I would like to take an informal poll as to how you learn chess. Some of the options would be:
1. A good book. (feel free to write the book’s title if it has made a difference in your training.)
2. Going over annotated games.
3. Chess videos
4. Chess teacher
5. Anything else that works for you.
Hopefully this will help beginners get ideas on resources to use for training.
I can’t afford a chess teacher, so I’ll have to say books. Only problem with books, is that I keep jumping from one book to another without ever completing one.
A good book, atleast to me, is Reasses your chess from Jeremy Silman.
The best beginner book, by far, is Idiot’s Guide to Chess by Wolff. It has a little on everything and is simply superb.
If you are above 1200, and have really digested everything in Wolff’s book, then it’s probably time to get a more specialized book (endgame, etc) or play through heavily annotated master games (e.g., McDonald Chess the art of logical thinking or Chernev’s Logical Chess).
For strategy, many like Silman (though he has a new edition coming out at the end of this year which is supposed to be much improved: he has said he needs to fix lots of mistakes and is changing lots of the examples).
I think books!
Two books ‘The Road to chess mastery’ and ‘Master v/s Amateru” by Marx Euwe and Walter Maiden (check spelling pl.)are very good for beginners to understand the ideas like strategy, tactics etc. If one goes through the 50 annotated games in the books includings analysis, surely they will find themselves improved; theoretically and playing strength wise.
the advice of Heisman of study very simple tactics, like the puzzles of Bain s “Chess tactics for students” and do it over and over again till i can solve each one in secons, sorry for my English but my lenguage is Spanish