My dear fellow admins. I'd like to post the article below in our BA forum. The first part is general advice on how to improve one's chess. The second part - the most important part - covers the X factors or the secondary factors that can affect members' chess performance.

As always, your valuable comments/suggestions are most welcome:

General Chess Tips - Openings

1: Opening Choice

Make sure you choose openings that fit your style. If you are a tactical player, do not choose the English opening with white, and the French Defense with black, for instance.

2: Time to Learn

When you select an opening, make sure you have the time necessary to master it. Some openings, like the Sicilian Defense, are incredibly vast and complex and require countless hours to learn and understand. If you do not have the time, pick openings that don’t have so many variations, and are more compact.

3: Develop First

Do not be tempted into attacking right away. Remember, the opening is the phase of the game where you are trying to deploy your forces. Development is more important here. Whenever you are getting ready to make a move in the opening, ask yourself if it fulfills the goal of developing your pieces.

4: Fight for the Centre

Do not give up the centre! Always remember the importance of the centre of the chess board. Make sure your pieces are developed in such a way that they can contribute to the fight for the centre which is almost sure to occur later on.

5: Be Aware of Gambits

Gambits are quite common in the opening phase of the game. When you are tempted to take the pawn you are being offered, always ask yourself what his motive is in offering that sacrifice.

General Chess Tips - Middle Game

6: Make the Transition

Your goals during the middle game are very different from those in the opening. When the time comes, make sure you take a moment to acknowledge the end of the opening phase, and set your strategy for the next phase.

7: What is He Doing?

Remember, the game of chess involves two players, not just you. No matter how obsessed you are with your own plans, make sure you always ask yourself about your opponent's intentions.

8: Know When to Calculate

You are not a computer. You can not calculate countless moves ahead on every single move. Develop a sense as to when you should spend a lot of thinking time calculating, and when you can get away with using your intuition. On chess.com, this need is made vastly easier with the Analysis Board. Always use the Analysis Board to play out moves and see where they take you.

9: Don't Stop

If you are in the middle of calculating a combination, make sure you don't stop too early. See the final position with the help of the Analysis Board, or make sure you have gone deep enough.

10: Have a Plan

As obvious as this sounds, the fact is that players often forget to look at the big picture and make sure the moves they are making are part of a bigger plan. Do not make this mistake!

General Chess Tips - Endgame

11: Role of the King

Remember that in the endgame the king is not a liability anymore. Instead of having to protect him, you can actually use him as a very dangerous weapon! Make the king an active part of the attack in the endgame.

12: Calculate More

Now that so many pieces are off the board, you can take the time to calculate more often and deeper than before. Do not let your opponent surprise you with a move you haven't thought of!

13: Study Endgames

There are many endgames that you can just not win during the game if you don't already know how. So dedicate some of your preparation to the endgame, and focus on those you are most likely to encounter.

14: Analyze Your Games

No matter what the result of the game was, make sure you take the time to carefully go over it. Nothing helps you learn better than your own mistakes!

Players can improve by usingthe Tactics Trainer, ChessMentor, Daily Puzzle, Computer Workout & Study Plans, allhere at chess.com. For premium or paying members, there are video lessons as extra learning resources.

Those are general chess tips that you can source from anywhere. The following however is advice from Biker Angels superadmins/admins

1: Number of games

Avoid playing too many games. It will put undue pressure on you and may cause you to time out, especially if you are not a premium member. Play at the number you are comfortable with. This differs from player to player.

Some people like, and can manage, a big number of games. Others like fewer games so as to focus more on each. Whatever your tolerance limit, try not to exceed it.

2: Number of groups

Avoid joining too many groups. Each group expects you to take part in their activities and play for them. Having so many groups to accommodate would only distract you, and cause you to spread yourself too thin. Group activities and interaction can steal the time you could have spent to work on your games and improve your chess.

Joining too many groups also hampers you from being a truly productive and contributing member to your groups, and in the end destroys quality time you could have spent in your teams and with your teammates.

DO NOT FORGET THAT IF TWO OF THE GROUPS YOU’VE JOINED FACE EACH OTHER IN A TEAM MATCH, CHESS. COM WON’T ALLOW YOU TO PLAY FOR EITHER OF THE GROUP. THE CHESS.COM SYSTEM WILL DENY YOU FROM TAKING PART. SO BOTH THE TEAMS LOSE YOUR HELP, NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY NEED YOU.

Guidelines on joining groups:

Be choosy. Don’t accept just because you’re invited and don’t accept all invites. Everybody gets invited all the time – joining groups is not a popularity contest. Study the group or groups you want to join first, ask yourself if you like to be in that group. Don’t go in blind: look at their statistics and info and find out whether they are active or not, look at their team match and vote chess performance – are they winning more games than losing or the other way round?

Avoid joining many same type groups. What’s the point? For eg, groups that specialize in vote chess – why join so many or all of them? Just choose one or ones that suit you best and which you like the most and forget the others of the same type.

3: Women’s groups

The same advice applies to joining women’s groups. We’re giving this subject separate treatment because we notice so many of our members are also members of many women’s groups. We are not telling you what women’s group to join or not to join : that is entirely your own decision. If, after reading all this you decide Biker Angels is not the group for you, that is also your own decision. We respect whatever decision you make.

But we are just wondering why you want to join so many. Any team, whether all-women’s or mixed men and women teams can arrange team matches and vote chess for members. What differentiates one group from another is how admins treat members and what benefits members get from being in that group. Here, we are speaking generally but there are groups where admins couldn’t care less if members run into problems whether with their games or even in their real life, or with joining group activities and matches.

At Biker Angels, we pride ourselves on giving the personal touch to members. We even bother to translate our important News announcement into 3 other languages, if you notice. For example, the News notice about our internal tournament issued in English was translated into Russian, Japanese and Spanish so that everybody or almost everybody knows what is going on, and nobody is left out, as far as possible. We also make great use of private messaging and your homepage wall to communicate with you and update you on what you need to know, praise you on your team match performance, thank you for your contribution, or just to say hello.

That’s how much we care about members. We also publish regular updates of your chess game performance in our forums, so you can see how much you improved or not improved every 2 months. You can also see how you have fared compared with your teammates. This is done under the forum topic titled RATINGS. More forum activities are being planned, all with these aims: to educate, to help, to inform, to entertain members and make Biker Angels a fun place to be in.

If you have a suggestion for starting a new line of forum activity, just let admins know. We’ll try our best to translate your idea into reality. We’re already spending a lot of time and effort on keeping members active, well-informed and happy to be in Biker Angels, and are willing to invest even more time and effort on activities for the benefit of members.

The Good Friends Group

Super Admins