@sameartist #31
For a Lichess chess game you can just insert the Lichess game URL (No iframe code needed) and it will magically appear embedded.
For a Lichess chess game you can just insert the Lichess game URL (No iframe code needed) and it will magically appear embedded.
eat high protein pizza
Get 2000 in Classical first and then work your way through each time control then finishing on blitz. Classical / Rapid is softer and more achievable. Then you can take the 'real' chess lines you have learnt in the slow games and apply them in Blitz. I hit 2000 in all catergories this year. But now I am struggling because the bubbles burst when your rating is inflated due to flagging points. Learning real chess and hitting 2000 are two different things.
And by the way people who play Bh6 make me sick.
Good luck in your quest. :)
And by the way people who play Bh6 make me sick.
Good luck in your quest. :)
I don't play classical anymore i dont trust my opponents, i think they are cheating at some point of the game.
If you don't play longer time controls you deny yourself one of the best learning experiences, but that's your choice. Of course you could play otb tournaments, then you have time to think and it's much harder for your opponent to cheat.
@sameartist
If you won't play classical chess, you'll never become a really good player.
Chess is a thinking game - not only an intuition game. That's what separates chess from other games like backgammon - you need to actually think.
As for cheating - you don't need to worry about it too much here. I've played almost 550 games, and encountered only something like 7 cheaters. It could be you got so used to non-thinking blunderfest chess, that when you actually played real chess and stumbled into resistance from your thinking opponent, it looked to you that they are cheating.
If you won't play classical chess, you'll never become a really good player.
Chess is a thinking game - not only an intuition game. That's what separates chess from other games like backgammon - you need to actually think.
As for cheating - you don't need to worry about it too much here. I've played almost 550 games, and encountered only something like 7 cheaters. It could be you got so used to non-thinking blunderfest chess, that when you actually played real chess and stumbled into resistance from your thinking opponent, it looked to you that they are cheating.
Play a time limit where you wont lose or win on time. Where the outcome is win\lose\ or draw. You will get better.
@sameartist I would recommend following @achja 's advice in general. He is the wise chess guru :)
There has been a lot of advice thrown at you in this forum. First, the facts:
* Don't worry about cheating on lichess. About once a month I play against a cheater in blitz. They're easy to spot (usually provisionally rated), even without the lichess algorithm. Suffice it to say, if someone is cheating, they will be caught and banned very quickly, and your rating points refunded.
* Virtually every high rated or titled player will agree in this thread that there are clear, well-established ways to get better at chess, incidentally increasing your rating. They all got their titles by playing in OTB tournaments with classical time controls. They probably all played a lot of blitz and bullet along the way. They all generally agree it doesn't help your chess too much, though there are benefits to it such as improving your play under pressure, time management, and opening memorization.
* Don't confuse achieving a rating landmark with general chessplaying ability. Your long-term goal should always be to improve at the game until you get bored of it or want to direct your competitive efforts elsewhere. With this in mind, achieving a rating of 2000 in rapid or classical is a good goal to set for yourself along the way. There are other ways to get there too; for example, you could learn a group of openings like the Smith-Morra gambit and the Pin variation of the Sicilian. These openings are objectively bad, but require precise theoretical knowledge from your opponent to refute. If you want to get to 2000 and stay there for the rest of your life, you could try this approach. It's no fun when your opponents rated 2000+ know all your tricks and you lose out of the opening every game, but some people will suggest this. It works, but it won't make you much better at chess.
Earlier I mentioned that there are clear, well-established ways to get better at chess. Chess training is a serious business, and over time techniques from various chess schools and famous trainers have become public. Most of them coincide on these fundamental principles:
* Study your own (classical) games. I'd recommend playing a couple of classical games, taking a break, then analyzing them in a group. Make a lichess study out of your classical games, then add each game as a chapter so you can look back in a month, year, on your annotations from previous games. Go through move by move on the important moves and analyze by yourself first. Surely there are a few variations you wish you could have calculated more in the game, moves you rejected but wish you could have looked at. Next, analyze it with the computer. Identify variations in which your analysis was right and pat yourself on the back. More importantly, find mistakes you made (where your assessment differed significantly from the computer's).
