Robert Kovacs
There are a number of ways to learn chess so some may be more suitable than others for you and your situation:
Options specific to children:
Many schools have group chess coaching usually run by the Sydney Academy of Chess (SAC) who are based at Burwood.
Sydney Academy of Chess also run more than fifteen clubs just for juniors, the closest to us being the Hurstville Junior Chess Club located in Carss Park. My understanding is that they meet roughly for an hour and are structured similarly to the group chess coaching sessions run through schools.
The NSW Junior Chess League offers a Coaching Clinic at the start of every school holidays. Check out their website, and keep an eye on their Coming Events link to see if any clinics are due in the next few months.
Both Sydney Academy of Chess and the NSW Junior Chess League also run chess tournaments for juniors.
General Options for Learning Chess:
Private coaching – this is a relatively expensive but good option and is available through SAC or through freelance coaches that happen to play at St George or other chess clubs. There are also many coaches of varying quality and price available through the internet – for example many of the chess presenters on YouTube also offer coaching. The rating of a coach gives you a rough idea of their competitive level, but the ability to teach is at least equally important. Look for coaches that are encouraging and able to patiently give clear explanations. Be aware that if a chess coach or presenter on a video or course on the internet says something like “if you are not willing to do such and such then maybe chess is not for you,” it would be much more helpful if they said, “Maybe serious competitive chess is not for you”. Of course, you can still play for fun and maybe later you might choose to take it more seriously. It is not a good idea to stick with a coach who makes negative, derogatory comments, but some constructive criticism may be necessary sometimes. It is only in the later stages where a student is approaching mastery that it starts to depend more on a student’s temperament as to whether they continue to need an encouraging coach or at times a more critical one. Regarding mastery, any coach that has a one size fits all approach is only going to be appropriate if they happen to be a lucky match. And … no one benefits from constant criticism.
On the internet – There are various paid and free options:
Paid courses: For varying fees including some free content there are many chess courses on all aspects of the game and for all levels available through sites such as Chessable and ChessBase.
YouTube: There are many great free chess videos on YouTube. As elsewhere, pick or stick with videos that explain why to do certain moves. Focus on learning the skills of chess as set out below. Also, while there are some genuinely tricky and fun opening gambits, don’t imagine invincibility or rely on presenters promising you’ll win most of your games if you just learn one tricky opening. Depending upon what you are after, probably NM Robert Ramirez provides the most comprehensive and well explained set of free videos all the way from complete beginner to potentially around 1600 – 2000 rating level. There is a fuller list of recommended YouTube channels at the end below for a variety of levels.
Lichess and Chess.com: These are currently the two main chess sites for playing online. They also offer lots of other options such as allowing you to connect to live streaming tournaments and lectures and have a lot of helpful learning features such as openings explorer, analysis board and puzzle sections which you can choose by themes – however not everything is as wonderful as it seems. While the Chess.com puzzles are curated to be of good quality you can only do three per day for free – beyond that a yearly fee is required which turns out to be a minimum of about $65/year and many of their other features also require this. Lichess on the other hand, is completely free and even has many more puzzles BUT they have been created by an AI algorithm from games on the site. Some are good, some not and some haven’t even been filed correctly. Annoyingly, you can also sometimes get a run of almost exactly the same puzzle taken from different games with slightly different positions. As for playing online, it’s convenient, but so convenient it can become addictive. Players can get stuck playing fast time control games for hours without really learning or thinking. Both sites also have a problem due to cheating.
Chess Books: Many people have become obsessed with online content and this can often be quicker to utilise than books, but they are still a great way to learn chess and are still recommended by many coaches including those at the very top. You can also combine learning chess from books and from online resources. For those interested, a partial list is provided below.
Playing Over the Board and at Our Club
At our chess club, we mainly play tournaments so if you are still learning the basics, you might not enjoy the competitive side so much. If this is the case for you, you are still welcome to come along and play some social (non-tournament) games. There are almost always at least a few people looking for some friendly, casual games on Tuesday nights! Additionally, there are also more or less casual chess clubs which may run during the day or evening such as:
Cronulla – Thursday morning 10am – 12 at Cronulla RSL. This is a group of mainly older players – but anyone is welcome – who just gather to play casual unpressured, untimed games.
Hyde Park in the city – there is a large chess board just behind the entrance to St James Station in Hyde Park. Some players bring their own boards as well.
