I think that you are over-thinking the whole mess.
Also, only playing 14 games in three years... Perhaps you are playing games elsewhere. If not, about five games per year seems too few to get the hands-on experience needed. But maybe you are more interested in being a theoretician.
Anyway, good luck. 
Is Part III out yet?
Is Part III out yet?
Not Yet. I'll start working on it soon.
I think that you are over-thinking the whole mess.
Also, only playing 14 games in three years... Perhaps you are playing games elsewhere. If not, about five games per year seems too few to get the hands-on experience needed. But maybe you are more interested in being a theoretician.
Anyway, good luck.
I'm not over thinking it. This is how all people learn. Now, others may apply the principles differently then I do. But they do use them. And where are you getting 14 games from? I have played over 99 games on chess.com. 65 of them in online chess. And I play at my chess club every week.
Speed Chess is a HORRIBLE way to learn chess, because all it will do is cause errors which will be reinforced into bad habits. these habits will then take 3x as long to overwrite with good habits because of Cognitive/Emotive Dissonance. Plus many GMs find it a waste of time to analize speed chess games because speed chess cannot be played accurately due to time constrants.
The only person I know of who has gotten to a high level primarily playing speed chess is Nakamura, which is more of the exception that proves the rule. A lot of Grand Masters, including Kramnik think anything under rapid is a bad idea for your chess.
And I have a question for everyone. This is the second time someone has made a judgment about me based soley on my speed chess. (Which I am the first to admit sucks.) Is speed chess the only thing people look at on this site? If you want any accurate judgment of my playing look at my Online/turn based play.
I don't look at it at all. Speed chess is for fun. It is not a good measure of analytical capability and theoretical knowledge. Why should you care what other people think?
Five-minute games can have some benefit in running through openings and trying them out (at least my friend who is 2150 USCF tells me so). That's about it, other than entertainment value. It can actually hurt your classical chess if you play it too much...but if you are having fun then keep doing it.
Well, 1. I honestly don't care what other people think. I jus want to know why people tend to ONLY look at someones speed games to judge someone's ability. It's just completely inaccurate. 2. As far as speed chess for learning is concerned. I have also heard that speed chess can be good for building intuition. There are two kinds of intuition: natural intuition, which is based purely on a feeling and players like Tal (Attack), Petorian (Defense), and Capablanca (Pawn Structure) had this natural Intuition. The second is developed intution, which can be learned through pattern recognition. This is because during a game you will see a position, and you might be able to completely place why, but you will know a move is good or bad because you have seen the position before. And speed chess can be good for this because it exposes you to a LOT of different positions over a short period of time, helping to build your pattern recognition.
And speed chess can be good for this because it exposes you to a LOT of different positions over a short period of time, helping to build your pattern recognition.
It's certainly better than doing nothing, but is it the BEST way? Well, don't laugh but in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, Pandolfini says to Josh Waitzkin that speed chess will completely screw up his "real" chess. That point is emphasized multiple times in the movie, for what it's worth. I have heard that going through Masters' games can help ingrain patterns. You would probably be better off flipping through those online (at a comfortable speed) than looking at or making poor moves in speed chess -- assuming your goal is to improve your slow chess. I would also go through the games of Master slowly, with annotations. I'm wondering if speed chess does more harm than good. I would defer to a chess instructor and/or chess Master for the answer.
1. I LOVE Searching for Bobby Fischer! So no, I'm not going to laugh at all.
2. As far as speed chess hurting your game, the answer absolutely is yes. At least up untill say a 2000 elo. And the answer is just basic logic. How many times has a player under, say 1800, made a mistake because they simply missed a move, check, or tactic playing over the board? Now think about how many more of those mistakes you and I have made over the board? Then think about a person who is 1300 or below? If we are making those mistakes playing a 2 hour game or longer, just imagine how many more mistakes will be made playing speed chess? Then on top of that add in the fact that you are able to play more overall games of speed chess than you are slow chess. This means you are creating bad habits, faster than if you were playing slow chess. This is why Andrew Soltis in his Learning Chess Made Easy suggest playing Postal Chess, or what is Online chess for Chess.com. The reason is it gives you time to think and ingrain good habits.
3. As far as Grandmaster Games. I have no doubt going over granmaster games will help your chess. This is one reason why I read as many books as I do. They are FULL of granmaster games. My issue with the advice of going over grandmaster games is; if a beginner just gets online and goes through games in a database, he or she won't know what they are looking at. Half the moves are incomprehensible to someone who doesn't know what is going on. This is one reason I read so much and take notes. I am accumulating as much knowledge as I can so that when I do go over the games of Capablanca, Petrosian, Karpov, Reshevsky, Tal, and Kramnik (just to hame a few) I will have a foundation of knowledge to build on and use to understand what I am looking at. First you need to have some instructiron. Then you need to see how to apply it. Then you apply it to your own games. It's how I've been getting better. And over the last few months I've notice a lot of little improvements in my play and thinking.
