Need help getting better.

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

Learn and apply the most important principles of chess. - (core of my teaching)
Always blunder-check your moves.
Solve tactics in the right way.
Analyze your games.
Study games of strong players.
Learn how to be more psychologically resilient.
Work on your time management skills.
Get a coach if you can.

I just started how to play chess like a month ago and what helps me the most is learning chess openings. Just pick one for both white and black then really study it to death. Don't worry about other openings especially if you're a casual chess player. I have gained almost 400 elo using that approach and a few others since I made my account back in October which you can see yourself on my profile. Another I'd like to add is study chess principles. There are a lot of those but if you can master only a handful of them then you're set for beginner chess. Also, I probably have watched hundreds of hours worth of GothamChess videos on YouTube and even got his book too "How to Win at Chess" which I can't recommend enough if you're 1200 below. I also recommend Igor Smirnov channel "Remote Chess Academy" I'll just close it right here in case my post becomes a wall of text but the tl:dr is this TL;DR 1. Learn chess principles 2. Learn chess openings 3. Watch GothamChess and Igor Smirnov on YouTube

Chess notation takes at most 5 minutes to memorize and some practice to master it. It's also probably the best thing to do first.

Openings, on the other hand, are not really in the top 5.

Dear MrShork,

I'm a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one given way to learn and improve.

First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analyzing your own games. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem is that it can't explain to you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why it is so good or bad.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames) and if you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

If you would like to learn more about chess, you can take private lessons from me (you find the details on my profile) or you can visit my Patreon channel (www.patreon.com/Bgabor91), where you can learn about every kind of topics (openings, strategies, tactics, endgames, game analysis). I've just started this channel and I'm planning to upload at least 4 new videos per week, so you can get 4-8 hours of educational contents every month for only 20 USD/month. I think it's a pretty fair deal. I also upload daily puzzles in 4 levels every day which are available with a FREE subscription.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck with your games!

Hey there

I am rated over 2400 online (https://www.chess.com/member/ppandachess). I created a free course that will teach you a training plan to improve. Feel free to check it out: https://www.panda-chess.com/daily-improvement-plan