Switching to more advanced tactics

I'm practicing chess for a really short time (~1 week) and while I mostly play with the computer, I've realized that the way of playing I have isn't a good strategy. My main strategy now is: 1. Develop my pieces 2. Get rid of all of the pieces of the other player 3. Get the other player to have a checkmate by getting them to a corner with rooks/kings And I'm very well aware that I cannot keep playing like this, so my question is - how did you get to play in a more advanced way? How to move into seeing patterns while playing, so I can play in a correct way? Would you focus mostly on playing full games all the time, or would you focus more on doing puzzles? Or maybe there are books that you could recommend? Thank you for all your help!

Working through a fully annotated collection of games would probably help.  No, you won't be able to duplicate what they are doing, but at least you will have an idea of how chess should be played.  Often recommended is Logical Chess Move by Move Every Move Explained by Irving Chernev.  Also make sure you go over every game to see what you could have done better rather than just jumping into another one.  And board vision is the single most important thing a beginner can develop so you can stop dropping pieces and missing opportunities.  Tactics are usually thought of as the best way to do that.  Not sure how many tactics (puzzles) you get a day here, but do all you can.  Maybe google something like best free chess tactics for more.  And try to have fun...No, seriously, it takes a lot of effort over a considerable period of time to become even mediocre at this game, so don't be too hard on yourself.  Oh and of course if you have some spare cash, a diamond membership here provides some wonderful tools to work with.  Good luck!

Thank you so much for your help!

You're quite welcome.  All these threads are archived so check out some of these previous threads; and of course slightly different search terms will turn up even more.

https://www.chess.com/forum/search?keyword=best%20beginner%20advice

So basically, you are asking how to improve. Well, if that is the case, here you go:

https://www.chess.com/blog/nklristic/the-beginners-tale-first-steps-to-chess-improvement

I hope it will be useful to you. Welcome and good luck.

More advanced eh? Calculating Ahead - Chess.com

Hi! My name is Lauren Goodkind and I'm a chess coach based in California.  

   It seems like you are serious about improving in chess.    Therefore, I have some tips for you: 

1) I would play full games with a slow time control (at least 20 minutes), so you have time to think.  Always ask questions, such as "If I move here, is it safe?" and "If I move here,  where is my opponent going to move?"

2) Solve puzzles to help you with tactics.  I offer 500 chess puzzles on my website for the beginner: https://www.chessbylauren.com/two-choice-puzzles.php  

These puzzles will help you train at least one move ahead and help you recognize basic tactics, such as fork, skewer, and more.  

3) I recommend two books for you that are available on Amazon.com: 

-50 Poison Pieces (Readers have to figure out why capturing an unprotected piece is a mistake) 

-Queen For A Day: The Girl's Guide to Chess Mastery (readers get to play an ENTIRE chess game with fictional character, Sophia!)  And this book is endorsed by the 2019 US Women's Chess Champion!  

I hope that this helps!  

Thank you everyone for your help, I'll look into suggested books and resources!

One thing I would recommend is play live games.  Play slow controls like 15|10.  Computers play very different than people especially at lower levels.  They are set to randomly blunder and even when not blundering will make unnatural moves.  You won't be able to gain instictive pattern recognition if you just play computers.

knowing what plan to follow in most positions is likely the key to advancing to intermediate and beyond that.

it's either you go through a book of typical pawn structures with plans included, and then conforming your opening so you can reach at least one of those typical pawn structures or

get an annotated game collection of a player written by the player himself with lots of words and analysis. you want to assimilate how the player thinks, plays his openings and the position arising from his openings. this will be a limited number of pawn structures, but you get the bonus of possibly adopting the player's repertoire since he's done some of the work for you already by explaining how he plays them

i did the first one and it's an ongoing process. i have improved a lot since the days i only solved puzzles and had a basic algorithm for finding moves.

tactics is the detail of how you are going to implement the plan. whether something can be exploited in a different move order and so on. but the plan itself you have to see that being implemented in action, in its purest form. there are only a few plans available to both sides for every major pawn structure so you should be able to go through all of them.

in a way this gives you an easier time choosing openings as you just need to know what pawn structures they lead to and if you have already studied that then it's easy to make a decision.

this does mean that fringe openings, and anything not leading to a typical pawn structure is out of the equation. but that's a good thing. you don't need to play gimmicky openings to get past the hump.