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moving up from 1400-1500

#11
sorry I'm a little late here but... watch immortal games or brilliancy games in your spare time/before you play!

i went from 1300 to 1700+ over on chess.com very quickly with this method. can't get past 1900 though -_-

you end up learning openings, insane tactics, and winning endgames all while being entertained. no joke, you end up seeing (and remembering!) the best tactics / strategies ever played.

kingscrusher has some good playlists, just keep in mind his analysis is almost always engine lines. the games are really well chosen though.
#12
lol well i just read all the other posts

everyone is saying study tactics, and yeah if you want some quick points do puzzles every day. keep in mind at a certain point you will hit a wall and (~1600) the people you play will see all the tactics your trying to set up, and simply not fall for them. you start playing people that don't just play 1 or 2 move threats and all of a sudden you lose because you have no good moves, and you're short term plan is gone

if you really want to get better you have to learn about formulating / !!!adapting!!! strategies and getting small positional wins.

a good way to practice this stuff is to play games without making any trades. you force your opponent into bad exchanges, trap their pieces, etc. its hard but after a couple games you start getting the hang of finding/creating good spots to put pieces and it becomes a lot easier. just play defensively and take away good moves from them, then you can crush them fairly easily. plus its fun to watch the 1 move threat guys implode when they run out of moves lol

also you rarely make blunders with this play style, so that'll fix that problem right up for you :)
#14
Another thing regarding tactics is to use your time to find better move during the puzzle solving.
On chesstempo.com there's the choice for "standard", "blitz" and "mixed" tactic puzzles.
With standard one is allowed to use unlimited time.
Sometimes puzzles have pittfalls. A certain move looks winning but it turns out to be a trap.
Thinking a bit longer and then discovering a better move can be rewarding, and develop your chess skills as well.
chesstempo also has quite often interesting comments with people showing different variations.
(If you become a premium member on chesstempo one can get the game source (often GM games) and FEN export and more. I've been a premium member and I think that e.g. 1 month of premium membership at chesstempo could be very useful for beginning chess players.)
#16
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#17
Don't be silly #16. Clearly he wasn't using an engine. That's just 19 moves, many of which are very much forced.
#19
@achja
regarding the game.i previously mentioned that i've been studying the sicilian for much long.and i learned about the accelerated dragon 2 days back.so i followed the first 4 moves in that opening. afterwards what followed came from my instincts.and i was keeping in mind the words from wafflesmack. at move 10 i planned a series of moves and this is the first time i am doing so.usually i could plan maximum 3 moves as i wish. do you mean to say that i played better than a 1400 range player? Then I'm happy about that.
@colin_ni
I never used an engine i swear. who would be dumb to post such a game in a discussion? And before posting this, i myself did the computer analysis. I do analysis of all my games just to see how well i played.And i have other 2-3 games with very little centipawn loss.
http://en.lichess.org/SusVJ7sJ
another one which i played today with the same player in that game you reported
http://en.lichess.org/3WllBhXf
another one with 15 centipawn
http://en.lichess.org/TsfT2Wk7/black
#20
@kingslayer92

Good to hear more details about your chess development.

Yes, I was surprised how good your tactical and positional moves were in that Sicilian game.

Let's play a few casual corr. games if you like, as a training.

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