Learn chess to a 1200 online rating in six months
Six months of daily play and study — about 30 minutes a day — gets a complete beginner past the beginner cliff and into the territory where games start to make sense. Roughly 90 hours total. You will not be a club player. You will stop blundering pieces every game.
6 months · ~90 hours · 1200 rapid rating on Lichess
1.Capablanca — Chess Fundamentals
Read the first hundred pages of Capablanca's 1921 primer before you touch a clock. He teaches endgames first, the way every good coach still does — king and pawn, simple rook positions, the basic mating patterns. Public domain on Project Gutenberg, and still the cleanest explanation of how to think about a chessboard. Skim the rest; come back to it later.
Free
Chess Fundamentals on Project Gutenberg →2.Lichess — daily play and tactics
Make a free Lichess account and play one 10+0 rapid game a day. Then do ten puzzles. Lichess is free forever, ad-free, open source, and analyzes every game with Stockfish for free. Chess.com works too but has a paywall on the analysis you actually need. The first hundred games will be terrible. Play them anyway.
Free
Lichess →3.Daniel Naroditsky — Beginner to Master Speedrun
A grandmaster plays climbing accounts from 800 to master level on YouTube and narrates his thinking the entire time. Start at the 1000-rated episodes and watch in order — he explains the same concepts you keep blundering, against opponents who are blundering them with you. Free. Better than any paid chess course on the market.
Free
Beginner to Master Speedrun playlist →If this doesn't fit you
If you want to play in person and have a club within driving distance, replace step 3 with showing up to the club twice a month. Over-the-board games against a slightly stronger human teach things no YouTube channel will. Bring a notebook. Lose ten games. Ask the winner what you did wrong.
Why this path
Most beginners drown in opening theory and never improve, because openings don't matter at 800. Tactics and endgames do. Capablanca gives you the framework, Lichess gives you the reps, and Naroditsky's narration shows you what an actual chess thought sounds like — the missing piece every self-taught player skips. Six months of this beats two years of memorizing Italian Game lines. The hard part is playing the game after losing badly. Play anyway.