Important for readers! About this book
Those “Chess is
easy!” or “Win in 3 moves with this secret trick!” YouTube videos are total BS
because they rely on clickbait, unrealistic opponent blunders, and the illusion
of effortless mastery to farm views. They treat chess like a solved puzzle game
rather than a deeply complex, psychological battle.
You will have to
log several thousand games before you begin to grasp the deeper positional
context on the board. That number isn't a scare tactic—it’s cold,
hard reality. Here is why you cannot bypass this grind. Chess isn’t a
math problem you can memorize, nor is it a set of rules you read once and
master. When you start out, you are essentially blind to the hidden currents on
the board. You see pieces; you don’t see their energy, their coordination, or
the subtle weaknesses they leave in their wake. Reading about concepts like
"pawn structures" or "king safety" gives you information,
but it does not give you vision.
Vision is built
through pattern recognition, and your brain’s data-gathering engine only
triggers through raw, unfiltered experience. Every single game you play is a
data point. When you lose a game because your piece lacked coordination, or
because you left your king exposed, your brain stores that failure. Play five
hundred games, and you begin to notice when a position feels dangerous. Play
two thousand games, and your brain starts automatically filtering out terrible
moves before you even consciously think about them. You stop playing random
moves and start sensing the actual dynamics of the battle.
There are no
shortcuts here. You can watch a thousand YouTube videos on flashy gambits and
clever traps, but they will never teach you how to feel the tension of a
complex middlegame. That intuitive grasp—the ability to look at a messy board
and immediately know whose pieces are more active and whose king is safer—is a
muscle that only grows under the weight of thousands of battles.
You need to step
onto the battlefield, take your hits, and lose hundreds of games without
tracking your rating. Every blunder is a lesson. Every tough loss is a brick
laid in the foundation of your chess subconscious. Stop looking for an easy way
out, embrace the grind, and start logging those games.
* * *
In this book,
you will discover where and how to start playing and studying chess. The QR
codes will take you directly to your chosen topics on the Lichess gaming
portal. The first two volumes of the book show you how not to play and how to
play properly. Read the book, log your thousands of games, learn, and commit it
all to memory…
Volume 1 and the
upcoming Volume 2 provide a comprehensive year-long curriculum, designed to be
studied alongside your own extensive playing practice. Should you wish to send
suggestions, notes, or corrections, you can reach me at
joedavidlavante@protonmail.com.
* * *
This book, which
you paid your hard-earned money for, will teach you how to calculate moves on
the board without touching the pieces—your Visualization Skills. This is vital
for a chess player: if you cannot mentally move pieces on a board, you cannot
visualize future positions, you cannot see the final position a few moves
ahead, and you simply cannot play chess. But to achieve this, you will have to
strain your brain, overcoming its natural reluctance to exert itself for long
periods of time. Make no mistake: this book is not for light reading or casual
enjoyment! This book teaches you how to think and develops your Deep
Calculation Abilities. It is done through grueling labor. There is no way
around it!
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This
beginner’s chess course was created by an intermediate-to-advanced player
from LICHESS.ORG, known online as JoeDavidLavante (1438 bullet, 1512 blitz,
1810 rapid, 2113 classical, 2342 puzzles as of June 2026), writing under the
pen name Alex Povazh. According to standard internet rating conversions for
Lichess, this breakdown places the author as an Intermediate/Advanced player
in bullet, an Advanced Club Player in blitz, a Candidate Master (CM) in
rapid, and a Chess Expert / Candidate Master in classical chess. |
I am not a
titled chess master, and I consider this a distinct advantage when writing a
guide for beginners: I still clearly remember the exact struggles and mental
blocks that novice players face when approaching the game. Overcoming these
specific hurdles requires a structured, practical framework tailored for a
regular mind not yet accustomed to chess thinking. Typically, traditional
training forces you through a multitude of boring, repetitive exercises that
kill the dream and the magic of the game.
That is where a
chess engine comes in, preserving the magic through a psychologically safe
approach. It is entirely embarrassment-free, available 24/7, and perfectly
suited for practicing specific positions, sparring, or building your workhorse
openings. It instantly reveals strong moves alongside the underlying ideas.
Furthermore, platforms like LICHESS.ORG provide invaluable opening
statistics—offering concrete data on how specific moves perform in real human
games. This allows you to study win/loss/draw rates, popularity, and common
human pitfalls across various rating ranges.
Inside this
book, you will find the "List of your daily tasks," which you will
need to work through on a regular basis. This is your personal roadmap for
getting better at chess. To seamlessly incorporate these items into your
routine, you can use the "Example plans" provided in the very same
article to build and customize your own study schedule.
Without a doubt,
the hardest part of this process is forcing your brain to learn and retain new
information. However, there is a clear scientific explanation for this
difficulty: intense mental effort and sustained concentration burn through vast
amounts of glucose—a precious resource that the human body naturally strives to
conserve for physical survival and is extremely reluctant to expend. This
biological imperative is deeply encoded in the evolutionary memory of both our
body and mind, spanning tens of millions of years. Not everyone is capable of
breaking through this formidable barricade of human evolution.
A scientific
explanation can help you get things done if you manage to transform the body’s
"original sin" of energy conservation into a series of predictable
challenges. By replacing absurd self-blame with a materialistic understanding
of the root cause, you can use this insight as the main driver for modifying
your behavior. Fortunately, a love for problem-solving is a natural instinct
fundamental to human nature and a key driver of evolution—and this instinct
will assist you in overcoming the hardships ahead. Competition is another
powerful human instinct, and both are deeply inherent in the game of chess
(which is more good news!).
Unfortunately,
driven by this same competitive instinct, beginner chess players are far more
inclined to just play chess rather than actually study topics and themes. This
deficiency is also enabled by the biological design of the human brain, which
heavily resists high energy expenditure. Food is our primary source of energy,
but historically, food has always been scarce. For millions of years, energy
conservation is exactly what helped humans survive in times of famine. It is
worth noting that this problem cannot be solved by modern gluttony, because
this survival mechanism is millions of years old and sits deep within our
biology. Ultimately, understanding the evolutionary root of this problem will
completely transform how you approach it, allowing you to solve the challenge
by mastering its underlying source.
For those who
consider chess a "useless activity": Chess is a powerful tool that
develops and strengthens the brain. It trains you to process and manipulate
vast amounts of information, while teaching you how to seek out truth and
identify deep causal relationships. More importantly, chess teaches you to be
ruthlessly honest with yourself and forces you to acknowledge your own
mistakes. On the chessboard, there is no luck, no bad weather, and no one else
to blame; every defeat is a direct consequence of your own choices. By learning
to accept these missteps without making excuses, you develop the ultimate life
skill: taking absolute responsibility for your decisions.
Learning to
enjoy the process of acquiring new information will help you develop a deep
sense of fulfillment when you win a game thanks to a chess concept you have
mastered through hard work and systematic repetition. In doing so, you
strengthen the synaptic connections between neurons in your brain, actively
pushing back against your brain’s natural forgetting curve and moving data from
your working memory into your permanent mental library. I highly recommend that
beginner chess players actively cultivate this feeling of fulfillment,
prioritizing it over endless battles fought merely for the sake of cheap
excitement and time-wasting over the board. By learning to derive genuine
satisfaction and pleasure from acquiring new knowledge, you can reach the
highest level of cognitive fulfillment—your true peak experience.
Alex Povazh,
aka JoeDavidLavante
September 2026
