What’s a good way to learn

Dear Rubixcuber,

I am 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 general way to learn. 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 analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals.

So, the question you asked is not so easy to answer, but I can tell you one thing for sure. In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). 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 really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

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

Lots of helpful, instructive resources for learning and improving your chess here....check it out...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell

I have often recommended "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess" by GM Patrick Wolff. It thoroughly covers all the main aspects of the game, has so many diagrams that you can read it without a board (for the most part), and has dozens of puzzle/exercises to test what you've learned. In addition, it gives a lot of recommendations as to where to go next. That book, plus John Bartholomew's "Climbing the Ratings Ladder" videos on YouTube, plus playing on this site, will give you a great start.

Everyone learns differently. I found GM Yasser Seirawan Winning Series books helpful. For the beginner these would be Play Winning Chess, Winning Chess Openings and Winning Chess Tactics. There are many great videos on the Internet by him, too. Always have a chess set out to follow along examples.

Practice, play and analyze your games as well. Good luck.

what is a good place to start for a person trying to understand the game. i have played with friends but mostly we only knew how to move the pieces and what a checkmate is. never really played with a strategy. today is my first day trying to really understand the game. any idea where to begin.