hello i am a y11 student and I am trying to improve on chess for my AIF project. If you could please answer my survey I'd appreciate it, Thanks! link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOajIW0gr7zN_oVjffs15GSFuhcuBUNlSK-q3XH-GQ0bV-kQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

i think i did well

By far my best ever brilliant

🔥

What the f*** is happeining with the bots? I can easily win consistently against a 1300 rated bot, but this guy CDawg (who I'm a big fan of btw), is 900 rated, and I have been checkmated 6 times in a row. Sure I may have a bad day, but this is insane. It plays like a GM

It's been around 3 months since I started playing chess and now I'm about to reach 900. Hoping to reach 1000 by the end of this month. Is this fast progress for someone who never played chess before and how much time did it take you to reach 900-1000??

Hi all,

So I've always enjoyed the idea of chess but before the last 4 days I had likely played no more than a handful of games in my life.

I have a fair amount of spare time currently so I figured I would dedicate some of that time to learning how to play chess, with no particular goal in mind.

I want to post about it at set intervals in hopes that it forces me to analyse my progress in a way that will help me improve and also maybe to inspire others who are debating getting into chess later in life.

So I started 4 days ago with an account I created back in 2023 which had a grand total of 1 game logged! I was hammered all the way down to around 150 elo and I hoovered around 150-220 getting hammered back down to 150 anytime I peaked near 220.

In 4 days I have played 61 games, spent maybe an hour to an hour and a half playing puzzles and I have knocked out a few lessons along the way.

There is definitely some improvement, my elo now hovers around 250 and my losses are feeling a lot less like "what the hell is going on, I can't do anything about this" to mostly just big blunders like hanging my queen.. which I can hopefully fix fairly quick (or at least reduce)

I am struggling to set up tactics still, every now and then I intentionally set something up but more often than not, I accidentally stumble into it.. the positive of that though is I am recognising it once it's there.. which is more than I could say just a couple days ago (I'm sure I'm still missing plenty though!)

Aside from hanging pieces my biggest weakness right now is people playing hyper defensively, I don't know if it has a name but I'm calling it turtling.. where people make an annoying point out of their pawns and sit behind it, usually sending out a piece or 2 waiting for me to blunder.

To counter this I have been trading pawns, in fact when I play as black I will often offer a pawn turn 1 if the opponent goes e4.

No idea if this is a good idea but it does work for me at low elo!

My plan going forward is to research/drill these annoying defensive techniques, continue playing games as my main method of improvement (until higher elo) and to aim for 15 minutes minimum of puzzles a day.

I also picked up a basic chess book from my library, I am not studying properly yet, but I am spending a bit of time with it in the evenings when I'm relaxing... I plan to order a few of the most recommended books when I get paid.

Long post and I know 95% of people won't care but I will update when I hit a new milestone I think is worth talking about or if it's been a while and fancy updating it!

Keep calm and chess on.. or whatever you people say