Did you list your recommended books anywhere?
There is a list of most of the books i use in my first psot on how to learn chess. Besides for Openings are you looking for anything specific?
No. Books on all aspects of the game are of interest.
Ok.
Positional Play:
Simple Chess by Michael Stean (Fantastic book. It really helped me understand the basics of Positional Play including weak squares. Plus it gives you a whole system to use for evaluation and planning.)
Chess Secrets: Giants of Strategy by Neil Mcdonald. This books is amazing. I have never read a book that explains strategy this way. It's basically a much easier to read My System. And it will really help you understand the Rook.
My System by Aron Nimzowitsch. This is THE book you must read on chess. If you are really serious about it you have to get through it. The best version is the one from Quality Chess because it is unedited. The actual material on chess is not hard to understand, especially if you have read the first two books listed. But it is somewhat hard to read because it was written in the 1920s and his non-chess examples to explain ideas are horrible. But you have to read it. It really did change the way I play and look at the board.
As far as I'm concerned these are THE only three books on positional play you will ever need. And I suggest you read them in the order I have given them because Simple Chess will give you a foundation, and Giants of Strategy will help you expand on Simple Chess and really help you understand My System. And when you are done with those three I suggest you reread Giants of Strategy because it will help explain and solidify My System. These books will repeat a lot of ideas, and that's good. Repetition is the Royal Road to Learning. But they will also expand on these ideas.
Attack:
Simple Attacking Plans by Fred Wilson. This is a great tiny little book. It gives you some basic plans of attack and some principles to follow. The games in it are great and it's a good place to start.
Attacking the King by Yakov Neishtadt. This book will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about attacking. It Also has the best explanation of tempo and Initiative I have read so far. It's great and it talks about all aspects of attacking. As far as I know it's out of print but you can find it here for $4. http://www.amazon.com/Attacking-King-Macmillan-Chess-Library/dp/0020294387/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1414864749&sr=8-3&keywords=attacking+the+king
The Art of Attack in Chess by Vladimir Vukovic. This is THE manual on attacking play. It will serve you for your entire chess career just like My System will. But it's advanced and can be hard to read, hence the first two books. Haven't gotten to it yet but I will.
Again read these books in the order I have given them and you will do great.
Tactics
The two books I have found the best on tactics are Predators at the Chess Board by Ward Farnsworth. They are fantastic, have a tone of examples and give you a way to think about tactics during a game. He also has a website called chess-tactics.org. It has all of the content from the books for free.
Pawn Structure
If you want to understand Chess, you must understand pawns.
Understanding Pawn Play and Dynamic Pawn Play by Drazen Marovic are all about how to handle pawns in the center of the board. The first book deals with your basic weak pawns, Isolated Pawn, Backwards Pawn, Doubled Pawn etc. The second book deals with the five pawn centers: open, closed, semi-closed, mobile and dynamic. If you want to be able to plan during a game. Read these two books because it really is all about pawns.
Pawn Power in Chess by Kmoch. This is the standard on pawn play, but it's really hard for some people to read because he uses a lot of language NO ONE else does. But the actual examples are worth memorizing and will really help. But right now I'm finding the first two books on pawns I mentioned the most helpful.
Pawn Structure Chess by Andy Soltis, and Winning Chess Middlegames by Ivan Sokolov are both about pawn structures. The Soltis book is about the pawn structures you get out of the opening. If you want to understand the opening you MUST understand the pawn structure you have. The second book is about various pawn structures in the middlegame.
The Opening
Mastering the Opening by Johan Hellsten. This is a great book on opening strategy. it gives you the strategy on which all openings are based. it really helps.
Endgame:
Silman's Endgame Course by Jeremy Silman. This is a great book about the endgame it will get you started. It arranges everything by playing strength; everything you need to know for a 1000 level player etc. This goes all the way up to 2400. Like I said it's a great start but it's incomplete.
Mastering Endgame Strategy by Johan Hellsten. I think you should probably read this book first. It gives you a principled and strategic understanding of the Endgame, which is a good foundation.
Dvoretsky's Endgame manual: This is the Standard on the Endgame. Very complete and Accurate. Advanced.
There is a book coming out called Liquidation at the Chessboard. It comes out on December 7th. It's about the transition from the middle game into a pawn ending. I have a feeling it will be great because I haven't found a book that talks about this. Plus understanding pawn endings are essential to the endgame and actually winning games.
Secrets of Pawn Endings. The standard on pawn endings. it will tell you everything you need to know.
