How to Get Good at Chess

Wondering when it will be your turn to declare checkmate? Whether you’re new to chess or have been playing for a while, it’s a tough game to master, but not impossible. Chess is a game of patience, skill, and a lot of thinking ahead.

It’s also a game that involves an aggressive amount of strategies, and it can take time to improve your game. However, it is a great way to exercise your mind, meet new people, and find a unique community.

If you want to know how to get good at chess, follow these directions. You’ll be playing better and better before you know it.

Learn the Game

Knowing the rules might sound like a condescending piece of advice, but you’d be surprised how many people get tripped up by not knowing the rules. Be sure you understand what chess is and how to play it before you dive into guides and games.

Practice Makes Perfect

Playing chess is one of the best ways to get good at chess. Whether this means playing games against a computer on your phone or playing with a friend in the park once a week, play as much as you can. This will help you learn without you even realizing it.

And when you play online, you can often learn from how you played by rewatching your games and checking when and where you made mistakes. That way, you can prevent yourself from making them in future games. It’s difficult to improve when you don’t always know what you’re doing wrong.

Do the Drills

You can use drills and exercises to help improve your chess game. You can find these in various forms, and they can range from beginner to advanced to help you work past certain problems you may continuously be encountering. There are lots of online resources that can help you learn chess for beginners, and advance your skills.

Books for Basics

Studying openings and learning lots of great moves might seem like the only way to improve, but chess is a moving game. While it’s helpful to learn the basic concepts and understand how openings can be used, memorizing a lot of moves won’t always raise your skills to the level you want.

Instead of burying yourself in books and reading chess guide after guide, try playing people and using some of the moves you might learn. Often people will not fall directly into a trap, and you have to rework things. Don’t get too caught up in already drawn-up plans when you could be building your own around each individual game.