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So, while I've always loved the idea of #chess, I've also always been spectacularly bad at it. Can anyone recommend any books or other resources that might help? I had an eBook (or was it a PDF?) on tactics once upon a time, but I don't know what happened to it.

I know that an important key is practice, but the problem is that when I lose, I don't know why I lost, so it's difficult to learn from the experience.

Sico Axial reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

“How to Think Ahead in Chess” by Horowitz and Reinfeld is wonderful. It’s an older book, but it’ll teach you what you need. archive.org/details/howtothink…

This is also terrific: archive.org/details/bobbyfisch…

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

The free lessons on lichess.com are very good and will give you a basic grounding across all aspects of the game, helping build the chess vocabulary you'll need to understand why this or that specific game went wrong.
in reply to Wayne Myers

@conniptions I believe it’s lichess.org.

Building on this: learn to analyse your games using an engine. Only play 5-10 games per day, but analyse each one. At first, look through the game without the engine, try to observe the flow of the game. Try to see if you got outplayed positionally, or you missed a tactic, hung a piece, etc.

Then analyse with the engine. Don’t focus too much on absolute swings of the evaluation, but more on trends.

in reply to Sebastian Lauwers

@teotwaki Doh, of course yes, apologies, was v tired when I posted.

Agreed in re usefulness of using engine for analysis (and importance of analysing games) once there's a grasp of the basic value of material, basic tactics and so on.

Not yet mentioned - the usefulness of puzzles: simpler puzzles help you drill basic patterns and tactics - it's one thing to know what a fork is, but another thing to look at a position and quickly spot an available fork. Lichess puzzles v good for this.

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