Sydney Chess Club – Monday evening 7:30 – 9:30pm located at Lv 2, Suite 2, 1-17 Elsie St, Burwood in the headquarters of the Sydney Academy of Chess. This is a kind of semi-casual club that in addition to running rated blitz or rapid tournaments once per month also runs weekly unrated casual tournaments usually 5 -10 minutes each per player. The majority of the regular players are intermediate to improving beginners. They also have a large retail chess book collection which you can browse. Please note: The club stops each year sometime in December and doesn’t reopen until late January.
If anyone knows of other casual chess venues, please let Robert Kovacs know via email to robertkovacs17@hotmail.com.
Of course, you also remain welcome and/or welcome back at our club. Whenever you’d like to try competing in tournaments the longer time control tournaments most suited to improving beginners are currently the St George Club Championship and the Internal Teams competition because players are paired in divisions based on their strength. The longer time formats also offer greater time for analysing your games with your opponent and/or others. Many players are happy to do this and you can potentially learn a fair bit from this as long as you can frame losses and mistakes as a learning experience. Shorter tournaments, such as the allegro (15 minutes each a game) or rapid (20 minutes + 10 seconds per move each) are also another idea because you have some time to think but they don’t require you to invest quite as much effort as a 3-4 hour game. The lightning (5 minutes each, or 3 minutes plus 2 seconds increment) games are probably too fast to start with and generally are not recommended as a good way of learning chess for beginners, however they can be fun, and suit some players better than others.
Beginners and lower rated players who don’t have any current chess coaching, particularly adults, please see the relevant tab for possible group coaching initiatives by the club.
General Advice for Learning and Improving
When you first start playing, what you are mainly trying to learn is the tactical awareness of stopping your opponent taking your pieces and checkmating your king while trying to successfully do that to your opponent. There’s no problem experimenting with your opening moves in early games but it’s most helpful to soon try classical openings by starting games with the pawn in front of the king – the classic four move bishop and queen mate comes from this and I recall a grandmaster writing that he ‘won’ his very first game of chess after the moves 1e4 e5 2Qf3 Nc6 3Qxf7?? – both players thinking he’d delivered mate when actually he’d lost his queen! Learn the attacking formations of the Italian Game and then later learn to start games with the pawn in front of the queen. The reason for these is that they immediately occupy the centre squares of the board which is like the high ground in a battle because you exert the most control over the board from these central squares. Secondly, you’re becoming familiar with pawn structures that are going to recur in different openings. While you are learning the particularities of these particular openings, first and foremost will be learning general principles such as developing your pieces and dynamic play – in addition to central control. Ultimately with openings, the aim is to hopefully learn what styles and structures suit you most and learn them deeply as your main go to, and then expand to incorporate other styles as you can.
In general, a person improves at chess by going back and forth between studying and playing. By studying you learn the skills of chess such as tactics and checkmates; positional features which often relate to the pawn structure; endgames in which few pieces remain on the board – and at least the basic moves from the opening you’ve chosen. Over time the aim is to develop an increasing ability to put these skills together and gradually deepen your understanding of what’s happening on the board. Playing games helps you put things together in practice and requires you to think ‘under fire’ in a competitive game setting. Becoming strong at chess takes time and commitment – like learning an instrument or a martial art or sport.
To have time in a game to really absorb patterns and consider various possibilities requires playing longer games – at least half an hour each, but preferably longer. Analyzing your games afterwards, including writing down why you did each move you did is a helpful part of the learning process. As for computer analysis some trainers such as Grandmaster RB Ramesh say not to rely on a computer at all until you reach 2100-2200 OTB at a minimum. As pointed out by Sam Asaka amongst others, you should at least be writing down the reasons for your moves before turning on a computer – and I would add that the bigger the effort you make in analysing your game before turning on the computer, the better. Furthermore, the computer will spot tactical blunders but won’t explain positional issues, you may need to ask someone or find a book or video on that. One final point is that a computer generally chooses moves based on tactical considerations which are sometimes so complicated that a grandmaster would struggle to see them so it is important that you understand why a certain move or path is being recommended otherwise you might just end up lost in the woods! However, there are ways to utilise computers helpfully at almost any level – one of the best is regarding ‘theoretical positions’ from endgames. If you haven’t already, watch a video or read a book on each topic such as checkmating the lone king starting with two rooks or a queen and then go to the ‘board editor’ under the ‘Tools’ tab on lichess and ‘clear board’ then click and drag onto the board a white king and a black king and a queen or two rooks on random squares and checkmate the computer’s king! Once you’ve set up your desired position, click on ‘Continue from here’ and then ‘Play with computer’ and after picking the right colour you are good to go! If you don’t feel confident you could start with an easier position and then move to a more random one. You can work your way up to mate with the two bishops and mate with just a bishop and knight – which is a lot harder. You can also repeat this process with theoretical endgames such as rook plus pawn versus rook – again after studying it, if you haven’t already. This is a way of using a computer to help you think for yourself and also a way of gaining self-confidence.
