what's up chess fans in this video i'm going to try to provide some guidance on the most common
chess questions i receive i made a community post a few days ago and in total received over
a thousand questions i've put them in this video into chess improvement chess specific
and then miscellaneous chess questions and i'm trying to do my best to separate it into beginner
intermediate and advanced let's jump into it kicking things off in the chess improvement
section i'm putting these two questions into one how do i get better and what do i focus on well
how do i get better is a tricky one because if you're an intermediate or an advanced player
you really have to diagnose the problem i mean do you have a good opening repertoire with the london
system but then for some reason you're getting into time trouble and losing a lot of games that
way you know maybe you're playing with the black pieces and you're getting a lot of king's indian
defenses the opening is going well you're out playing your opponents but then you have a blind
spot for some sort of tactic you've got to drill into what exactly is going wrong in your games
and then you have to figure it out maybe you have to change your opening repertoire but you have to
continuously try to find what you're good at put that aside and try to tune everything up
however as a beginner it's hard to get better i mean you're going to struggle in the beginning
chest is an intense learning curve so what you should do as a beginner focus on basic checkmate
patterns so you know how to finish a game look for simple hanging tactics one move tactics
not yet going into combinations and simple openings just get developed take the center
castle and then get going from there it's a little bit harder uh to give you a you know split of time
when you're an intermediate or an advanced player but definitely openings and tactics are something
you must focus on and then your endgame conversion you have to start adding a few more layers but
that's generally how you get better at chess and i guess what i'll add for this part is who is there
to diagnose your problems well obviously you can train with someone you can train with a coach but
if you don't have that join a community of chess fans for example the gotham city discord there's
a link somewhere in the description below there's folks always talking about chess giving each other
feedback and advice and pointing people in the right direction as far as digital resources for
openings whether they're free or paid you've got to figure that out for your own budget
and then ultimately make a decision so hopefully that helps you let's jump into the next question
a lot of you also asked me this as a follow-up how much time should i spend doing puzzles and
studying openings versus playing and also if i'm playing what time control should i be playing at
i always say 10 15 30 minute games definitely uh because that allows you to implement everything
that you've learned unless you're like 1800 2 000 at which point blitz is actually also
okay three minute games bullet is usually something you should avoid in general but you
should do something that you find fun as far as a percentage split i don't know everyone's a little
bit different you need to be able to internalize what you learned like in the opening go and play a
few games what i'll say here set yourself a quota five games in a day win or lose doesn't matter
5-0 don't keep going 0-5 don't keep playing and also don't get you know too emotionally invested
in these games set a quota five games ten puzzles correct and that's it keep it rolling from there
another question that was asked so many times but in different ways was
should i solve a lot of puzzles how do i even find puzzles in games and so on and so forth well
take this puzzle from a game that i played against the mod of mine a long time supporter dr
chess gremlin you know he's up he's a 1400 rated player and in this position um i had just played
97 looking for the move knight to d5 hitting his bishop and potentially you know setting up
excuse me some squares for my bishop to escape so using a tactical pattern sequence of checks
captures attacks something i talk about a lot in the tactic solving guide he realized that after
a4 my bishop is just stuck and if i move upon he's going to be able to take and do some damage on the
dark squares like the bishop coming here i thought i had actually tricked him with this move making
him go to a5 and then pinning him and he found a fantastic move here that froze the position for me
and made me lose a piece he just played backwards with the knight and he realized that this bishop
is frozen and it's got nowhere to go so here uh i had to sacrifice a piece i mean i could have done
something like this but this is still very bad as i lose two bishops for the rook it just goes to
show you that even against a strong player tactics are in the position okay how do you find them
checks captures attacks always that's like 95 of the time how you are going to find a
tactical sequence for either yourself or for your opponent this last question in chess improvement
i get asked every day that i'm streaming in a million different ways i am this old and i am
thinking to hit this level by this time do you think i can do it and if so how do i do it okay
first things first if you want to learn chess just learn it just learn it don't set yourself a
goal of becoming an fm and i am a gm you know the point is if you want to play the game join a good
community of people and just go for it don't think that you're wasting time but at the same time if
you are in a position financially don't pour all of your money into chess thinking you know somehow
you will absorb more information take it on a budget friendly approach uh and learn slowly
pick some skills up and if you're a professional a working professional skills don't translate
between the job that you have and chess okay chess will deconstruct everything you thought you knew
about intelligence allow yourself to make a lot of mistakes and practice and you'll get better
the next section is called chess specifics because a lot of you didn't just ask me questions about
chess in general you asked about very specific things like pawn play and pawn breaks i could make
a much longer video on this but i'm just going to give you a couple of examples uh starting out with
this one where in a strange opening against the subscriber i had full control of the center uh and
a knight on g6 like this can be very frequently targeted with a flank pawn which is exactly it's
what i did i played h4 threatening to trap the knight played h5 and then one more instructive
little thing here i used pawn play in the center of the board to play against this dark squared
bishop so i traded off my dark squared bishop i put two pawns on the dark squares that opens up
my light squared bishop as well and then later in the game i use my pawn as a barrier on move 16 to
control the movement of this knight so this knight is kind of boxed out by these two but of course
pawn play affects other pieces more positively like this move did open up this bishop uh one
more thing about a position with regards to pawn play is something like this where both players
