Midlife crisis

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Begin this year I reached the age of 50. As you might know that is the age where every selfrespecting man will start to exercise his midlife crisis. It's the age where you make up the balance of your life. If you are egoistic you ask yourself if you have gotten enough out of your life. Since the answer is probably no you leave your wife and get a younger woman. Or a sportscar. If you are religeous then you realize that you haven't done enough for your salvation and start to do charitative work. You start to ask yourself if you are not wasting your time.
And so I started with geology.

The what and the how

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This weekend I played in a tournament with stiff competition. From the 42 men in my group there were 2 grandmasters and 15 (international) masters. And 3 Dimitri's, which is an indication of the east-block caliber. The opponents I faced hoovered between 1919 and 2140. I was the lowest rated player with 1874. I played 7 games and got 2.5/7 (+1 3= 3-) which is about what to expect.

What can I say about it?
It was very instructive.
In the 3 games I lost my opponents admitted I was better in the opening untill deep in the middlegame. Due to my (relatively) well understanding of the Polar bear and the resulting positions. My opponents had little clue. But in the second half of the middlegame I committed a slight inaccuracy and was invariably heavily punished for that. I played 6 Polar Bears and 1 Caro Kan.

I felt that there was little difference in our tactical ability. Allthough I'm somewhat slower. In two of the drawn games my opponents played a (pawn)gambit. But my understanding of gambits helped me to outplay them tactically. In one case I was a piece up, in the other two pawns. But in both cases I had to accept a draw due to time trouble. So in the world of what could have been I would have had a full point more:)

Provisional conclusion.
Tactical exercises have prepared me quite well to meet 2100 players. I know how to play against them. I lost my fear. But in certain middlegame position I simply don't know well enough what to play. That's why I play inaccurate. I'm not able to judge between two positons due to lack of knowledge and experience.

What and how.
The how I associate with tactical ability and the what with positional knowledge. It is obvious that at the moment I can make the most progress when I work on my positional knowledge. Which is what I'm doing lately. No matter how well you are in tactics, if you don't know what to to play it doesn't help you. If you execute the wrong plan in a tactical brilliant way you will still lose the game.

Why?

As you could read in my previous post, two positions of Dvoretsky's book took me a weekend each to adjust my ideas about chess. Now I'm working on a third position and a weekend proved to be not enough to overhaul my ideas. See diagram.























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Dvoretsky says that if it were black to move it speaks for itself that he would trade queens since 1. ... Qf5 2. Qxf5 gxf5 is good for black.

Why?

In my ridgid vision the creation of an extra pawn island is not good. So of what comprises the advantage of black? Or is it his only way to maintain equality and are other moves worse?

Rating update

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Rating progress or regression is sufficient reason to break the radio silence since I promised you to keep you informed about my path to 2000. I reached another all time high with 1874 (=+18) points according to the new dutch ratinglist. In the past year I surpassed a whole bunch of guys against whom I was looking up before. Margriet improved to 1552 (+44)

I noticed lately that I was more talking about chess improvement than I was actually working. The break from blogging has indeed boosted my study efforts as I hoped it would.

This is my approach: I made a checklist with which I have to verify each position in order to assess the characteristics and to find the best move. Then I lookup the answer and usually I haven't found the right answer. Then I adjust my checklist so that it will help me to find the right answer the next time. Since I switched over to Dvoretsky's positional problems lately this usually means quite an overhaul of my idea's. Unbelievable how ridgid, shortsighted and vague my ideas about chess are!

Take the following example from Dvoretsky's book:























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This is a position of a game of Anand. One of the things Anand said about this position was: "the black knight at b4 is bad". Well, according to my checklist it was quite good. So it took me a weekend to overhaul my idea's about good and bad pieces. I used to advocate the term "piece activity" as the nec plus ultra for the middlegame. But now it proves that that idea is way too vague. As BDK tried to convince me for a long time to no avail.

Piece activity in itself is not enough. The activity has to have a relation with attacking targets.

Or take the following example:























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White to move.

The move Dvoretsky proposed here was Bc2. For me, with my gambit background, h6 was screaming to be played. It simply blurred my thinking. It took me another weekend to overhaul my idea's so that Bc2 would fit in them. I had to revert back to Vukovic and his preconditions for a kingside attack before I realised that it is way too soon for an attack. So I had to add the preconditions in my list.

And so I'm moving along. I'm convinced it is the best way to improve. Thus closely following the ideas of Phaedrus.

For the time being I don't worry about visualisation or calculation. There will come a time when it will be appropriate to move that from the backburner to the frontburner. But that time is not now.

Everything has been said and done for now

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For the third time my reasoning has lead to the same conclusions on how to improve at chess. This means that there must at least be some truth in it. Now the time has come to just execute what I have formulated. Otherwise I would just continue to talk for the sake of talking. I will shut up for now and keep radiosilence until I have reached 2000.

Another missed characteristic

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Who would have thought of e6 as the best place for the night?
I didn't.

It seems it is all about building a database of cues in stead of patterns or ideas. Most patterns are already there, in my system, ready to be recognized. It just needs cues to be triggered.
Lack of cues means that you forget your ideas or patterns during play. It is maybe the key of Phaedrus' transferproblem.

Let's animate

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Let us see if we can make this animation stuff practical.

The idea I missed here is the regrouping of the knight. It stands in the way on c3.