* Learn your endgames. It seems that the most famous chess trainers all seem to agree on this, even if others in this thread don't. If you're not a natural endgame player, this is especially true. Endgames help you learn what kinds of positions to aim for as you're finishing up the middlegame. Many endgames are similar depending on the opening you play. For example, the endgame in the Ruy Lopez exchange after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Bc6 dxc6 with all the pieces traded off (and the white's d-pawn traded for black's e-pawn) is a technical win for white. I'm not saying to play this opening, but many openings from the French to the Sicilian to the Grunfeld to the KID have thematic pawn structures and thematic endgames.
* Learn your openings. There seems to be a lot of dispute about this which is ill-founded. Learning your openings doesn't mean learning every sideline in every position, it means learning and understanding the main lines that occur when the game starts. Usually books are the best source of opening information. But you don't have to memorize every line in them to get a lot of benefit. They're references that you can look at when you analyze your games. Put those annotations into the lichess study and you'll be able to find them easily in the future without having to look in your book. Did you remember 10 moves of theory this game? Next time, shoot for 11.
When you get your main lines down pat (and blitz with a training partner who plays the same openings is a great way to practice these repetitively and learn them), you'll feel confident when your opponent deviates from the main line. There's a reason that main lines are the main lines: both sides are playing the best moves. When your opponent deviates, know that they just played an inferior move. Recall the move they were supposed to play, then think of how they differ. For example, I know that in the Fritz variation of the Two Knights Defence, the main line is 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Ng5 d5 5.ed5 Nd4 6.c3 b5 7.Bf1. My opponent plays 7.cxd4 instead of 7.Bf1. I don't have to know anything about that line to feel confident. I'll sink into my first think of the game and try to understand why 7.Bf1 is the main line instead of 7.cxd4. Inevitably I'll play 7...bc4 and have a better position than in the main line.
* Practice tactics. It doesn't matter what your rating is, we all make mistakes in games. All the time, and way more than we'd like. The only thing we can do is try to keep sharpening our skills so we tend to make fewer mistakes on average. Lichess has more puzzles than you'll ever need, but if you can find it the Informant Anthology of Chess Combinations offers some of the most difficult and rewarding real-game puzzles there are. I don't think an hour a day is appropriate. Do them in shorter chunks to keep you fresh, but don't invest a lot of time in them unless they're really difficult puzzles from another resource.
* Find a community member or group with stronger players to help you. It's like a free trainer. @achja posts interesting games all the time in his group and you're free to comment. There's a forum here to post games as well. Just remember to take all of this with a grain of salt. Professional trainers/titled players are inevitably the best resources to really help you get better. I was lucky enough to have some strong, better chessplaying friends like @TonyRo who could play practice games in my least favorite openings for hours until I learned how to play them. I would recommend you also find someone who has similar goals with whom you can play training games.
The last piece of advice I would offer is not to keep your head along the way. There is a Japanese aphorism: When your journey is 95% complete, you are halfway there. In chess, this is true also. When you're 800, you could play anyone. It could be their first rated game of chess, or they could be on their way to being a GM. As your rating increases, the type of players that you play against changes too. When you're 1600 you don't get so many easy blowout victories. You start to draw games when you and your opponent can't make progress, and if you play trap openings, your opponents start to know the refutations to those traps. Life changes, and the opposition becomes more serious. Instead of your rating growing by 50 points a day, it grows by 30, then 15, then you start to break even.