It’s also important to realise that your self-esteem is not immune from the combat on the chessboard. The more you can see your games as learning experiences the less painful it is on you. However, this is easier for some than others and in some cases worrying more about the results may lead to a greater drive to improve. Nevertheless, and especially in the earlier stages of learning, it is generally better to play the majority of your games against players around your level and a bit above – so you can absorb new things and reach the next level. But playing lots of games against players much stronger than you threatens to shred your self-esteem which won’t help you to look for possibilities (and respond to your opponent’s possibilities) and to develop the ability to create possibilities of your own.
Unlike most martial arts, chess has no belt graduation system, so the only official rating of your performance level comes from wins, losses or draws – which you get after a minimum of 9 games within over the board, rated tournaments. Unlike tennis, when even if you get thrashed you are still likely to win some points, in chess early rewards come from moments of understanding. Over time these levels of understanding grow for which hard work, self-belief and the encouragement of others comes in handy. Even if you don’t win a game, if you notice that you understood more of the game this is a positive sign. Overall, as you improve, your rating should increase – however this occurs in different patterns for different people. For example, some players improve rapidly at first but then their rate of progress slows whereas some are the opposite.
Bobby Fischer talked about how improvement often occurs in uneven bursts because it may not be noticeable until a new ‘level’ has been reached. He described feeling frustrated that for some time his results weren’t reflecting his increasing learning but then one day “just getting good’. Jose Capablanca said of himself that he had to lose hundreds of games to get good. Garry Kasparov has described how some people have great natural talent, but others develop bit by bit through hard work. Magnus Carlsen has stated that he often didn’t do the homework his coaches set because he was determined to do things in his own way. This worked for him because he was so interested in chess that he would read chess books and magazines the way some people consume comics, TV/internet shows or computer games. He pursued ideas until he understood them but also continued benefitting from coaching as well.
There is a great deal of satisfaction and joy to be had from successfully pulling off tactics and checkmating your first opponent or simply winning a hard-fought game. Drawing or winning against someone you thought you would never get near is also amazing. The tactical and positional patterns and combinations on the board also provide a great deal of beauty and awe in themselves and some people love solving or even creating complicated chess studies to celebrate that beauty. On the other hand, everyone has also experienced the disappointment of falling for an opening trap, losing due to overconfidence or blundering away a game they were winning. Chess like other forms of competition can also be cruel as well as beautiful which is a lot like life itself – which is one of the reasons the game is so wonderful.
Good luck with your chess!
Recommended YouTube Channels and Books
YouTube Channels
NM Robert Ramirez – This is the best and simplest to begin with. RR’s channel is highly recommended because it’s thorough and well organized and energetically presented. There is an overall playlist called Chess Course From Beginner to Master Level. The first videos start at how to move the pieces and other basics, but improvers and beyond can start at the level that suits them. He also has playlists just on endgames, middlegames or openings.
Chess Vibes – this is NM Nelson Lopez’s channel. There’s a brilliant playlist called ‘Logical Chess Move By Move Book Club’ where he has made one video exploring and analysing each game from Irving Chernev’s very helpful book of the same name. He has now started working through a new book – Jeremy Silman’s Complete Endgame Course with a little bit of the more complicated 100 Endgames You Must Know thrown in as a bonus – but a playlist isn’t available yet. There are also some great videos in his ‘Strategy/Tactics’ playlist for example on various tactics and some overview collections such as 21 Positional Chess Concepts’ and Top 18 Attacking Principles. The overview ones are too quick to learn from scratch with but give lots of helpful ideas and are useful for revision.
Dr Can’s Chess Clinic – As players are improving – for example trying an attack and falling short – this channel is useful because Can Kabadayi has a big focus on helping players improve beyond ‘hope chess’ – hoping an opponent will do a certain move as opposed to learning to make your plans happen. Another pet topic of his is moves that he calls ‘chess crimes’ where he examines moves in a position that don’t work and those that do and WHY. He has some very helpful videos but sometimes misses some details. Nevertheless, generally helpful especially for lower rated players.
