After a hiatus, I’ve decided to get back into active chess competition. My current rating is < 1000.
Any suggestions on preparation (besides playing)?
Thanks in advance.
Get Chessmaster and go through the tutorials and lessons.
It’s actually some really good stuff on the cheap. And it’s range goes from rank beginner that’s never seen a chess board before to roughly 1300 or maybe even to about 1400 USCF.
It has some stuff for higher level players like puzzles in the lessons section.
At your rating level, practicing tactics is probably the most important. One way would be to get a chess puzzle book and work through the problems until you can solve them all. A book that I really liked when I was starting out was “Winning Chess” by Chernev and Reinfeld, but I don’t know whether there is an edition still in print.
Hmm, I uninstalled the program, so I can’t remember the exact name. I"ll try and find it later.
But it’s a free chess puzzles program for the Android platform.
It’s got multiple levels and goes from mate in 1 to mate in 3 or more. I won’t include the “Master” section with only 2 move mates.
I never did solve a master 2 mover -and there are a LOT of them. That being said, those 2 move mates are taken (obviously), from decades of chess puzzles made by people that like to make chess compositions.
The puzzles are random, so you can’t really look any up. But I’m pretty sure the person who made the program is active in some sort of chess composition organization like the World Federation of Chess Composition.
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~stniekat/pccc/
The player coming back from a hiatus has a couple questions to ask of himself. First, are you book or computer oriented? There are a number of online tactics programs to find and use. Personally, I find my eyes get tired after an hour or so looking at a computer screen. There are a number of good puzzle books that fit your level. Robert Palliser’s “The Complete Chess Workout I & II” are good with modern puzzles designed for the amateur level. There is also “Chess Tactics for Kids” and “How to Beat Your Dad at Chess”. These books are for players U1200 and not only for kids to use. Second, how much time do you have to study? If you can devote an hour 3 days a week of study plus playing casual games at a club with real people, then you are ahead of what many tournament players do. Third, why are you playing in tournaments? For fun, rating, or money? If you are playing for the challenge, then go to it. Even play up a section. Don’t worry about your rating. If you play a lot and learn from your losses and wins, it will go up a bit. Forget about playing for money. If you play well, you might get some.
Work on the following areas:
- Checkmates - Use the “How to Beat Your Dad at Chess” or a Pandolfini book on checkmate exercises to groove in the checkmate patterns.
- Basic chess tactics - Lots of puzzle books, and websites out there to use to get you thinking about patterns and improve the accuracy of your calculation.
- One piece endgames - Recently, a number of endgame books have come out. Some are designed almost for professional players, like Dvoretsky’s “Endgame Manual”. You can get by with less. Read “Silman’s Endgame Course” designed to learn what you need to know at every class level. Small chunks go a long way.
- A simple set of openings that you know, work on, and polish. Have one defense to 1. e4 and one defense to 1.d4. You can add more as you go along. Decide on what you want to start out as on offense. Learn your lines as deeply as you can, but recognize that you and your opponent will likely be out of “book” very fast. Know what the objectives are of your opening, some typical middlegames, and traps to avoid. This takes a lot of work.
- Have fun at the tournaments. Make friends. Don’t beat yourself up if you lose. Ask others to go over games with you. You will learn a lot that way. This will also improve your enthusiasm for the game.
I took about 6 years off from chess when we moved to Nebraska in 1977. Although I was pretty rusty when I started playing again, within a year of when I got back into it I hit my all-time peak rating.
That’s almost exactly what I did: stopped playing in the late seventies, started again in 1983, hit my all-time peak rating in 1984. I think part of the reason for the peak rating was inflation in the rating system due to bonus and feedback points, but I was also playing much better than I was in the seventies. I went from 1419 at the start of 1983 to a peak of 2130 in 1984, but I wasn’t able to maintain that rating and eventually slid back down to Class A.
I never actually studied with anyone, but a local Expert/Master once said my biggest problem was that I preferred to play ‘interesting’ chess that often loses rather than ‘boring’ chess that is more likely to win or draw. (Hence my affinity for things like the Falkbeer Counter Gambit.)
I don’t disagree with his assessment, but I think a larger problem is that I don’t have the spacial ability/memory that better players have. (I can’t do jigsaw puzzles, either, the pieces all look alike.)
If you look up “chess puzzles” on the Google Play Store: It doesn’t come up right away, but if you hit the more button under apps section, it comes up as Chess Puzzles, Chess Tactics by Krubar Entertainment. Currently it’s ranked #7.
Since it’s not timed like many online websites that have tactical problems, it gives you the opportunity to study the position. (It doesn’t award points either, so your doing the problems for the satisfaction of just solving them.)
I leaned many excellent tactics and mating combinations. Technically the highest level is “Expert” and not master. Although the difficulty of the Expert mate-in-two’s is astronomical for players at my skill level, they’re certainly not designed to teach mating patterns, but rather the cleverness of the creator. Pretty sure those mates have slowly built over time since the late 1800’s when chess compositions first were sent to magazines or appeared in magazine as an intellectual challenge for the readers.
