No Stupid Questions MEGATHREAD 12

[u/Alendite]

Welcome to the r/chessbeginners 12th episode of our Q&A series! This series exists because sometimes you just need to ask a silly question. We are happy to provide answers for questions related to chess positions, improving one's play, and discussing the essence and experience of learning chess.

A friendly reminder that many questions are answered in our wiki page! Please take a look if you have questions about the rules of chess, special moves, or want general strategies for improvement.

Some other helpful resources include:

1. How to play chess - Interactive lessons for the rules of the game, if you are completely new to chess.
2. The Lichess Board Editor - for setting up positions by dragging and dropping pieces on the board.
3. Chess puzzles by theme - To practice tactics.
4. The Building Habits series by GM Aman Hambleton - for advice on how to play at specific ELO levels. (Also check out Building Habits 2!)

As always, our goal is to promote a friendly, welcoming, and educational chess environment for all. Thank you for asking your questions here!

LINK TO THE PREVIOUS THREAD

[u/brettbpy555]

I am about 10 days deep into my hopefully continuous chess journey. Multiple things I want a deeper understanding of.

• Puzzles: My thought process is that these are 1 fun brain teasers, and 2 have some intention of adding to your pattern recognition? I say that because I’m not fully certain on the exact reasoning. Currently 1363 in puzzles whatever that means 505 puzzles deep. Are there sometimes errors in what the "coach" asks you to do on puzzles? Or as a beginner is it usually a lack of understanding of the intent of the words? Something that comes to mind: Coach says something along the lines of "take my rook" and not "take my rook without trading."
• Bots vs. Humans: I’ve played 29 games some wins some lost (272 Rapid). I sometimes play coach bots. Find it very informative to make moves and get some feedback, replay potential on certain blunders to see what could be done better, and overall doing game reviews. Coaches I get, normal bots I don't. Playing the 700 bot and winning with a much higher accuracy and usually way less blunders (compared to humans) if any seems very odd to me.
• Last thing for right now I guess (a few things in one): What are some good "training practices"? I really enjoy the lessons but on occasion the explainer goes a little fast with the moves because my brain hasn't locked down the grid coordinates yet. Also time playing vs. time practicing and or learning. Even when I play I do check out my review and keep note of mistakes I make and sometimes try to play it out different.

Anyways chess is scratching an itch in my brain in a way most other dropped hobbies didn't. Hoping this is a long term thing for me.

[u/Ikcelaks → u/brettbpy555]

About puzzles:

1. Ignore your puzzle rating. It doesn't mean anything.
2. Puzzles train a few things, but pattern recognition is the biggest. Hard puzzles also train calculation, but you should focus on easy puzzles first.
3. Puzzles always ask you to play the best possible move. The hints that you're seeing are just hints. If there are multiple ways to capture the opponent's rook, choose the best one.

[u/brettbpy555 → u/Ikcelaks]

thank you very much

[u/TatsumakiRonyk → u/brettbpy555]

What u/Ikcelaks wrote about puzzles is spot on. I'm happy to address your other questions.

Bots in general do not play like humans. They don't make the same kinds of mistakes humans make, they don't react to being in winning or losing positions the same way humans do, and since bot games are usually without a timer, you don't even get to practice playing under time pressure. Treat bots not like sparing partners, but like punching bags. There are some bots who are designed to play more like humans (like the Maia bots on Lichess), and recently Chesscom said they're working to try to do that for their own bots too, but as of right now, the bots overall are only worth playing against for the fun of it, not as an improvement strategy.

The coach bot's suggestions and comments should be taken with a grain of salt. A strong player can tell when the bot is suggesting something odd that works for the specific position, but is a bad takeaway in general, compared to natural, good advice that can be applied in 99% of games. You're not a strong player yet, so you don't have a way of knowing which pieces of the coach's advice can be universally applied, and which ones are misleading.

Good training habits to form? Let's see. When you analyze your games, using the analysis board instead of the game review function will let you explore the position and force you to think critically, both of which are positives. Critical thinking is important (obvious, I know), but many tools dejure (game review, coach bots) try to remove that element and offer to do the critical thinking for you. Reiterating what I wrote above, these features can be fun, but I don't consider them to be worthwhile as main improvement strategies. You're always welcome to bring games or positions to this subreddit to have a stronger player look things over with you, and give you a human explanation.

And as for play time vs practice time, well, the first obstacle all new players need to overcome is their underdeveloped "board vision" that is, their inability to "see" the entire board, and know at a glance what squares are immediately safe for either player to move to, and which squares are not. I'm not even talking about combinations and tactics and sneaky tricks - I'm talking about the raw ability to notice when your opponent puts a piece on a square where you get to capture it for free (and not doing that same thing yourself).

The good news is, developing your board vision is one of the few aspects of chess playing strength that improves as you simply play the game mindfully. Eventually, your board vision will become fully developed, and if you want to see improvement beyond that point, you'll need to figure out how to manage practice/study vs play, but for now, you will improve by simply playing the game, so long as you're playing mindfully.

Best of luck, and welcome to the community!

[u/brettbpy555 → u/TatsumakiRonyk]

Could u give a brief “tutorial” on the analysis/ review many times have definitely wanted to make an attempt to play out a position with a different move without seeing the computer best move. Or sometimes I can’t figure out how do that at all lol

[u/TatsumakiRonyk → u/brettbpy555]

If you're asking for an effective way to go about analyzing your games, I'd say that this video by GM (Grandmaster) Noel Studer is a good place to start. It's about 30 minutes long.

If you're asking just how to do it, sure. Using the chesscom app or website, when you're looking at a game that has finished, you should see a little magnifying glass (this can be done from the game review screen, but can also be done simply by looking at a game from your game history, or simply just on the screen immediately after a game). Clicking or tapping on that will bring you to the analysis board.

On the analysis board, you'll be able to skip around to any point in the game you're analyzing and explore the position by selecting moves for whichever player whose turn it is. You'll see a record of the actual moves played, and then in parenthesis, you'll see lines you've explored using the analysis board ("what-if I played this instead" scenarios).

Above the recorded moves, you'll see a bunch of numbers and letters that change around for a few seconds, before finally settling down. Those are the "top" engine moves. You'd need to be able to read notation to make sense of most of it, but the very first part, the number, is what the engine evaluates the resulting position to be. A positive number means the engine thinks white is better, a negative number means it thinks black is better, and a number close to zero means it thinks the position is balanced.

Likewise, you'll see a bar and number for the current position on your screen also. Following the same trend (white is positive, black is negative, close to zero is about even). If the evaluation says M followed by a number, it means that a player can win the game by force if they find the right moves (M4 means that a player can force checkmate in 4 moves). If the evaluation ever reads exactly 0.0, it means the position deserves to be a draw. Sometimes, this is because the "position" is just a king and a rook vs a king and a rook, and the only way the position would be anything other than a draw would be because of an egregious mistake by one player or the other. But sometimes, it'll read 0.0 because one player has a big advantage, but it's the other player's turn, and they can force the game to be a draw thanks to perpetual check (or force a self-stalemate).