have castled on opposite sides uh there's only been one piece traded it's been a pair of dark
squared bishops so when you have opposite side castling another knight on the edge of the board
there you go a5 a4 but also that move is just kind of preparing a direct assault on this king and my
opponent played this unfortunate move and actually just straight up got his knight trapped on b3
a big question i also got was about pawn brakes in general what i can tell you about pawn brakes
is that they need to advantageously affect your position whether it's improving the position of a
bishop a knight a rook opening an attack and not opening the position too much for your opponent
that's a good starting point for pawn play the next question i got a lot of was when do you
reroute your pieces and how do you evaluate peace trades in positions where it's not so obvious so
i took this game where i had the white pieces in the recently concluded title tuesday tournament
this was the position from the opening and here i realized i couldn't make any progress on this side
or in the center so i played queenie one i brought the queen back and i hit the c3 pawn
from where i would get access to the other side of the board that's how you reroute you improve
your position my opponent struck back with c5 i took here and the question is should i trade no
because then i'm just pinning myself right that's not good so instead i played queen c6 check which
actually forces my opponent to play the move king to e7 and it looks like everything is
okay my queen can't do any more damage i can't go here so the second reroute how do i get to
this king correct i know you got it bishop c1 and that's actually a very annoying move so my
opponent had to play queen h5 and check and make that little square for his king i still cannot
get in and i really want to take this pawn or this pawn well which piece is the glue of the position
for the person playing with the black pieces right it's this so bishop c5 and that's how you do it
right you you want to find a way to logically break through and continue to make progress so
you offer a trade of the dark squared bishops there you go not all trades are the same and
this was an example which combined both rerouting and trading i ended up losing this game but we're
not going to talk about that the next question was also extremely popular how do you make a plan in a
position where it's not so obvious and look that is frankly where all of us struggle in chess the
middle game in an equal position you should be familiar with the plans that you play from your
own openings that is so important so take this position i played against the subscriber this was
random sicilian in a closed position i know that the plan is to attack the king because i don't
have the advantage in the center queenie one black's best plan here is to counter attack on
the queen side that's just something that i know from studying a lot of games which you should do
he didn't do that he played bishop d8 and rerouted his bishop to b6 looking for a check but after
king h1 well there's just nothing here for black so after playing h6 because he didn't quite know
what to do well i have this so who did i open up here the bishop and all of a sudden black's
position collapsed actually he made a big mistake he played e5 and hung at the h6 pawn now i know
there's a big raiding gap here between myself and my opponent but that's how you make a plan that's
just a very simple example of go for an attack on the king if that's not possible what's next on
the list make a trade that benefits you look for pawn play look for a breakthrough on one side of
the board we're all in this together chess is hard the last chess specifics question drives me insane
because i get it so much and i don't understand why it gets asked what are your thoughts on this
opening i play this opening what are your thoughts on it look title players know and appreciate
almost all decent openings the question is do you like it do you know it does it fit your playing
style how are your results you can gauge whether or not the opening that you're playing is good you
should not listen to a random title player even if i tell you don't play the sicilian defense what if
you have a 90 score with it okay so keep playing it you should just find something that makes sense
to study that's the way you should approach this okay so stop asking this question pick something
if you know it and it's going well for you then play it if it's not switch it up if you've made
it this far this next set of questions is just going to be kind of miscellaneous and starting
off with emotions and chess you know like how do i recover from making a horrible mistake how do i
recover from you know losing a lot of games in a row how to deal with tilt how to deal with anger
if you need to ever step away from the game it's always helped me okay i have quit chess
for years of my life and come back and enjoyed it with a fresh start what i will warn you not
to do is to get into the tilt don't turn it into gambling don't play more because you're losing
and try not to play more when you're on a hot streak because when you lose it's going to hurt
your rating is going to fluctuate in puzzles in blitz but to kind of narrow that down a little bit
try to set yourself a quota and balance it like that and i guess what i should add here is like
it's okay to be angry just don't let it make you too angry or too upset if chess is getting bad for
your mental health take a break all right take a break i think this next question is extremely
important how much of a computer should you be using in your chest study do not use one when
you play live games to study with a computer after a game and fully fully get every concept out of it
is difficult most likely you will need to get some human input for some of the suggestions i'm sure
many of you have seen computer suggestions and go what the hell does that even mean try to put it
into human words uh there's actually an engine website now out i don't know it off the top of
my head that's out there that tries to break it down into human form join a community of chess
players okay that'll help you out a lot and do not play practice games against engines engines
do not play like 99 of the people you're going to be playing against they do weird things and
then they'll randomly just lose all their pieces play humans and if that brings you anxiety join a
trusted discord server group of folks whom you can practice against and the last question i'll
answer just for fun is how are gm so good and well the answer to that question is i have no idea i'm
just an international master but i'll tell you my experience i've probably played close to half a
million chess games in my life when you can get to that level let me know and if you're still
not an international master well maybe it's time to play some checkers if there's any questions i
didn't answer drop them in the comments below like the video share it with a friend i thought this
would be helpful and you guys made this possible thank you so so much for all of your support on
this channel and take a look at some of my other videos maybe you'll get something out of them