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I've heard it said numerous times by coaches and top players that you should strictly avoid using chess engines while learning chess at least until you're over 2000 ELO.

I understand why it is sensible to not blindly use engines to give you all the answers all the time and call it training.

But it seems to me that there is room for a little bit of engine use in the absence of a coach (or knowledgeable player) who can tell you what to even look for when analyzing your games to find mistakes far less suggesting better moves.

My question: Is it really such a complete mistake to use a chess engine as an early learner? Assuming you're doing it just to reveal where your bad moves are and to suggest better ones that you can then take with you to focus your training in a more intelligent way than just playing blindly again and looking back at your games with a mind that it just as ignorant as it always was through no fault of your own.

EDIT: I know books can help with the underlying theory but I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who often blunders even after sincere attempts to understand and use the material. The one thing books cannot offer is an analysis of your own games.

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Is it really such a complete mistake to use a chess engine as an early learner?

No, particularly if you don't have a coach or stronger player as a mentor, an engine can play a key role.

Ideally after you play a serious game you give a copy of your game to your coach / mentor / analysis buddy. You both go away and spend an hour or two going through the game, analysing and annotating the game. You then meet up and compare notes.

There are two key parts to this:

  1. You doing some mental hard work analysing your and your opponent's moves. This is just about the best practice you can get for what you need to be doing during the game.
  2. Fact checking your analysis with your analysis partner

The engine can take the role of your analysis partner but it is vital not to skip the first step where you put in some mental sweat doing your own analysis before you see what the engine says..

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I don't think it's a mistake at all and I'd be curious as to who says it is.

A coach is probably ideal. But they need to get paid, you need to find one who is compatible with you on several parameters - schedule, personality, language etc. And it can be very hard for a beginner or intermediate to know who is a good coach. Rating can tell you if someone is a good player but that is different.

But a lot depends on how you use the engine.

If you use it simply to memorize openings - well, that's not so good. But if you try to think about why the move the engine suggests is good, then you will learn something. Maybe not as much as with a good coach, but still a lot.

And, of course, an engine will identify blunders easily - even blunders you were unaware of, because your opponent didn't punish them.

I would, however, be careful about the evaluation of positions. Those evaluations assume best play on the part of both players. Even 2800 players don't always play the best moves, and the rest of us - well, we aren't going to see brilliant 10 move combinations and neither are our opponents.

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Another way to use an engine is to practice and reinforce lessons you have learned in a book. Engines are usually very useful for practicing your endgame technique. Maybe you are studying an endgame position that some author says is a win. Then you can practice the next day/week against your engine to see if you remember what you learn. Also, being the strongest engine doesn't necessarily make it the best as a training aid. Stockfish might win a match against Fritz, but it is a very good analytical tool, and it has a long record of success. I don't know what engine the pros use, but I suspect it is Fritz.

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