Archive for September, 2009

Three simple ways to improve your chess skills

It will not be an exaggeration to say with confidence that the more experienced you become in the game of chess, the better will be your quality of life.

Chess is also referred to as a war game or a battle of the minds. The expertise in the game of chess will not only help you become a better player and say “checkmate” quite often to the opponent, but also will help you take vital decisions in life guided by your mind. This is one reason this game of chess is surviving the test of time and technology and will continue to the King of Games as long as the humanity derives lessons from it for a better and organized life.

Chess is one of the easiest games to learn. All you need to know before playing the game is about the pieces, the arrangement of the pieces in the board, the basic movement of the various types of pieces, their capabilities and other simple rules of the game. One can learn these simple things in less than a couple of hours and start playing it. This is probably one reason that we find 9 out of 10 people aware of the game and have played it at some part of their life, but did not manage to go beyond the level of a novice or a beginner and lost interest in the same.

The unique feature of this turn-based game is that there is no room for luck or chance. As a player, you will be responsible for the fate of the game and you cannot throw blame on others for a bad result. If you ensure that you do not commit a mistake, then you are likely to avoid losing the game and manage to settle for a draw.

The first and foremost thing to improve the chess skills is to reduce the percentage of losses and replace with either wins or draws. As a new player or beginner in the game, you are bound to make mistakes. Mere understanding the rules of the game or learning the game will not guarantee you any success in this noble game. It is but imperative for a beginner to play as many games as possible, without worrying about the losses. What you should do to improve the skill is to learn from the mistakes. You lose the game only because of your mistakes and nothing else stops from winning the game or settling for a draw with the opponent.

Having gained the confidence in the game, the second thing one should try to do is to learn and master the theory of chess. No two games look alike in the game of chess though the game is being played for more than 1500 years now. The existence of the innumerable possibilities for any given move or given situation is what makes the game more challenging, fascinating and interesting. One should try to learn and grasp the theory behind the moves, the objective of the pieces and the positional influence of the pieces. How one can do that? Analyzing your own games played previously, or referring to chess books and literature in this context will be of immense use in this regard. Playing out the old games of grandmasters and trying to find the reasoning and motive behind every move played by those grandmasters is one way of gaining expertise.

The third thing one can try to do to improve the chess skills is to invite players with a relatively higher skill than you for a game of chess. An experienced player will have more variations in store and can play much better than you can. While you will lose most of the games played with experienced players, you can stand to learn new ideas from those games.

Now, learning chess and improving the skill set has been made much more easier, thanks to the contribution of the computer and the Internet to this war game. Anybody having a passion for the game and wanting to lead a better and organized life can learn the game of chess through the computer, play chess online with the computer or with a virtual partner in online chess site and gain the much-needed experience.

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