I really should make a standard posting for this.

- Follow general chess principles such as focusing on development of your pieces in the opening.

- Solve puzzles daily and before you play chess games, so you can learn popular chess motives and, with harder puzzles, train calculation. GM Nakamura says chess.com has the best puzzles, but they cost something. If you are a cheapskate like me, both lichess.com and chesspuzzle.com offer free puzzles, even without account. You can also do a daily survival puzzle rush on chess.com.

- Up to rating ~1000, play slow time controls, so you can properly think of your moves, do blunder checks, etc. At most maybe 5|5 Blitz, but some say 30|0 Rapid.

- Analyze your games.

- If possible, get a coach

- Study games of the masters, preferably with commentary of said masters

- Watch the speedruns by GM Naroditsky on YouTube, they are super instructive and probably the best free resource (at least that I could find, and GM Nakamura recomments them, too). There are of course many other such resources on YouTube and elsewhere on the net.

- Books help too, especially with endgames I know of no good free source of a complete set of endgame skills.

- From about rating 1000 on, opening knowledge will help. Before that point you can do standard openings, too, but you probably wont be able to punish errors in the opening yet.

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond…

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

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Dear Djmeowzz

My name is Gabor Balazs. I’m a Hungarian FIDE Master and a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you.  Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one given way to learn and improve.

First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analyzing your own games. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem is that it can't explain to you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why it is so good or bad.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main areas (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames) and if you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students enjoy the lessons because they cover multiple aspects of chess in an engaging and dynamic way, keeping the learning process both stimulating and efficient. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

If you would like to learn more about chess, you can take private lessons from me (you find the details on my profile) or you can visit my Patreon channel (www.patreon.com/Bgabor91), where you can learn about every kind of topics (openings, strategies, tactics, endgames, game analysis). There are more than 30 hours of educational videos uploaded already and I'm planning to upload at least 4 new videos per week, so you can get 4-6 hours of educational contents every month. I also upload daily puzzles in 4 levels every day which are available with a FREE subscription.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck with your games!

I'm currently an "advanced" beginner and have been playing about two years. I didn't start making steady progress until I dropped back to very slow time controls and focused more on the thinking aspect of playing instead of reflex or intuition. Nothing fancy, just things like patiently following the opening principles and considering why my opponent made the move they chose.

Great chart! At my beginner level, answering these questions thoughtfully is the difference between losing and winning, or maybe a draw. Especially fatal when I don't ask the first one ...