Originally posted by Ragwort
I think it is possible to improve very significantly but you have to play slowly enough to engage with your games and be willing to work through your games after they finish. At all levels chess games (and rating points) are lost because players do not fully appreciate possibilities available to their opponent in time to effectively counter them. At the novi ...[text shortened]... don't think you can be told how to play chess well. You kind of have to find out for yourself...
I agree with all that Ragwort says there. It's really about two things, ultimately:
1. learning the basic positional advantages (bishop pair, control of the centre, control of files/ranks, good knight vs bad bishop, temporary weaknesses (such as lack of development), permanent weaknesses (isolated pawns, backward pawns, etc.). And so on. There is a list of them in , for example, Hermann Grooten's book, "Chess Strategy for the Club Player." Soviet players were simply drilled to go through a mental check list of these items.
2. seeing what moves are playable; by which I mean not the the totality of all possible moves, but rather learning to prune the number of moves down to a shortlist of moves which satisfy the criteria from item 1. and then analyse those moves effectively. You can't play a move which you haven't
seen. Many players look at too few moves, try to calculate one or two potential moves too deeply and get lost in silly variations. Many players see a move only post mortem, if it is pointed out to them, and wonder why they did not see it in time to play it.