How to Study Chess for Free

Trust me, I know how it is. We desperately want to improve our chess skills, but we don't have the money to shell out for the latest books, DVD lessons or expensive training software. What are our alternatives? Are there other ways to that do not involve playing the same mistakes day after day, with little or no improvement in our game? There are! I have listed but a few of the ways to get good, solid chess information without paying big bucks.

Internet Videos
If you are reading this article, you have access to thousands of free chess instruction videos on the Net. Go to www.youtube.com and type "chess" into the search bar - you'll see what I mean! There are videos of games, there are opening and endgame videos by Grandmasters, and there are interviews with prominent players. The site www.chess.com has a plethora of free chess videos available to us, as does GM Henrik Danielsen's site www.videochess.net , although I believe most of those are links back to Youtube these days. Also, http://www.chessvideos.tv/ has thousands of free and very instructional videos. I personally learn very well watching chess videos, and have found them to be vital to my chess improvement.

Grandmaster Databases
Just because one cannot afford to be on the big pay sites does not mean he or she has to miss out on the best games played by the strongest masters of all time. The chess site http://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html allows us to download hundreds of PGN databases, all for free! Chess players can select from different masters, different openings, various tournaments - or, download them all and have one of the most complete chess collections possible. That site has been around for years, and I am always finding something useful there. Don't have Fritz or Chessmaster? That's not a problem. You do not need commercial software to view chess PGN files. Arena (www.playwitharena.com) is a free and very handsome interface that not only views PGN bases, but can also analyze games with you! SCID (http://scid.sourceforge.net/download.html) is another good and free interface that many chess players love. Xboard and Winboard have also always been free, although some feel that their interface is a bit lacking.

Study your Own Games
Possibly one of the most forgotten areas in chess that needs to be torn apart, bit by bit: our own games, particularly the losses. With the free software mentioned above, you can input your own moves and have a powerful, Grandmaster-strength engine analyze each position with you. Then the games can be saved into a database of your very own. That is why I always recommend to play slower games, even on the Internet. It really will not do us much good to find out where we went wrong in a 3-minute game, but when we make crucial errors in a 30-minute game, we can really change our thinking and become better chess players. That is especially important for the tournament player, because he or she can come home from the competition and enter their chess games into the software for analysis.