In the past the only way to study chess by yourself was out of books or to play games of chess against yourself, this has all changed with modern computing and the Internet.
With the Internet it is possible to find someone to play against at any time, for example at the time of writing this article there were over 14000 people playing chess online at www.chess.com. Playing online gives you the ability to fine tune the matches you play by selecting the rating of the player you wish to play, the time settings and more. Another popular site for playing chess is www.chesscube.com.
The biggest change that has occurred over the last 20 years is that chess computers play better chess than any human alive, in fact even an old android phone performs better than the best grandmasters (Droidfish is currently strongest chess app). At the moment the best chess engine (i.e. the software that calculates the chess moves) is Stockfish and it has a rating of more than 3300 ELO, this is more than 400 ELO than the best human. Stockfish is an open source project hence this chess engine is available for free. To play against this chess engine you need chess software like Scid vs PC.
An important step to improving your chess is to know where you are going wrong in your games. So it is important to analysis your chess games as described here. When analysing your chess games you first go through the game again looking for better moves and then you go though your game with chess analysis software (such as Scid vs PC). Going though the game with the chess software is like having a "coach" going though your game with you afterwards and telling you where you and your opponent went wrong and what moves you should have played. However the chess software does not explain why a move is good or bad or how to find good moves.
Another resource on the net are the chess databases such as www.365chess.com that store a huge number of chess games. Using this you can go through the grandmasters games and also use it for exploring openings as these databases gives the statistics of how the different openings performed in competition. The statistics given are percentage of times players won, drew and lost with this opening. It also categorises players games by the openings that they used, so it is easy to go through a number of GM games with the opening you are interested in using. However studying openings in this way is mainly only useful if your have a rating larger than 1500 ELO so for my level of chess and most other club members it is better to spend more time study chess tactics (this advice is from GM Susan Polgar).
A good way to studying chess openings is via video lessons such as the excellent chessopenings.com, and thechesswebsite.com which is good for learning gambits. Chess software also comes with an opening book that stores all the openings used by the chess software. These opening books can be utilised to build your own chess opening repertoire as described in this advanced article about how to study chess openings with the use of computer (for players over 1500 ELO).
Chess tactics (i.e. chess puzzles) are available on a number of websites, one of the best source of free chess puzzles is ChessOK, another site for puzzles that can be printed out is http://wtharvey.com/. Mato youtube channel has brilliant tactics videos and Chesstempo has very good endgame puzzles.
There are is also a lot of chess advice on all facets of chess that is available from chess portals such as www.chess.com, www.chesscube.com and numerous different chess training software that can be used with computer software such as Chessbase Reader.
But saying this nothing beats sitting down with a professional chess coach to motivate and fine tune your chess training specifically for you.
Resources mentioned in this article:
Chess portals:
Chess playing software:
Scid vs PC (PC)
Droidfish (Android)
Chess databases:
Chess puzzles:
Chess openings:
What are your favourite Internet chess resources?
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