How to improve in Over the Board Chess

I am a 580 on rapid, and i feel i am slowly improving my chess, so i decided to challenge a close friend for a game of chess over the board. The friend has been playing has chess for a long time (he is not on chess.com though) and actually goes in competitions. But i blunder a lot whenever we play our chess games (usually once a week), and many of those blunders i am sure i would never have done if playing on chess.com. even my friend says i have the right ideas but i just blunder absolutely foolishly. Even today i hung an easy mate in 1. How do i improve my overall board vision and concentration in Over the Board chess I am fine online but OTB it feels like i have gone blind.

My guess is that you simply have more practice looking at a 2D board, and if you play more OTB, your board vision there will soon catch up. If you can't practice with real pieces, maybe switching to a 3D piece style may be worth a try to get some experience that way.

Going through mastergames or doing other studying or puzzles that you set up on a real board might help at least with getting used to the way a real chess set looks.

I play OTB and like classical games the most so one thing to also keep in mind is to not move as fast as you would online. You often have 90 minutes and 30 second increment or something along those lines in those games.

My actual FIDE standard rating and the Finnish National one are both higher than my chess.com ratings so to me OTB, at least with longer time controls, seems to be a strong point.

You can try a digital board (DGT). Quite an investment, about 300 EUR. Chess.com supports it.

Or just buy a nice full-sized Staunton plastic chess set and 20" roll-up board and manually copy all moves from a program onto the board and back.

Hey there.

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Use a systematic way to scan the board. Before every move, check for immediate threats: look for your opponent’s threats first, then evaluate your own options. Doing this consistently in OTB games will help build the habit of thorough board inspection.

I am a 580 on rapid, and i feel i am slowly improving my chess, so i decided to challenge a close friend for a game of chess over the board. The friend has been playing has chess for a long time (he is not on chess.com though) and actually goes in competitions. But i blunder a lot whenever we play our chess games (usually once a week), and many of those blunders i am sure i would never have done if playing on chess.com. even my friend says i have the right ideas but i just blunder absolutely foolishly. Even today i hung an easy mate in 1. How do i improve my overall board vision and concentration in Over the Board chess I am fine online but OTB it feels like i have gone blind.

My suggestion, two easy things to do:

1) During the opponent's clock time, check which of your pieces are unprotected. During your time, you create plans, calculate, setup strategy, traps, whatever. During the opponent's one, you need to make sure you understand which are the pieces unprotected or even under immediate attack.

2) You get a book of tactics exercises and solve them one by one on a phisical board. In solving these you follow this process:

- You take a sheet of paper, number the exercises 1, 2, 3... etc. For every exercise, you write down on paper the complete solution in all the variations you can see and calculate even the forced moves, even the easiest, even the most obvious. In creating these variations, you never ever touch a piece. If you can't solve because of this, you leave the line empty. This will be the proof that you have a knowledge gap in that specific tactics theme and this tells you what to study.

- After solving one exercise, before moving to the next, you check the solution. Here, while reading the solution and comparing it to your paper, you do execute the moves on the chessboard and tell loud the sequence of moves and the reason/action you're doing like "Rook on c5, to pin the knight". Then you move on and move on.

Happy studying.

I am a 580 on rapid, and i feel i am slowly improving my chess, so i decided to challenge a close friend for a game of chess over the board. The friend has been playing has chess for a long time (he is not on chess.com though) and actually goes in competitions. But i blunder a lot whenever we play our chess games (usually once a week), and many of those blunders i am sure i would never have done if playing on chess.com.

I am sure that you do make those blunders regularly on chess.com too. However, your opponents don't notice and don't punish them. Your friend is probably a much stronger player, so he does notice.