Defense
Starting out: Defensive Play by Angus Dunnington. A great little book that goes over topics which a lot of books don't.
Art of Defense by Andrew Soltis. Gives you the basics of defensive play.
How to Defend in Chess by Colin Crouch. This will teach you how to defend using 17 games form Lasker. And 17 games from Tigran Petrosian. it's great.
I will give give you more books on different topics later. I have to do right now but these will get you started.
Senchean, sorry if I misstated your game count. I clicked on your wall and clicked the games tab. Right now it shows only 11, even though this doesn't correlate with those on your activity tab.
You might want to make a career as a technical writer. That's a compliment.
To continue:
The Sacrifice
Understanding the Sacrifice by Dunnington. This goes over the positional features necessary to know when it is safe to make a sacrifice or not.
Positional Chess Sacrfices by Mihai Suba.
Sacking the Citadel: The History, Theory, and Practice of the Classic Bishop Sacrifice. This is the only book I know of, of its kind which does exactly what it says and goes over the Greco Sacrifice, also known as the Bishop Sacrifice or the Greek Gift. This is where the Bishop is takes the pawn on h7 against the Castled Position in order to attack the king.
Dynamics
How to Play Dynamic Chess by Valeri Beim which goes over dynamic play such as how to use tempo, initiative, and Sacrifice
Dynamic Strategy by Mihai Suba. This is the book on Dynamic play, but it is advanced and almost zen like so read How to play Dynamic Chess first.
Soviet Classics
Soviet Chess Strategy by Allexey Suetin.
A Contemporary Approach to the Middlegame by Allexey Suetin. Suetin was a major Soviet trainer and strategist. He was the trainer and second for Tigran Petrosian and helped him win the World Championship.
Soviet Middlegame Technique by Romanov
Questions of Modern Chess Theory by Lipnitsky. This book changed a lot of how chess is thought at top levels and was a major influence for both Karpov and Fischer, who learned to speak russian just so he could read it.
All of the russian strategy books and My System plus Chess Praxis are available through Quality Chess.
Senchean, sorry if I misstated your game count. I clicked on your wall and clicked the games tab. Right now it shows only 11, even though this doesn't correlate with those on your activity tab.
You might want to make a career as a technical writer. That's a compliment.
The technical writer comment made me laugh out loud. I could have had a writing minor in college but didn't want to take technical, poetry, or bussiness writing. The reason I can be so technical and precise is because I'm a philosopher. Also known as a practitioner of unemployment.
As far as the chess record. it's not really your fault. And maybe it is an issue with the way our profiles are presented. I don't know. It's just it seems all anyone pays attention to on here is speed chess. When honestly, I don't even like speed chess that much. I prefer OTB. And if I can't do that then online chess.
"It's just it seems all anyone pays attention to on here is speed chess. When honestly, I don't even like speed chess that much. I prefer OTB. And if I can't do that then online chess."
I'm with you 100% on this. We both consider chess as a thinking man's game. This sets us apart, odd to the many.
And chess ITF (I get tired of saying OTB so I just coined a new acronym for "in the flesh") is the only form of chess that is real to me. This other stuff is convenient and efficient, but it is plastic or synthetic chess.
But life is a series of tradeoffs. I just had a meal that came in a cardboard box. It was convenient and efficient too.
Hmmm...this may sound like a joke. But, you talk about how different people learn differently and then go on to write paragraph after paragraph without a single graphic or puzzle. I am a visual and kinesthetic learner. See and doer. If you understand there are different types of learners try and involve those in your future posts
Hmmm...this may sound like a joke. But, you talk about how different people learn differently and then go on to write paragraph after paragraph without a single graphic or puzzle. I am a visual and kinesthetic learner. See and doer. If you understand there are different types of learners try and involve those in your future posts
Principle and Post 2 will talk about the three different learning systems and methods on how to use them. For you I"m assuming you learn best by either watching people play, watching video lessons and actually playing yourself. And if you are reading a book you probably use either a program like game editor on chess.com or a real board so you can physically move the pieces. Also, if you have to read something, occupy your hands. Play with a ball, or some dice, whatever. This will help keep your mind occupied so you can concentrate.
This method also works really well for people who have ADD. The problem with those with ADD is they have no way to filter out distractions. So by occupying their hands it helps them focus, because they have a consistant, constructive distraction. It's strange, but it works.
I haven't used any diagrams because right now I'm just trying to get the information out there. And I don't think it's a joke.
