Feeling extremely stupid

I learned the basic moves of chess when I was a little kid... but nothing beyond that. Up until last week, I had maybe played 30-40 chess games in my entire life, both OTB and online/vs bots. I never really tried to focus or think very much, just playing quite casually.

Now that i'm 24, I started chess as a serious hobby a week ago, and I feel like I have some sort of mental disability... even though I am a PhD student, so something doesn't check out. I'm no Magnus in the brains department, but I know that i'm not slow also, lol. Maybe the fact that i'm chronically sleep deprived... but I can still function, so it should not be affecting me this much.

I started out with 1200 ELO for some reason, lost every single game I played for the next two days which was quite demoralizing, then arrived at 450 elo... and that has been slowly going down over the last 4 days. Now at 330.

In every single game, one or all of these things happens:

1) I blunder my queen, plus at least one other piece.

2) A knight invades my side, taking 3-4 pieces before leaving, and he's positioned in such a way that I can't do anything about it.

3) I miss the opportunity to take a free piece. How can it be that I keep missing such obvious things, game after game? This is frustrating beyond belief...

Thanks a lot for these tips!

You should have selected 'New to chess' when you were asked. It's not that you are bad and had a lose strike, it's just you are 400~ rated and found your place. Since you are PhD material you probably have enough memory and intelligence to climb up to at least 1200.

Think of it this way: How long does it take you to reach PhD level? And much do need to study for that? If you know (as you probably do) the answer to that, it takes about the same amount of studying and learning to be (really) good at chess. I mean like PhD-level good...; )

And chess is more general in terms of the intelligence needed. It takes a lot of memoratizion, hence you need to play a lot games. As one José Raul Capablanca said: "To be good at chess, you have to lose hundreds of games" (freely paraphrased). So there's some indication as to what it takes to be good at chess.

Baby steps and patience is what you need when learning chess.

Don't feel bad about it. You sound like an intelligent guy so I'm sure you'll make progress but with chess I think experience counts for a lot and brand new to it you don't have the experience that helps with instincts for positions and common traps/tactics to watch for. If you stick at it, I am quite sure you will improve

Nobody walks into a new skill and instantly becomes a Master of It. It all takes varying degree of time and effort to adapt and learn the nuances of it. Chess is no different. It's relatively easy to learn how to play but you can spend a lifetime trying to master it and may never reach it. Moreso, the more you understand about chess, the more you realize how little you really know about it. Take Magnus Carlsen, clearly the best player in chess at present, World Champion for years, who readily admits he still is confused about various aspects of the game.  So do not despair at your initial struggles with chess, it is normal and expected. What's most important is identifying what's happening that causes you to lose and figuring out how to avoid these oversights in the future. If you plan to take chess in a more serious manner, I recommend you look to create some type of learning program for yourself- not necessarily go running off to find a coach to teach you but utilize the many (and much of it free) material and tools to learn chess on the internet. Give yourself a break too, plan to lose many of the games you play in the near future but make it part of your study program by practicing and learning from the losses by analyzing them afterwards. 

A study program that I recommend for new players (assuming you already learned the basic rules of how to play like how the pieces move and such) is to start small but consistently. Making grand, time-consuming programs sets you up for failure and unnecessary fatigue- keep it short and fun and you'll more likely stick to it and see improvement over time. Something like the following could be a good start for you:

1. Solve at least 10 puzzles every day. Take as much time on them as you need to try and get the puzzle correct, and review any puzzle missed to better understand what you overlooked.

2. Play at least 1 game a day, preferably with as much time as possible. For example, playing blitz can be exciting and fun, but you'll likely end up developing bad habits and ideas from it and ultimately may negatively impact your play overall. I wouldn't play anything with less than 10 minutes per player and the longer the better. 

3. Consider having an ongoing Daily game of chess. Each player can have as little as one day to make a move and as much as several weeks depending on what you choose. This gives you a lot of time to really think through each position, make notes, and do some calculation, and gives you the opportunity to play your best chess and any mistakes can be seen as less of an oversight on your part and more of a lack of understanding or knowledge of the game that you can then look into becoming familiar with.

4. Review any and all games you play. You should be able to cite the mistakes made in the game and likely cause of those mistakes. Over time it should help you uncover areas you need to focus on improving. 

5. Pick a topic or theme and spend at least 15 minutes a day working on it. It can be a Chess book, an interactive Chess lesson feature such as those on Chess.com or ChessAble.com. I recommend prioritizing first the understanding Opening principles and basic endgame play such as checkmates, king and pawn play, and promoting pawns. You may also wish to invest more time into learning the different tactical motifs and concepts and practicing them by solving more chess puzzles.

6. Review a master chess game each day. You likely won't understand why many of the moves were made but you'll begin to learn the topical ideas master's play as they open the chess game, transition into the middle game, and then possibly transition into the endgame, learning various patterns as well.

All of the above could be done within an hour or two each day. Whatever you end up doing, keep it fun and fresh so you stay engaged with it. Don't make it into an unpaid internship scenario where you may down the road see it more as a chore. I also recommend you ask stronger players to review your games, play games with you and offer advice. Often a stronger player will be able to highlight weaknesses in your play by more readily capitalizing on your mistakes and can communicate your mistakes and address concepts you may be unaware of that are causing your mistakes in postmortem analysis. Approach losses as learning opportunities and try to disassociate the losses from feeling inferior. Anticipate the losses, use them as fuel to learn and improve, and the wins will come along soon enough. Have a great time with chess and feel free to reach out to others whenever you have questions!

-Jordan 

Thank you very much Jordan, for that in-depth answer! I will try to do all of those things as much as I can :)

I had to lose thousands of games before becoming a half-decent player.

One essential requirement is stubbornness... or even bloody-mindedness. If you are the sort to quit in discouragement after a few (or a few hundred) losses, you'll never be more than a casual player.

It pays off in the long run, though. I drew a game against Tal back in 1988.

I see. So it just seems like chess has a brutally long learning curve, that is steep from the very beginning... well, i'm up for the challenge!

!!

Seriously, try not to worry, Svanderov. You'll be winning at least half your games soon if you aren't already. Then blundering less as you check over time will have your rating go up (slow time controls). Then puzzles will help your calculation and your rating will go up. Then watching master games (like the ongoing Grand Prix games!) and trying to guess the moves will make you think about if your could do a similar opening. You study and your rating goes up. Etc. 

It started as a simul game, but by about move 25 it was the only game still going and Tal pulled out a clock and the second half of the game was played head-to-head.

That is so f'ing awesome!

Sicilian Najdorf, of course. What else would you play against Tal?

I strongly relate to this. I was in chess club in 7th grade, but didn't play much for many years and then picked up chess seriously about a year ago. Similarly to Svanderov, consider myself reasonably intelligent and good at logic, games, and puzzles so the early days of chess were rough.

I'm sure it never goes away, missing moves and making mistakes is always frustrating, but it is fun to improve.

I worked at my game for about 6 months, and now I don't play as often, but I've been able to reach ~1250 blitz, ~1300 Rapid, and ~2400 puzzles. My starting was around 700 Blitz, but I did a good amount of study before playing. Settling on some openings and picking up some opening courses, analyzing my games, and then doing puzzles helped me most.

I play less consistently as I found I was starting to rage too much at losses, but still do puzzles on most days and enjoy watching chess content online.

Caro-Kann : White is 33% wins, 43% draws, 24% losses. Total: 54.5% for White

Sicilian Najdorf: White is 29% wins, 48% draws, 23% losses. Total: 53% for White.

Figures taken DIRECTLY from the Lichess Master's data-base.