FYI, if you look around the World Federation of Chess Composition, it tells you that chess problems (for competition purposes) gives you 20 minutes to solve a problem. -I can’t hardly look at a board for 20min and not get really bored when I know there’s a forced 2 move mate in there “somewhere”. :mrgreen: 
Kinda makes me wonder exactly what mate-in-two problem could give even a grandmaster a challenge. There actually are GM level chess composers. I think they’re ranked by WFCC, but looks like FIDE is also involved. Maybe all Grandmaster composers are already FIDE GM’s anyway. /shrug.
This is a very useful thread. The last time I was really active in chess was the mid-1970s, when I played on our high school chess team. In recent years I’ve been reading Chess Life on and off, and now I’ve finally joined the USCF and this forum.
At some point I’d like to compete in tournaments. I’m too old and don’t have the time to get really, really serious, but chess is fun and I’d like to eventually obtain a rating.
What I’ve been doing so far is diving into various chess books, replaying and studying games. I 've had a hard time getting used to algebraic notation, though!
I have also been using the ‘Majestic Chess’ software. I have a Palm Tungsten handheld that I used to use for writing articles, and I wonder if anyone out there would be kind enough to recommend an inexpensive chess program for the Palm–something that would be good for a fifty-something returning player to practice with.
Antonin, just do it. Play in a tournament. Don’t worry about your rating. It will go up and down. So what? Have fun playing and ignore the rating. The quality of the games and the quality of the people you meet is what matters. Life is too short to wait until you are ready. No one is ever ready enough to play. Are you going to make mistakes? Sure. Everyone makes them. There is this weird fetish of trying to be perfect that holds people back from trying things, taking risks.
I actually don’t have a rating, and have not played against a person since the late 1970s. I would like to have a rating, though, no matter how low.
I don’t have any illusions about being a very good chess player, not anymore. But I have fond memories of past glories. Unfortunately, the two games I remember most were not recorded. On those two afternoons my high school team played away games, and we did not have enough people along to record all of the games. I think the 1st and 2nd board games were recorded, but not mine. I was 5th board.
Now, as I approach age 60, I think it would be fun to once again play against and talk about the game with people in my age group and of a similar skill level.
uscfsales.com/winning-chess-new-edition.html
uscfsales.com/the-complete-c … rkout.html
uscfsales.com/silman-s-compl … ourse.html
Maybe look at:
home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Eve … _Guide.htm
Thanks much for the tips! I’ve been browsing the USCF store, and there are lots of useful things there. Maybe this weekend I’ll place a few orders.
A book I bought a long time ago that I’m renewing my acquaintance with is Edward Lasker’s ‘Modern Chess Strategy.’
When I had a Palm I downloaded a program called Chess Tiger that I really liked. That was maybe 10 years ago and I haven’t had a Palm for a long time, so I don’t know if it’s still available.
I’m not sure that is the case. USCF has records of people in the 1970s who played just a few games and may not have realized that they were rated. You should send your name, DOB, and state or states you lived in around that time, especially as you have a fairly common name, to ratingsmgr@uschess.org and ask if they have any record of you. You’d be surprised how often someone about your age turns up and we go through this. It’s nice to link the new to the old.
As far as your last paragraph is concerned, you’re actually right at the age of a lot of our members. The distribution is bimodal, with one hump constantly at about ten years old (and when they get older, they leave like flies) and the other who started when Bobby Fischer was big, or should I say active. That hump moves about one year per year. In short, I’m saying that you’ll find a lot of people your age here, and, while fewer of your skill level, many of those, too, and many stronger who’d be willing to help, and many weaker who’d be eager to benefit from your skill.
Alex Relyea
@ Alex: I will take your suggestion and see if the USCF has any record of me.
I was board 5 for our high school team here in Cleveland, Ohio. Our moderator thought I was better than a 5 and just a tiny bit weaker than a 4, so he put me on board 5 because, he said, he wanted a “sure win.” Perhaps he was just pulling my leg, but it was an era when every high school chess player wanted to be the next Fischer, and I enjoyed having that kind of trust placed in me.
I still remember two of my games in particular–one a victory that involved a series of moves that began with a bishop, and the other a draw against a really good player from a high school that was then a local chess superpower. I remember the setting of each game as if it were yesterday, and decades later I still feel a touch of disappointment that neither game was recorded.
It’s nice to know that other players my age are coming back to “the other beautiful game.”
I see that there is a free 2010 version of Chess Tiger for the Palm OS. I’m usually very queasy about downloading things from sites that I don’t know very well, but perhaps I will give it a try, since it is on the Chess Tiger website.
Perhaps, Openings for Amateurs is another modern algebraic book that I should have mentioned.
uscfsales.com/openings-for-amateurs.html
After being beaten something like 200-0 by Stockfish 4 on my new phone, I felt like it couldn’t get any worse. I saw a speed tournament advertised with no delay. Often in these forums I talk about the good old days before time delay reared its head so I decided to jump into the fray.
I had promised that I would not play blitz because it was based off of regular ratings rather than the higher of reqular or quick but life is too short to hold your breath waiting for a perfect situation. My preparation consisted of losing games 201- 204 in short order to my handset from hell. The event was exciting and fun! None of the cash landed in my pocket (it usually doesn’t) but a good time was had by most. My preparation will consist of trying to learn something about the openings. It is sad to have to throw in the towel in under twenty moves as often as I have done recently. Like others have said here. Go play and have fun.