My daughter has expressed an interest in chess and joined the chess club so I'm trying to brush up a bit myself so we can play together.

I'm finding the lichess puzzles fun but some like this one are bizarre and some of the solutions seem similarly bizarre.

Am I missing something?

• move peasant to d6, get his queen.

black can respond with 2 moves, both of which are bad:

• move king and queen is taken on c7 by white (other king moves besides d8 would be worse I think)
• queen takes d6, loose queen by white knight on b7.

I learned the basics as a kid, just like how the pieces move and what is legal. I don't feel like I have ever managed to develop a sense of strategy, and I both think that I need to think for too long about each move, but also still make obvious mistakes like not noticing a threat and losing a piece for no gain.

What would be the best way for a player of my level to improve? Read a book about openings? Follow through games by great players? Obviously part of it will be play lots of chess, is there a particularly good website/app for this? Is playing against humans better than bots?

I'm not likely to have access to much in person games like a club or anything, this would be something in looking to do in my spare time, as and when possible.

If the black knight can't move because it would put himself in check can the white king take the queen? Or would putting the king in D1 or D3 be an illegal move?

NOTE: I only play correspondence chess. And this rating is correspondence chess. I don’t know what my elo rating would be in time controls. I have a disability that affects the mitochondria (energy production), and I’m unable to concentrate for a whole game so I play correspondence.

This game was pretty cool. I managed a centipawn loss of 19. And to win by +3 when my openent made 0 blunders (1 mistake, 3 inaccuracies), and I managed to scrape the game by with only a single inaccuracy (0 blunders, 0 mistakes).

I tend to spend a long time analysing moves and even take notes (which is allowed in correspondence chess), so perhaps my rating is more of an indication of the effort I put in than my true skill. But I’m quite proud nonetheless.

Solution is

SPOILER

(how do you properly do spoilers on lemmy?)

!Kf4 which wins the rook!<

Is it recorded somewhere? I would be curious.

I’m ofc aware chess engines are far from flawless. And humans have spent years analysing single sequences of 4 or 5 moves (openings) and written multiple volumes of novels.

But I’m still curious.

I'm putting this here because I've seen a lot of posts by people on forums, here and elsewhere, asking about the best way to improve as a beginner chess player.

Oftentimes a lot of emphasis is put on reading books or consuming online content, but for me the most significant factor in my chess improvement was finding an environment where I could play over the board casually with people of varying strengths, who all enjoy chess.

The benefits are many, but perhaps the most significant is getting to discuss your games. After, and sometimes as, you play, you and your opponent will discuss lines, and often things you're worried about in your position. As a beginner, you can pick up fairly quickly basic tactics, but positional understanding -- those 'instincts' about a position -- are so much easier to learn if you have someone to point them out in your games. Chess is such a lovely hobby in that everyone I've met has wanted others to succeed and improve. The strong friends I've made there have lent me books, and reviewed my games once I started playing in the league.

Beyond the chess, there's the social and motivational aspect. I look forward to Wednesday evenings (my pub chess night) because I know I'm going to go, chat shit with some friends over beer, and play some chess.

The final thing I'd emphasise is that it doesn't have to be a formal club. In my city there's a great pub chess night, and on the continent I'm aware there's a great coffee house chess scene. You can be casual, and strength is not the be-all and end-all.

So go forth and play! If you want any advice on finding somewhere nice (and if you happen to be in Bristol, UK), let me know!

This is from the chess master app. That's the solution of the puzzle (to win).

It's level 3, puzzle 18

Subjetively, it makes a HUGE difference whether I play a "normal" game against the computer and select stockfish lvl 1 (yes, I'm a very bad newbie), compared to when I select "offline game" and also select stockfish lvl 1. The latter is far more difficult and hardly makes any mistakes (as far as I can tell anyways). I can never beat the offline bot, and almost always beat the online bot. Is this a known quirk of the app?

I clicked on "Analyze Game" and Stockfish wouldn't find any blunder or mistake. I had lost two matches against the opponent previously (on other days) so this game was just ... perfect.

(Is there any blog posts / etc on the distribution of accuracy-percentages, potentially for various ELO levels? I am pretty surprised that I played so accuracte given that I tend to blunder regularly)

My father is annoyingly using this construct that I find very hard to break into, he played white here. So I would like to find a strategy against it :-)

so my rating on lichess is higher for rapid (close to 900) than to blitz (close to 700), and I kind of wonder whether this is due to differences in the pool of people playing rapid vs blitz, or whether I am just a not as good at thinking fast.

I have played A LOT of blitz games in June & July and only recently really picked up rapid games. Overall I think I am not even making too much use of the additional time quite often in rapid as I am still somewhat used to the time constraint in blitz (e.g. I never lost due to time-out on a rapid game), so I don't think its actually me playing much better in rapid than in blitz

A bit annoying that people won't find the 'resign' button if they are unwilling to finish the match.