middle game, possibly the opening problems

I feel that I am playing solid through the opening and middle game, but the game report tells me I’m blundering and making mistakes/inaccuracies. They are well founded sometimes, but when I play, what I think is a good game, it shows that I have mistakes and inaccuracies throughout my game, although these “mistakes” are sometimes me developing a plan. I know I’m a beginner, but I want to get better and eliminate blunders/mistakes when I can. Can anyone tell me if this is something to look over while developing a plan or something I need to take a second look at.

As a beginner it will be very taxing and time consuming to calculate long lines and make plans longer than 2-3 moves every time it is your turn while you are playing a blitz or rapid game. Spend time analyzing your mistakes after your games, and try to understand why it was an error, not just look for a better move alone.

Fundamentals come first: develop your pieces and get your king to safety. You are not going to win if you have no pieces on the board to attack with, and neither if your king is vulnerable in the open for your opponent to attack. Are you trading just to trade, or does it make your position better or your opponents position worse? How can your opponent punish your (short and sweet) plan? Are you leaving behind a weakness?

Play slower time formats while you are learning, rapid would be far more instructive than blitz.

Pieces out, king safe, analyze games and understand why the move was a mistake, play a lot of games vs. humans. Chess.com has a lessons feature I think, and there are also lots of free resources for beginners on youtube.

What’s the importance of a human competitor, I guess obvious reasons, but wouldn’t playing a computer be just as good or better than playing a human. I do find myself playing computers quite often.

well, if you did not make mistakes......you would be a grandmaster. So...you are going to make mistakes. Every move you make might be a mistake in the computers opinion. Try playinga top rated engine and see how long it takes to thrash you. People make more realistic errors than a computer bot that's programmed to make errors. I find the computer doesn't like sacrifices, calls them blunders, even when it leads to a win. Sacrificing pieces you won't need to open up attack lines works fine.....at lower chess levels.

My experience of playing the computer was that it wasn't very realistic. For example it would play a good opening but make terrible blunders in the middlegame. People are more consistent, they dont play a 1400 opening and 400 middlegame. It was easy to win, I would offer a big sacrifice, the computer would ignore the free material and leave me with a great position. This was a year ago on a 1200 rating. It may have improved.

As a fellow beginner, I find the game report to be overwhelming at times. When I first joined chess.com, I basically only reviewed my blunders. Maybe also 1 or 2 mistakes, but inaccuracies were definitely too nuanced for my limited knowledge level. With more experience, however, I began gradually diving deeper into the report. Regarding your specific question, it seems like you may be developing plans that are easy to defend and counter. You may not have noticed the flaw while playing against another beginner, but a better player would have made you pay and the report will grade you as if your opponent is a GM. Having said all that, I know how it feels to be proud of a tough win only to find out that I actually played like trash and basically just got lucky my opponent was worse!

Because humans make natural errors, just the way you also would. Computers on the other hand blunder on purpose, which makes for an unnatural experience in contrast to how actual human vs human games would play out. When analysing a game vs. a human opponent, you can learn from your own mistakes but also from theirs. This both during and after the game.

The engine will play decent chess and then just give away pieces knowingly, for no reason. Now compare this to humans, which make oversights on accident. Even if the mistake was made because of a faulty plan or idea, looking at that plan can help you understand WHY the error came to be, and thus improve your own chess.

I’m hovering around 800 in 30-min games. What I find helpful in evaluating the game report is to focus on the moves that the computer associates with huge swings against me in the game. Since those scores are inclusive of the entire line of moves the computer predicts into the future, those big swings can help me identify where I made an error in judgment that closed off a good outcome.

Regarding the computer vs human opponent question, their styles of play are so different that if your goal is to win against human players in the long run, why not practice against them now? (As others have said, the computer seems to mix credible play with random nutty blunders, and playing very safe while watching for and capitalizing on blunders is not always as productive against human players.)