Chessfactor – This channel is well organised. They have playlists for beginners – for them approximately 1000 rating level – improvers, intermediate and advanced levels. There are also collections of videos on visualisation, calculation, positional and tactical topics, overall strategy and a number of openings including good coverage of classical king pawn openings.
St Louis Chess Club – This channel has absolutely loads of great stuff including huge collections of beginner, intermediate and advanced videos, as well as playlists by topic and is an amazing resource providing many lecturers and covering so many aspects of chess. My only caveat would be that some ‘beginner’ videos are more beginner than others, but very highly recommended.
Ramesh RB – For a perspective on really serious chess training particularly regarding analysis, calculation, visualisation, general study methods and psychology and health, this site of Grandmaster Ramachandran B Ramesh the chess coach of GM’s Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa and his sister Vaishali and Daniel Naroditsky amongst others is highly valuable. He is a very encouraging presenter but also realistic, saying that to reach 2300 in chess you should be doing 3 hours a day (of useful chess study) and for each hundred rating points above that you need to add a further hour per day including puzzles every day in a style that works for you – but not puzzle rush. He also makes some very helpful recommendations such as:
Don’t get upset at yourself – instead learn to think and analyse for yourself.
Don’t just watch – do! (Set the pieces up on a board and try and do it for yourself and see it/understand it for yourself. Which is one of many things I am still working on myself!)
Other great channels include: ChessBase India, ChessDojo, Daniel Naroditsky, Sam Asaka and ChessCoachAndras (IM Andras Toth).
Books
This list is in no way complete and could not hope to be. There are many other great books (and online courses) out there. (As well as more than a few that are not so great or that just repeat the same old tired stuff.)
Beginning chess and beyond:
Comprehensive Chess Course Volumes I & II: From Beginner to Advanced Player in 24 Lessons – Roman Pelts & Lev Alburt. Lev Alburt has also co-authored a whole series of good books on all aspects of the game from the Russian chess school perspective.
Build Up Your Chess Volumes 1, 2 and 3 by Artur Yusupov and various other books by him with and without Mark Dvoretsky who are also from the Russian chess school perspective.
The Complete Book of Beginning Chess – Raymond Keene
There are many other great books out there and depending upon what you are after, a simple kid’s ‘learn to play chess’ book may be fine to start with.
Openings:
Chess Openings for Juniors, J N Walker, 1975
For particular openings look for books that explain why and what’s happening, including middlegame plans and at least some complete games such as the ‘Starting Out’ and ‘Move by Move’ series of opening books.
Middlegames and overall:
Logical Chess Move by Move – Irving Chernev
Pawn Structure Chess – Andrew Soltis. Andrew Soltis has many other good books.
Chess Pattern Recognition for Beginners; Improve Your Chess Pattern Recognition; and Train Your Chess Pattern Recognition – (all three by) Arthur von de Oudeweetering.
Mastering Tactics and Mastering Checkmates (both) by Neil McDonald.
The Art of Attack in Chess by Vladimir Vukovic is an old classic.
Chess – (Puzzles) by Laszlo Polgar. There are many other great puzzle book compilers such as John Nunn, Gary Lane and Danny Kopec and many newer ones, but one point I’d like to make is that while it is good to do puzzles as randomly as possible so that it is more like a game where you don’t know what you are looking for, it is also important to have a good source of puzzles arranged in themes so that you can train your chess pattern recognition.
From the Middlegame Into the Endgame – Edmar Mednis (Part of middlegame planning is about whether, if you have a choice do you enter an endgame or avoid one. Unfortunately, his books are older and second-hand copies are relatively expensive.
Endgames:
Endgames for Kids – Karsten Muller. He is an endgame expert and has written many good books on endgames (and on tactics).
Please note: Mark Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual (complicated) and Jesus de la Villa’s One Hundred Endgames You Must Know and the book above are examples of books on ‘theoretical endgames’ such as when rook plus pawn versus rook is winning or drawing and how the knight fights against a pawn on the a or h files. Until you want to reach grandmaster level, you only need one good book (or course) on these.
You also need to find a good book (or course) on analysing and planning for general, practical multi-piece endgames such as Mikhail Shereshevsky’s Endgame Strategy. Be aware that titles of books can be misleading – as a random example a book with ‘Practical Endgames’ in its title may just be another book on theoretical endgames or it may not.
The third area of endings to cover is tactics in endgames:
Tactics in Chess Endgames by John Nunn and Van Perlo’s Endgame Tactics by Ger Van Perlo are two notable examples and with different approaches.