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Teaching myself chess and need help


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If all you want to do is play then Lichess and Chess.com are both free. 

The paid for account on Chess.com gets you access to more daily puzzles as well as the tutorial content. Lichess has infinite puzzles for free but has fewer tutorials (I think). 

Personally I prefer the Lichess interface but I have considered getting a premium chess.com for some of their lesson content. 

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5 hours ago, Uncle Psychosis said:

If all you want to do is play then Lichess and Chess.com are both free. 

The paid for account on Chess.com gets you access to more daily puzzles as well as the tutorial content. Lichess has infinite puzzles for free but has fewer tutorials (I think). 

Personally I prefer the Lichess interface but I have considered getting a premium chess.com for some of their lesson content. 

The lessons on chess.com are excellent, I've progressed a lot since I started them this week. The ones on Lichess are just puzzles basically. Going to do as many as possible on the weeks free premium trial I'm doing just now. 

It looks like lichess has a lot of features that chess.com does but it's not very apparent how to view them so might be a case of getting to know the software better. 

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On chapter 1 of a book called The Right Way to Play Chess by David Pritchard (revised and updated by Richard James). I'm confused by the following paragraph on pawn promotion,

""A pawn on reaching the end of the board (the last rank of eight squares) is promoted to any piece (other than a king) that the player chooses. A queen is the natural selection, in view of her being the strongest piece, but occasionally the peculiarity of the position demands promotion to knight, or even to bishop or rook."

What I don't get about that is, of those three pieces, the knight is the least powerful, right? I mean, if you put a knight alone in the centre of an empty board, there are only 8 squares he can move to. But a bishop can move to 13 squares, and a rook to 14. So if a queen is the natural selection for pawn promotion, why isn't the rook the next most natural selection?
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-showcase/checkmate-by-promoting-to-knight

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Been playing Nelson a lot, finally started to beat him, not easy though.
Played a bit of online chess in my teens, probably haven't played a game for 10+ years but inspired by this thread to get back into it. Rusty is an understatement, download chess.com app and beat Emir easily before getting pumped by Nelson. Will be going for blood in the rematch.
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22 hours ago, Ziggy said:

The board needs a quarter turn. The square on the bottom right should be the same colour as that person’s pieces.

But this can only be true for one of the players, unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying; and it's already true for white.

Apart from that, I can only think that the King-Queen arrangement breaks symmetry, so that's all that could be amended. Board rotation modulo a balf-turn, then royal shaggers swapping: those are the only set-up variations(/blunders) that seem possible to me.

/ not a chess player

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21 minutes ago, Cowshed Chris said:
23 hours ago, Bigmouth Strikes Again said:
Been playing Nelson a lot, finally started to beat him, not easy though.

Played a bit of online chess in my teens, probably haven't played a game for 10+ years but inspired by this thread to get back into it. Rusty is an understatement, download chess.com app and beat Emir easily before getting pumped by Nelson. Will be going for blood in the rematch.

Two Queens, f**k you Nelson.

chess1.thumb.jpg.5473ff0a79ee011ac646f552616b10b2.jpg

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1 hour ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:
On 18/01/2021 at 05:10, Todd_is_God said:
Why would you ever choose to promote to either a rook or bishop, though, given a Queen can make the same moves?

A Queen promotion can cause stalemate.

I don't think so. I've been playing chess for decades but I never experienced having a stalemate when I promoted to a Queen. 

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37 minutes ago, SmudgePop said:

I don't think so. I've been playing chess for decades but I never experienced having a stalemate when I promoted to a Queen. 

Doesn't mean it's not possible. Here's a possible (not necessarily plausible!) endgame position where if white promotes to a queen, it's a stalemate, but promoting to a rook will give you a standard white win. Naturally, it's probably better to go kf7 first and then promote to a queen and checkmate at the next move. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to concoct a position where the best move is definitely to promote to something that isn't a queen.

NotAQueen.png.8090fed0da1afc1dd0202c2b1a220f5d.png

Edited by Aim Here
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3 minutes ago, Boostin' Kev said:

Just seen him now, thanks.  On the free version I'm sure I could only see the first player under Adaptive called Jimmy.  I take it I have to beat him to work my way up to the others?  On a weeks free premium just now so they're all available.

Top tip, he brings out the queen really early, and if you're not careful will check mate you in about 6 moves.

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1 hour ago, Bigmouth Strikes Again said:

Top tip, he brings out the queen really early, and if you're not careful will check mate you in about 6 moves.

Early queens tend to be easy to exploit. As much as you can, try to incidentally threaten the other guy's queen when getting your pieces developed. Assuming you don't screw up, you'll have a full roster of developed pieces, while the other guy burned up most of his moves trying to not lose his queen.

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On 18/01/2021 at 12:57, superbigal said:

Anyone who gets to the stage of promoting a pawn, should either not be playing chess, or not be playing that opponent.  If the game gets to that stage you, or your opponent (Or both) are simply pish.

My Russian cousin Grandmaster Superbigalski told me this.

 

This is complete and utter nonsense. There are loads of games at every level, right up to World Championship matches, where pawns have been promoted.

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Early queens tend to be easy to exploit. As much as you can, try to incidentally threaten the other guy's queen when getting your pieces developed. Assuming you don't screw up, you'll have a full roster of developed pieces, while the other guy burned up most of his moves trying to not lose his queen.
I had my rematch against Nelson and tried a different approach, all out attack. Backfired spectacularly, absolutely pumped.

Took a step back and played Sven (I had skipped him). Won fairly comfortably though made a complete arse of a check mate move and extended the game by about 10 minutes [emoji85]

Quite amazing how I seem to have lost all and any skills/tactics I may have had before. It's been a long while but Ive been surprised how lost and without a plan I've felt in most games. Enjoying it though, another shot at Nelson later....
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