What is the best way to improve my chess skills? I'm probably sitting at around 1400-1500ish and my end goal would be to get up to around 1800-2000. While I know it's not an overnight achievement, I would love to get to that level of play.

Should I try a computer based chess game? Is so

What are the top 3 best chess video games?

Stuff the game should include is

a smart chess engine
Opening practice
Anything that can help me improve my chess skills such as chess analysis,
famous chess game reviews
Puzzles

Any helpful advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hi Fayt,

Welcome to chessvideos.tv! If you want to improve your chess, then this is a great place to start. In my opinion, the best software for what you're asking for is Chessmaster. It comes with tonnes of learning material from IM (is he a GM now?) Josh Waitzkin, an excellent teacher. It includes a course on tactics, a course on the endgame, 2 courses on psychology and about 10 annotated games on top of all of that! It also comes with a course on Attacking chess by GM Larry Evans which I'm yet to check out. All of this is in audio format, so you don't have to read it all. In addition, there are plenty of puzzles to keep you going including 10 "Match the Masters" games which I find very useful. It isn't the "strongest" engine, but is still as strong as the best human players (at least). It also does basic games analysis. You should be able to pick up a copy for around $10-15.

For analysis, you can also download other engines which are stronger, I use SCID for my games databases and as a GUI to analyse my own games as it's free. If/when you get very serious about that kind of thing you could also consider Aquarium or Chessbase, but they cost money and I would steer clear until you're sure you need them.

In addition, you should check out the videos here. Most are free. Also for tactical puzzles http://chesstempo.com/ is excellent and in my opinion the best place to go. Again, it's free.

Hope this helps!

thanks for the information.

Is this a best way to improve my chess?

Also realistically how fast can you improve your rating and how do you find out what your rating is?

There is no one single way which is "best" to improve your chess. Everyone has their own opinion. There are thousands, maybe millions of books on the subject and they don't all agree. What's important is to find an approach that suits you. Try Chessmaster, get a couple of books out of the library, maybe buy some if you have the money. Use tactics sites, watch videos, study the games of the great masters. All of these things will help.

The only way to get a rating is to play rated games: these are usually either in clubs or in tournaments. I'd definitely recommend joining a club. I'd say this is the single best way of improving as you'll come up against good players who can show you where you can improve (it's like free coaching! Plus game practice!) There's no telling ho fast you'll improve until you get playing and get working on your game. My guess from around 1400 to 2000 would take 5 years if you put in a fair bit of study, but it all depends on you! Good luck!

P.S. One trap many people get in to is to study openings too much. Two great books that helped me when I was starting out were Winning Chess Tactics and Winning Chess Strategies by Yasser Seirawan. I'd recommend those, plus chesstempo.com plus, chessmaster, plus joining a club. That is more than enough to get you started!! As hobbies go, chess is cheap, (unless you travel to play in competitions!) I think you should be able to pick up the books at less than £10 each, chessmaster at less than £10, chesstempo is free and joining a club is around £20 a year, so you're talking £50 tops and 3 of those costs are optional if you're really strapped for cash (books and Chessmaster).

Sarciness speaks wisely. I would just add the advice given to me by a chess master when I asked the same question years ago: "Go get your head bashed in a few thousand times" IOW, play lots of games and treat your losses as educational opportunities. Be sure to keep a record of your games and analyse them- especially looking for your errors and the opponent's errors that you failed to exploit. Even the best players make errors, usually every game.

Good luck!

I've found the best way to improve, is not to look for ways to improve, but just do it! If you have the knack, work, study, and bust your ass and really focus, you'll improve. If not, then you'll have some fun, and your game will prob stay the same strength. There is no substitute for effort On a more serious note, it's not really as complicated as everyone makes it sound. Study tactics, openings, middlegames, endgames, psychology, and stay in shape for tournaments. if you hit all that stuff for an hour or two a day, you'll no doubt get better. That doesn't mean you'll be a GM in 3 months, improvement is an individual thing. I started at 28, and am happy to have progressed maybe a class and half or so in 3 years. Slow by youth standards, but then again, I have a life I'm not willing to work at chess for 5 hours a day, so i don't expect to make master in my lifetime. My goal has always been expert in 5 years. Probably I'll fall a little short, but I'm still improving. Biggest hurdle for me is $$$. I can't afford to travel to tournaments because I live in rural land. I hope to get my club TD cert and just run my own here at some point. But it would be hard to gain rating with only 8-10 of the same opponents who all know my repertoire to play against LOL. best of luck!!

Simply by looking at the incredible amount of material available about chess improvement, it does not take a genius to see that for all the self delusion going on, the promises do not work. If it was just knowledge, as so many seem to think, chess would be an easy game to get better at, which it certainly is not. Search as much as you like about how to get this knowledge to stick in your head and you will be stunned by the silence.

The Russians in all they're superior excellence - advocate repetition. In other words, honing your skill base and not constantly trying to learn new material. Just go for the hard slog and hope something turns up. If nothing happens, they will say you have no talent, whatever that is supposed to be who knows, they don't either. So with such rich logic, they can never be wrong, can they?

Honestly, your better off just grabbing a pretty girl and opening a few cans, but if your still suffering the chess bug, you poor soul, here is my advice.

DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON CHESS! Surf the web and get everything for free. The amount of free stuff is frankly shocking and often superior. Google ' free database ', is a good place to start. There are also plenty of free and very strong computer programmes like Houdini. or Rybka 2.

A note on learning, which you will read nowhere else, some might say for a good reason, but here goes - practice every little thing in your head to the point it matches the speed you normally think. Your brain works really fast, but for it to understand stuff, really grasp it, the learning needs to be at your brains working speed. You see a combination, learn it if you will - your in first gear and it will not stick. Repeat the combination in your mind, over and over, until your up to fifth gear when your brain can have a chance to understand and file away what you thought you had learnt.

I have often told people on this site that they must learn the basics, even though they claim they already have this knowledge. Some things should be automatic, so fast that you are not even aware of them, only then can you claim you know them and reap the rewards.

Now go on, grab that girl and.....

my best advice is to internalize your improvement
the improvement is something that happens inside your brain, not outside of your brain.

the external stimuli is only as valuable (if at all) to the extent it inspires you to turn thinking gears inside your own brain.

you can review the #1 "BEST" (whatever that means) chess material ever-- you can take a 1on1 lesson with Garry Kasparov-- but those *external* factors will mean nothing if you don't do the hard thinking inside your own noggin.

It may seem depressing at first, that there is no sure-fire training material to "help" you. However, the opposite is the case-- it is not depressing but empowering to know that you are a self-contained chess improvement machine. Since the change happens inside your own brain chemistry, you have total power and control over how much or how often your own brain works. This lets you take exclusive responsibility and pride for your own personal improvement. You can't "download" the skill/intuition like Neo learned kung fu in the Matrix. So even if you can't afford private lessons with an I.M., who cares?? If you can get a $10 Dover edition book of Botvinnik/Keres/Alekhine/Bronstein games with good annotations * and use your own brain on it, you have enough to get to 2000+ for sure. *Or discretion to watch the best videos on this site with liberal use of the "Pause" button to stop and think...

There are a lot of good videos here, also a lot of bad ones. But the videos are only as good as the mental work you put into them. Improvement does not happen on your computer monitor, but in your own brain. Your brain doesn't know or care what is the material on the outside, it only knows about the calculation/visualization work that it is doing (or not doing).

Watching chess videos but not working hard for yourself to think about the content is like going to the gym to watch other people move the weight around. In that case you are only watching the video-presenter. It's all part of what is commonly called "discipline", but the key is really your attitude toward it. I think if you love or have passion for chess, you can "study" chess with about as much "discipline" as a heroin junkie disciplines himself to shoot up dope. My friends think i have tons of "discipline" when in fact i am simply a hopeless chess addict and my brain gets high on chess patterns and force vectors in a vacuum. Yeah sure, i let them think my chess study is based on discipline-- that's just my little secret....

EDIT, bottom line, what i'm trying to say is with the right thinking habits and mental approach, it hardly matters at all what you do or what material you use. The way i read game collections is to review a game, then close the book and replay the entire game and variations from memory. This way i have to work hard on it, rather than just "turn the pages and nod" in a zombie-like state.

EDIT #2: acknowledge that the whole "industry" of starving chess masters wants you to believe in the "silver bullet theory", that the only thing holding u back is the right DVD's and books which they are selling. be highly selective when parting w/ ur money!

What's with this grab a girl nonsense? Are you implying that people who play chess have no life? Well grabbing a girl won't work in my situation as I'm married with 3 kids so yeah...lol.

I like chess because it involves thinking and coming up with tactics. I love to play strategy games and honestly it's healthy to make the brain think and work.

Thanks for all the valuable information. I downloaded the chessmaster grandmaster edition and it contains a lot of nice audio tutorials and an amazing opening database that not only explains the reason of each move but also let's you practice the openings giving you a percentage of how well you did. it also as an amazing game analysis as well as tons of computer difficulty ranging from under 100 to grandmasters over 2500. Finally it contains tactics to find checkmates and such.

All in all I am very pleased with this game as I am an auditory learner and having the audio tutorials helps wonders. That's one reason I love watching the comentaries on this site. I like to stop the video figure out what I would do then watch to see what actually happens to learn and understand the meaning of the moves.

Thanks for the recommendations. Chessmaster grandmaster edition as more than exceeded my expections and hopefully it will help increase my chess skills at the same time. Plus I got the game for free so there is nothing better then that.

Glad you like Chessmaster, although I can't condone piracy. Good luck with your improvement!

@Fayt: In your case, it's probably important to make sure you're grabbing the *right* girl or you'll get in big trouble...

BTW, Pobble wasn't suggesting you don't have a life, but that grabbing a girl might be a better alternative to spending any time on chess at all.

I really like the chessmaster recommendation. its a great place to start. well, i started there and enjoyed the videos. Josh does a good job.

Needless to say, there are coaches, and methods to improve.

I would recommend you surround yourself with material and get involved with the resources. it is true, there is a wealth of material for free online. but the more you become involved, the more questions you will have, and it is always nice to find people that can answer your questions and guide you in the right direction.

I was fortunate to have a chess club with very strong chess players.

The internet has changed that to a point, but its not the same as having a community of people.

check out this link, it offers a method of improvementl: http://chesstrainingschool.com/why-how- ... l-improve/

as time goes by, and you get more suggestions, you might come back to it.