So while you're trying to become a better chessplayer and hit the 2000 milestone, keep in mind that your opponents are also hungry. They're practicing hard, learning your openings, solving tactics puzzles, finding ways to draw rook endgames a pawn down. Nobody's going to give you free points any more because they wouldn't be there if they did. Just be aware that in your chess journey, just as in a chess game, you have to learn how to accept transitions and not fall into the trap of thinking the same old tricks will work forever. Even when they're damn good tricks. Whereas you used to be able to get away with solving some easy tactics puzzles to stay sharp and avoid blunders, now you have to solve more difficult puzzles and challenge yourself. Otherwise you will fail in the same positions in game. It was once useful to learn how to win in a K+P vs K ending -- now you have to know how to maintain distant opposition to outflank your opponent's king while there are many pawns on the board. You crushed everyone with the Closed Sicilian because they didn't know how to stop a kingside pawn storm? Those days will be long gone and you'll never control another d4-square.
Just remember that this is a struggle we all go through, and don't let it deter you. Follow commonsense advice from strong players and don't try to overthink any aspect of your chess improvement (you don't need to analyze a game for an hour if you lost from an opening blunder). Don't be afraid to adjust your openings, style, or thinking methods along the way when it makes sense, most of all to you. Be honest with yourself when you're getting real learning done and just spinning your wheels. And holler at some good players. You never know which new friend might teach you hundreds of rating points worth of knowledge through mutual training games. Good luck.
There has been a lot of advice thrown at you in this forum. First, the facts:
* Don't worry about cheating on lichess. About once a month I play against a cheater in blitz. They're easy to spot (usually provisionally rated), even without the lichess algorithm. Suffice it to say, if someone is cheating, they will be caught and banned very quickly, and your rating points refunded.
* Virtually every high rated or titled player will agree in this thread that there are clear, well-established ways to get better at chess, incidentally increasing your rating. They all got their titles by playing in OTB tournaments with classical time controls. They probably all played a lot of blitz and bullet along the way. They all generally agree it doesn't help your chess too much, though there are benefits to it such as improving your play under pressure, time management, and opening memorization.
* Don't confuse achieving a rating landmark with general chessplaying ability. Your long-term goal should always be to improve at the game until you get bored of it or want to direct your competitive efforts elsewhere. With this in mind, achieving a rating of 2000 in rapid or classical is a good goal to set for yourself along the way. There are other ways to get there too; for example, you could learn a group of openings like the Smith-Morra gambit and the Pin variation of the Sicilian. These openings are objectively bad, but require precise theoretical knowledge from your opponent to refute. If you want to get to 2000 and stay there for the rest of your life, you could try this approach. It's no fun when your opponents rated 2000+ know all your tricks and you lose out of the opening every game, but some people will suggest this. It works, but it won't make you much better at chess.
Earlier I mentioned that there are clear, well-established ways to get better at chess. Chess training is a serious business, and over time techniques from various chess schools and famous trainers have become public. Most of them coincide on these fundamental principles:
* Study your own (classical) games. I'd recommend playing a couple of classical games, taking a break, then analyzing them in a group. Make a lichess study out of your classical games, then add each game as a chapter so you can look back in a month, year, on your annotations from previous games. Go through move by move on the important moves and analyze by yourself first. Surely there are a few variations you wish you could have calculated more in the game, moves you rejected but wish you could have looked at. Next, analyze it with the computer. Identify variations in which your analysis was right and pat yourself on the back. More importantly, find mistakes you made (where your assessment differed significantly from the computer's).
* Learn your endgames. It seems that the most famous chess trainers all seem to agree on this, even if others in this thread don't. If you're not a natural endgame player, this is especially true. Endgames help you learn what kinds of positions to aim for as you're finishing up the middlegame. Many endgames are similar depending on the opening you play. For example, the endgame in the Ruy Lopez exchange after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Bc6 dxc6 with all the pieces traded off (and the white's d-pawn traded for black's e-pawn) is a technical win for white. I'm not saying to play this opening, but many openings from the French to the Sicilian to the Grunfeld to the KID have thematic pawn structures and thematic endgames.
* Learn your openings. There seems to be a lot of dispute about this which is ill-founded. Learning your openings doesn't mean learning every sideline in every position, it means learning and understanding the main lines that occur when the game starts. Usually books are the best source of opening information. But you don't have to memorize every line in them to get a lot of benefit. They're references that you can look at when you analyze your games. Put those annotations into the lichess study and you'll be able to find them easily in the future without having to look in your book. Did you remember 10 moves of theory this game? Next time, shoot for 11.
