How do I get better at chess as a beginner?

Almost every game between beginners is decided by a piece left hanging, not by an opening. Where the improvement actually is, in the order it pays off, and what to ignore for the first year.

Difficulty: beginner
Time: 30 min
Read: 5 min

Short answer

Stop losing pieces. Before every move, check what your opponent's last move attacks and what your intended move leaves undefended. Learn basic checkmates and endgames, learn opening principles rather than opening lines, and analyse your own losses. Memorising openings is the least valuable thing a beginner can spend time on.

Beginner chess improvement is unusually well understood and unusually badly followed. Games below club level are decided overwhelmingly by pieces given away for nothing, and yet most study time goes into openings, which are the part of the game that matters least until you have stopped blundering.

Step by step

Make a blunder check part of every move.Two questions before your hand moves: what does my opponent's last move threaten, and what does my move leave undefended? This one habit is worth more than everything else on this list combined.
Look at every check, capture and threat.Before choosing a move, scan the forcing moves available to both sides. Almost all tactics in beginner games come from a check, a capture or a direct threat that neither player saw.
Learn tactical patterns by doing puzzles.Forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks and back-rank mates. A few puzzles daily trains you to see the shapes. Recognising the pattern is what lets you spot it in your own game, in real time.
Learn opening principles, not opening lines.Control the centre, develop pieces towards the centre, castle early, do not move the same piece repeatedly, do not bring the queen out too soon. These handful of ideas produce a reasonable position in any opening without a single memorised move.
Learn the basic checkmates.King and queen against king, king and rook against king. Beginners routinely reach a winning position and fail to convert it, and these take an evening to learn permanently.
Learn basic king and pawn endgames.Opposition, the square of the pawn, and when a pawn promotes. Endgames are the most learnable part of chess because the answers are definite, and knowing them turns drawn games into wins.
Play longer games.Fast games train pattern recognition and reinforce impulsive play. Games with enough time to actually calculate are where thinking improves. A mix is fine; a diet of only very fast games is not.
Analyse your own losses, before using an engine.Play through the game and find where you think it went wrong, then check with an engine. Doing it in that order teaches you to evaluate; jumping straight to the engine teaches you nothing except what the engine thinks.
Pick one opening for each colour and stay with it.Not to memorise, but so that you meet the same structures repeatedly and start to understand the plans. Variety in openings early is a way of never learning any position properly.

Tips

Play people rather than only computers. Human opponents make the mistakes you need to learn to punish, and engines set to a low level play unnatural moves.
A local chess club is the fastest improvement available and it is usually very cheap. Playing someone better than you, over the board, with an analysis afterwards, is worth many hours of solo study.
When you lose, write down in one sentence why. A collection of those sentences shows you your actual weaknesses, which are usually not what you assume.

Common mistakes

Studying openings first — Below a decent club standard, games are decided by hanging pieces and missed tactics long before opening knowledge matters. Opening study is the highest-effort, lowest-return activity available to a beginner.
Moving quickly because the move looks obvious — Obvious moves are exactly where blunders live, because you stop checking. The blunder check has to be unconditional, including on recaptures.
Only playing very fast games — Bullet and blitz reward pattern speed and punish calculation. Improvement in calculation requires games long enough to actually calculate in.
Running every game straight through an engine — The engine tells you the best move without telling you why, and it evaluates positions no human would reach. Think first, then check.

If it doesn't work

You keep losing pieces for nothing

Cause: No blunder check habit — Fix: Force the two questions before every single move until it is automatic. This alone typically moves a beginner up considerably.

You get a winning position and then draw or lose

Cause: No endgame or basic mate technique — Fix: Learn king and rook against king, king and queen against king, and basic pawn endgames. It is a small, finite body of knowledge.

You get lost in the middlegame

Cause: No plan, usually because the opening produced a position you do not understand — Fix: Play the same opening repeatedly so you meet the same structures, and learn the typical plans for those structures rather than more opening moves.

You are stuck at the same level

Cause: Playing a lot and studying nothing, or studying and not playing — Fix: Both, in roughly equal measure, with analysis of your own games as the bridge between them.

You freeze under time pressure

Cause: Spending too long on early moves — Fix: Move quickly in familiar positions and bank the time for the complicated ones. Time management is a skill in itself.

Questions people ask

How many openings do I need to know?

One as White and one against each of the two main first moves as Black is plenty for years. The aim is to reach positions you recognise, not to memorise lines.

Are chess books or online lessons better?

Both work. What matters is doing tactical puzzles regularly, playing games slow enough to think, and analysing your own losses. The medium is far less important than doing those three things.

Is it worth joining a club as an adult beginner?

Yes, and it is the most underused route. Clubs are used to beginners, membership is usually inexpensive, and playing over the board against a range of strengths improves people much faster than online play alone.