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Comment by icr0 | Hacker News Reader

I started chess at about 900 lichess, and plateaued at 1800(10+0 rapid).

What got me from 900-1100 was playing carefully and evaluating my move before I played it(can this piece be taken/is there a mating strategy for my opponent), to prevent blunders

What got me from 1100-1400 was learning two solid openings (Ruy lopez for both sides/ Grunfeld against 1.d4)

1400-1600 was doing hella tactic puzzles, and putting myself in my opponent's position and looking for his tactics

1600-1800 i have no idea, just practice i guess

John Bartholomew's strategy videos and Saint Louis Chess Club opening videos were probably the best resources for me to learn

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Openings are the killer for me - I can never remember them, and it feels like a cheat to just remember a particular opening and trot out all the same moves all the time anyway.

But then I lose because I've made an obvious mistake during the opening...

Memorized openings just get you out of the gate in avoiding common pitfalls. Understanding why they work gets you a lot further. It's very similar to music in this way. Learning to play a song is a very different exercise from delving into music theory, improvising and composing other songs in the same form.

It's more important to remember the theme of an opening than the specifics of the multiple lines sprouting from it. For instance some openings revolve around having a bishop on a strong diagonal and an important central square or two to hold. If you remember these themes a lot of the available moves become (relatively) easy to work out, because you know why the moves are made in the first place. The best thing you can do is find resources that cover the themes as much as the lines/moves themselves, some of the Lichess studies are good, some just cover moves though which isn't helpful.

I've played a lot of people that go down 12 moves of an opening they remembered only to falter as soon as their memory runs out. It's very common, and you will always run out.

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