When you get your main lines down pat (and blitz with a training partner who plays the same openings is a great way to practice these repetitively and learn them), you'll feel confident when your opponent deviates from the main line. There's a reason that main lines are the main lines: both sides are playing the best moves. When your opponent deviates, know that they just played an inferior move. Recall the move they were supposed to play, then think of how they differ. For example, I know that in the Fritz variation of the Two Knights Defence, the main line is 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.Ng5 d5 5.ed5 Nd4 6.c3 b5 7.Bf1. My opponent plays 7.cxd4 instead of 7.Bf1. I don't have to know anything about that line to feel confident. I'll sink into my first think of the game and try to understand why 7.Bf1 is the main line instead of 7.cxd4. Inevitably I'll play 7...bc4 and have a better position than in the main line.
* Practice tactics. It doesn't matter what your rating is, we all make mistakes in games. All the time, and way more than we'd like. The only thing we can do is try to keep sharpening our skills so we tend to make fewer mistakes on average. Lichess has more puzzles than you'll ever need, but if you can find it the Informant Anthology of Chess Combinations offers some of the most difficult and rewarding real-game puzzles there are. I don't think an hour a day is appropriate. Do them in shorter chunks to keep you fresh, but don't invest a lot of time in them unless they're really difficult puzzles from another resource.
* Find a community member or group with stronger players to help you. It's like a free trainer. @achja posts interesting games all the time in his group and you're free to comment. There's a forum here to post games as well. Just remember to take all of this with a grain of salt. Professional trainers/titled players are inevitably the best resources to really help you get better. I was lucky enough to have some strong, better chessplaying friends like @TonyRo who could play practice games in my least favorite openings for hours until I learned how to play them. I would recommend you also find someone who has similar goals with whom you can play training games.
The last piece of advice I would offer is not to keep your head along the way. There is a Japanese aphorism: When your journey is 95% complete, you are halfway there. In chess, this is true also. When you're 800, you could play anyone. It could be their first rated game of chess, or they could be on their way to being a GM. As your rating increases, the type of players that you play against changes too. When you're 1600 you don't get so many easy blowout victories. You start to draw games when you and your opponent can't make progress, and if you play trap openings, your opponents start to know the refutations to those traps. Life changes, and the opposition becomes more serious. Instead of your rating growing by 50 points a day, it grows by 30, then 15, then you start to break even.
So while you're trying to become a better chessplayer and hit the 2000 milestone, keep in mind that your opponents are also hungry. They're practicing hard, learning your openings, solving tactics puzzles, finding ways to draw rook endgames a pawn down. Nobody's going to give you free points any more because they wouldn't be there if they did. Just be aware that in your chess journey, just as in a chess game, you have to learn how to accept transitions and not fall into the trap of thinking the same old tricks will work forever. Even when they're damn good tricks. Whereas you used to be able to get away with solving some easy tactics puzzles to stay sharp and avoid blunders, now you have to solve more difficult puzzles and challenge yourself. Otherwise you will fail in the same positions in game. It was once useful to learn how to win in a K+P vs K ending -- now you have to know how to maintain distant opposition to outflank your opponent's king while there are many pawns on the board. You crushed everyone with the Closed Sicilian because they didn't know how to stop a kingside pawn storm? Those days will be long gone and you'll never control another d4-square.
Just remember that this is a struggle we all go through, and don't let it deter you. Follow commonsense advice from strong players and don't try to overthink any aspect of your chess improvement (you don't need to analyze a game for an hour if you lost from an opening blunder). Don't be afraid to adjust your openings, style, or thinking methods along the way when it makes sense, most of all to you. Be honest with yourself when you're getting real learning done and just spinning your wheels. And holler at some good players. You never know which new friend might teach you hundreds of rating points worth of knowledge through mutual training games. Good luck.
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