I wrote the “How to Learn Chess” forum topic over ten months ago, and recently it has gotten more views, and comments. You can find it here: http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/how-to-learn-chess I don't exactly know why it suddenly has renewed interest but I do appreciate it. I have learned a lot from going through the program I created. I am no where near done, and I have made several revisions to it. But in the spirit of this renewed interest I have decided to expand upon the original article and share some of the thoughts and lessons I have learned during my journey. What these new posts will be about are an expansion of the learning principles I outlined in the first article and how to use and apply them to one's chess study.
First, I have added several new principles to the original list. They now include:
I will write these articles in this order, each one expanding on a single principle. I will start with, “The best way to find a solution is to accurately define the problem.”
First, why do you start with accurately defining the problem? Isn't the problem already well defined? I wish to learn chess. And to a small extent this answers our question. But it isn't well defined. We need to know what chess actually is. And from there we will be able to determine a way to start learning it. If we don't do this, we will waste a lot of time and energy that could have simply been put to better use.
For example, when I was in school I was terrible at math. I remember in fourth grade crying when I first learned long division because the damn problem simply wouldn't come out right. And I have ALWAYS had problems with math. I HATE math! But several months ago I was at a book store and found a book called “Pre-Algebra Demystified. I liked it because it only dealt with one idea at a time, and it was part of an entire step by step course allowing me to follow it as deeply as I wanted to go in the subject. So I got it. While going through basic multiplication problems, I was getting the answers wrong. Thirteen years after being out of school I was still having basic problems with math. Now, I knew for a fact that I know how the specific operation worked. But for some reason the answer was incorrect..
Then I realized, the operations were in fact correct but I would occasionally write a number down wrong. So even though the process was done correctly, and the answer for what was actually multiplied was correct, the overall answer was wrong because what was written down was wrong. So I was more careful and started getting the right answers. All this time I thought I was simply bad at math, which didn't make sense considering I'm a philosopher and highly trained and successful in logic. But in actuality it was simply a problem of copying down the problem and answers correctly. And this is why you accurately define the problem. By doing so, I figured out my trouble with math, a problem I have had for over 25 years. And you can use the same process to identify any problem you have with chess, or in life in general.
What is our problem and how do we accurately define it?
In order to learn something, we must first know what it is we are learning. So we need to know what chess is. Now I know what some of you are thinking, it's a game. And this is true, but what kind of game is it? It's a strategy game, with the goal of checkmating the enemy king. And we checkmate the king with pieces and pawns. So, even with this basic definition we have some idea of what we need to know. We need to understand how the pieces and pawns work including the king, what checkmate is, and how to achieve it with those pieces and pawns.
This seems simple, and we learn the basics of all of this within our first lesson. But as anyone who has played chess knows, doing this and doing it well are incredibly more complicated. It's so complicated hat chess is considered the most complicated game ever invented. In fact it is so complicated that in Mike Henebry's “Chess Words of Wisdom: The, Principles, Methods, and Essential Knowledge of Chess,” a 496 page book, not including the acknowledgments or index, on the whole topic of chess. And it has NO diagrams at all. The whole thing is just words. All he wanted to do was gather all the knowledge he had read into one location. The table of contents 13 chapters. Those chapters are further broken down into 85 topics with 219 individual concepts covered. I don't know if that is all of the information one needs to learn chess at a high level, but it does give us a good idea of how much one would have to master in order to get better. Unfortunately though, the knowledge of chess strategy and tactics is only half the problem. The other half is the person playing the game.
I'm assuming most people who are reading this article have read at least something about chess strategy and tried to apply it to their games. And unless they are a chess prodigy it is very difficult to do. I remember the first time I actually learned about the center. I had played chess for years with my father, and never even realized the board had a center and that it was strategically important. And yes, we played badly. We didn't even know how to castle. And even after I learned about the center it was still very difficult to use that information to my advantage. First, there was the issue of remembering it all, and then there was the issue of applying it properly to my games.
Moreover EVERY person has Ideas about what chess is, and how it is played at top levels. This is their worldview about chess. And everyone's worldview of chess is wrong when they first start playing. We think things like, it's all about attacking, or using your queen, I need to see every single possibility on the board during every single move in order to play well. We think we need to calculate 20 moves ahead in order to play well, and have a consistent absolute, unchanged plan from move one. I know I had them, and honestly most of them were completely wrong. And this brings us back to our original question. What is the problem of learning chess?
The problem of chess has at least three dimensions to it:
Now that we have the problem defined we can use this definition to create goals for ourselves:
There are several ways to achieve these goals which will be outlined in the following articles but first we have one more thing we must do. As I said there is the problem of attaining knowledge about chess, and then there is how the individual player thinks about chess. A part of the way that person thinks is how they approach learning.
If we have a better understanding of how we learn, we can use our time more efficiently because understanding and retention of the knowledge we learn will not take so long. And we will cover the individual systems people use while learning in or next article: How to Learn Chess Part III: Learning Systems.