What you can do for free, what is worth paying for and when, and three concrete budgets depending on how much you want to invest.
It is an awkward question to answer because the honest reply starts at zero. Chess has one of the best ratios there is between what can be learned free and what serious material costs.
What follows is what you can do without spending, what is worth paying for, and when.
That gets you to 1400 without difficulty, and considerably further with a method. Nobody has to pay anything to start.
When free material stops being enough, what is missing is not content. It is one of two things:
Order. A course decides for you what comes first and what comes next. That is what solves the problem of knowing many scattered things and not climbing.
Diagnosis. A private lesson tells you what you are missing, which is the question no video can answer.
Everything else that is sold — subscriptions, apps, books — is some variant of these two, or it is content that is also available free.
Gets you to: 1400 comfortably, 1600 with consistency. What is missing: the diagnosis. That is the real ceiling of this option.
This is probably the best ratio of money spent to level gained: the course provides six months of structure and the lesson prevents those six months going into the wrong topic.
Gets you to: 1800 with sustained work.
Gets you to: as far as the work takes you. From here the limit stops being money.
On courses two bands above your level. The best material in the world is useless if you cannot apply it to your games. It feels like an investment and it is an expense.
On many courses at once. One finished pays more than three started. And "finished" means applied in games, not watched.
On a subscription you will not use. If your problem is that you do not study consistently, a subscription does not fix it: it makes it more expensive.
On elite opening books. They are excellent and they are written for 2200.
There are two moments where money pays a great deal, and outside them it pays little:
Starting from zero. A lesson or a fundamentals course prevents three or four habits installing that would take years to remove. It is the most profitable spend in chess.
When you are stuck and do not know why. There a single diagnostic lesson can save six months of studying the wrong thing.
In between those two moments, free material and your own work do perfectly well.
So far the sums have been about studying. Competing has its own budget, and it is worth knowing before you enter your first tournament:
The federation. Almost every country charges an annual membership in order to hold an official rating. It usually runs between ten and forty dollars a year, and in many places the club includes it.
Tournament entry. Between five and thirty dollars for a local weekend open. It is the most frequent expense if you compete regularly.
Equipment. A vinyl board with regulation Staunton pieces is about thirty dollars and lasts twenty years. A digital clock, between twenty-five and fifty. Both are optional at first: the club lends them.
Travel. It is by far the big expense of competing. A tournament in another city costs far more in transport and accommodation than in entry fee, and it is the line that decides how many tournaments each person plays.
Put together: competing locally is around a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars a year, equipment included and amortised. That is less than almost any other activity practised every week.
This is a rather different question, with two differences that change the whole budget:
A child needs more structure and less material. A recorded course works badly below the age of ten: attention does not stretch that far and nobody is correcting. What works is a club, a chess school or a group class, which also happens to be the cheapest option of all.
Equipment matters more. A child learns far better on a physical board than on a screen, and there the thirty-dollar board is worth having from day one.
What is not needed: private lessons before eight or nine, unless the child asks for them. A private teacher for somebody still enjoying the game tends to turn the game into homework, which is the one genuinely expensive mistake of this stage.
Realistic budget: a club or school membership — often under twenty dollars a month — a board, and nothing else for the first year or two.
And one last sum that rarely gets done and decides more than all the others: chess costs time, and time is the resource that is genuinely scarce.
Five hours a week for two years is five hundred hours. Put like that it sounds like a lot, and it is exactly what it takes to get to playing well. The useful question is not whether you have the money — almost certainly you do, because the numbers above are small — but whether you will be able to sustain that.
From which comes the one spending recommendation that holds for everybody: spend first on whatever raises the probability that you keep playing. Almost always that is a club or a group, not a course; people quit chess for lack of company far more often than for lack of material.
Material can be had cheaply or free. The habit of sitting down to play every week cannot.
The scarce resource in chess is not money: it is time. Four hours a week for six months is about a hundred hours, and the question that matters is not what the material costs but whether those hundred hours will be spent on the right thing.
A course that orders those hundred hours is worth far more than its price. A course you never apply is free and still expensive, because the time went anyway.
Can you learn chess entirely for free? Up to solid club level, yes. Ordered free material, a platform to play on and a local club cover the first two years without spending anything. What gets bought afterwards is not information: it is order, diagnosis and saved time.
What do I buy first if I can only buy one thing? Four private lessons with somebody who looks at five of your games. It is the only thing nobody else can do for you, and it produces the diagnosis that tells you where to put the rest of the money and time.
Are books still worth it? Very much, and they are the cheapest content per hour there is. They also force you to set positions up on a board, an exercise a video does not produce. The downside is that they demand more discipline.
Is a platform subscription worth it? Only if you will use the part that justifies it — unlimited puzzles and analysis — and only if you already have the habit of sitting down. A subscription bought in order to create the habit is the commonest way to pay for something you do not use.
How much does a decent board cost? A vinyl set with regulation Staunton pieces costs about thirty dollars and lasts twenty years. It is the only physical purchase genuinely needed, and only if you are going to play over the board or want to study with your hands.
And a clock? Between twenty-five and fifty, and it is not needed until your first tournament: clubs lend them. If you buy one, make it digital with increment, because that is what practically every tournament uses.
Are the classic books still useful? The endgame and middlegame ones, completely: that part of chess did not change. Opening books age fast and are precisely the ones least needed at club level.
Is paying for engine analysis worth it? No. Free engines are as strong as anything you can pay for, and far above what you need. What you pay for on a platform is convenience, not analytical strength.
If you want to put this into practice with structured material:
A collection of six courses by GM Andrés Rodríguez to expand your opening repertoire, recognize weaknesses, and make better strategic decisions.
ARBy GM Andrés Rodríguez
A collection of six courses by GM Andrés Rodríguez to enrich your repertoire, understand complex positions, and improve your game from opening to endgame.
ARBy GM Andrés Rodríguez
A collection of six courses by GM Andrés Rodríguez to expand your opening repertoire, discover brilliant combinations, and improve your understanding of pawn structures and piece trades.
ARBy GM Andrés Rodríguez
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