Bad at chess

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I've been trying to get better at chess recently, but I've never really been good at it. I understand the rules perfectly, and basic strategy, but it's very hard to decide what the best move and understand why the opponent makes certain moves. Does anyone have any tips on improving?

Chess is quite the thinking game. It's hard to predict what people will do even if you've played them more than once! It's certainly a decent amount of luck and skill, plus patience too.

Perhaps look for signs they are playing offensive or defensively? If you are playing the same person a few times, I would guess they have some sort of pattern to look out for. Then alter your plan accordingly. Also last but not least- plus practice makes perfect.

I used to play chess a ton in school many years ago, there was even a chess club after school! I never entered any tournaments or anything though.

Here's what upped my game.

I started playing people that were steps ahead if me.

I got best a lot.
I watched and learned from my mistakes.

When in went back to my regular chess opponents my game results was more wins.

KASPAROV LOST TO DEEP BLUE, BUT BELIEVES HE CAN STILL WHIP PUTIN

Most pundits agree that Putin has gotten the better of his European and Washington counterparts so far, which has lit a fire under one former Russian chess legend turned political activist, one irate Garry Kasparov, who believes he has the secret to toppling the Kremlin’s Grand Master...

IBM websites remind us the corporation’s pride and joy, Deep Blue, a supercomputer which played a fascinating and winning series of matches with then-reigning World Chess Champion, Kasparov in 1997. Kasparov lost.
After a previous series of chess games starting in Feb 1996, which Kasparov won, his luck wore thin and by 1997 he was regularly beaten by the Big Blue machine of IBM. Very predictably, Kasparov accused IBM of cheating. How does a computer “cheat”?

After his humbling string of defeats, Kasparov turned to couched potato punditry of the political sort, running street protests in Moscow but also without much luck. Trying his hand again, he is now advising what he calls “the west” on how to beat Putin. Here again, his luck doesn’t look too good because his one-liners only tell us nothing new.

Paid by outlets such as Rupert Murdoch’s new toy, the Wall Street Journal, political pundit Kasparov tells us that the west should, “Sanction the 140 oligarchs who would dump Mr. Putin in the trash tomorrow if he cannot protect their assets abroad. Target their visas, their mansions and IPOs in London, their yachts and Swiss bank accounts. Use banks, not tanks”.

Great stuff which “the west” could (or should) also do to its own 140 criminal bankers and dodgy brokers, and their army of bent traders, tax dodgers and parasites, but because they own the finance system, the same way that Russia’s oligarchs do, the likelihood of that is low. Your move, Mr Kasparov.

Kasparov, writing in the WSJ, tried a flanking move to confuse or amuse us all. He claimed to know that Putin will run a divide-and-rule strategy on the world’s finance markets, pitting Europe against the US. He wrote that “Wall Street’s loss (will be) London’s gain, and Mr. Putin’s divide-and-conquer tactics will work again”.
This is pure nonsense. If that is how Kasparov plays chess, then it’s really no surprise that Deep Blue beat him. His ignorance of how world financial markets operate, and who operates them, is stunning.

He ignores the basic fact that Wall Street and London rise in lockstep, with Tokyo and other places like Frankfurt, and they will all fall together, also. This is the seamless grid of stock exchange operators, since 2009 dedicated to a “permanent bull” market – who cares about “fundamentals” – but Kasparov airily claims that Wall Street can fall while London gains. Somehow he got it 100% wrong.

What’s more frightening is how Kasparov wants so badly to get into politics.

Those very same Western financial market operators are now giving us a vintage show of mock-panic. The bankers, brokers and traders who own and operate the markets have lots of fancy explanations for their sudden urge to sell, but their real intention is to nudge Western politicians further and faster down the road to war. This is bankers’ mass psychology. War is good for stock exchanges because after the ritual slaying of fake value, there can be the ritual “buy on the dip”, afterwards. It is a tried and tested formula, operated for far more than a hundred years.

Kasparov doesn’t tell us (or simply doesn’t know) that “the markets”, including Moscow’s stock exchange, generate and feed off panic on a daily basis. The important point is that since 2009 the panic is obligatorily euphoric, aimed at driving stock prices, commodity prices – anything at all, including Mr Putin’s own oil and gas revenues… to the Moon. When the euphoria-panic turns tail and descends into sell-everything-and-scoot the panic is black, like Kasparov’s chess pieces. The events are totally symmetrical. Ask Janet Yellen, or Mario Draghi.
http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/03/14/k ... hip-putin/

It takes a combination of book study as well as playing against those a little (or more) better than you. You may know that you made a mistake, but may not know what you should have done, different plans, goals, etc. Books are written for all skill levels, so get something that explains the reasons for most of the moves rather than something that goes into a lot of detail for an opening your opponent may not follow.

Annotated games of world class players is another resource.

Good luck! The game can give you hours of enjoyment for decades.

I'd like to get better at chess, too. Ironically I was one of the best players at my school's chess club. I understand the strategy, but as with many skills lack of practice has made me incredibly rusty. Years ago I tried to rectify the problem by joining an online chess tournament, (basically the site would put two random online players in a game with each other) but infuriatingly, my opponent would often log out halfway through a game. I've tried playing chess in the mean time against a computer but tend to feel like a young, far less resourceful John Connor up against Skynet. :/

We all have different ways of learning. One thing that worked really well for me was to find a system of openings that I could fall in love with. This helped me get better, and it made the task of learning openings fun instead of a boring slog.

I increased my rating from 1150 to 1900 over five years in my late 20s. Some other things went into this though. It was sort of like a switch flipped internally... and my interest in chess became a lot stronger than it had been previously.

Interest and increasing ratings certainly help to keep up the interest, something shared by quite a number of current or former strong players.
Burnout will happen when the losses hurt as much but not as much high from the wins. Also, the minor irritations start to become bigger. At any rate, enjoy it!