Temposchlucker

Tunnelvision. Now I'm over my anger about Bent Larsen's silly move, I see that there is something interesting in it. This was the diagram what the rage was all about. The instruction was: find the positional plan. I set it up at a board and analysed the position for two hours without reaching a definite conclusion. When I looked at the solution it said this is a mate in 3. It costed me 20 seconds to solve it. What does this mean? Since I solved it in 20 seconds, the pattern must be very familiar. I mean, I have probably exercised between the 20 and 50 knight sacs a day the past 3.5 year, so how could it be otherwise? But I don't associate a knight sac with a positional plan. So the instruction sets a filter over the candidate moves. At which moment did this filter work? Was the move filtered BEFORE it appeared in my brain, or appeared the move and was it dismissed? I can't remember exactly. I postulate that this tunnelvision is the common state of mankind. Not only fi...

Sometimes I get the feeling that grandmaster play leads to brain damage. Take for instance the book of Bent Larsen called Good move's guide. I mean, I pay money for a book to get help right? To save me time. He has a chapter about positional chess with 48 positional problems. I arrived at problem 13 and spend two hours without finding a clue. I don't want to give up too easy. When I looked up the answer, it said: I hope you haven't spend too much time to assess the remaining endgame since it is a mate in 3. I looked again at the board and solved it in 20 seconds. I really can't understand why an author does this. Why does he want me to spill two hours for nothing? If it is a joke, he will never notice the effect. If it is to make me look stupid, yeah, I already know that. That's why I bought a book in the first place. To HELP me because I'm stupid in chess. There is nothing in this for me nor for him so WHY on earth can he behave like this? Youth frustration? Br...

I have tried to find an algorithm for piece activity, inspired by the simple algorithm for piece mobility. As Mousetrapper already suspected, that is a dead end. Well, you can't find your way in a maze without entering a dead end every now and then. So I'm trying another approach. I work my way thru Bent Larsen "Good moves guide", which has 48 positional problems, with a heavily annotated solution. I will try to find a correlation to certain characteristics of the position and the plans that are based upon them. I start with simple standard plans like "trade off a passive piece against an active one", "improve the position of your worst piece", "open the position" and the like. Let's see what is on that road.

Correspondence play. From 35 finished turn based games I have won 32, drawed 1 and lost 2. A real nuisance is that EVERYBODY continues to play thru no matter HOW MUCH material they are behind. What do they think with 3 days per move? Since I started with chess 8 years ago I haven't stalemated a single game. Not even under time pressure. I really hope that matters become better with higher rated players. My rating rises terribly slow so it is difficult to get higher rated players. At RedHotPawn you can't even chose the rating of your opponents before you have finished 20 games. The plus side is that I get a lot of endgames, I can experiment with my new acquired strategical knowledge and I can check my opening play. Since I rebuilded my repertoire 4 years ago, a lot of book lines are unintentionally replaced with my own fantasy lines. More thoughts about piece activity. Or maybe I should call it reshuffling of my thoughts. Home. A piece must have a good home from where it can wo...

I expect no clear thread in this post, since I haven't made up my mind yet. Piece mobility is defined as the number of squares you control. I love the simplicity of this definition since it is just a matter of counting. It says nothing about the quality of those squares though. That's why I think that piece activity is a better word to use for the things I'm talking about. But what is the activity of a piece? Just counting the owned squares isn't enough. A rook at a1 can cover your whole backrank. Still it can be a very inactive piece. So activity has something to do with the enemy camp. Just counting your squares at the enemy side of the board, seems to be an arbitrary choice. A bishop can be good, bad or active. A bishop is considered good when there are no central pawns which obstructs its activity. A bishop is considered bad when the central pawns stand on its color thus blocking it. An active bishop can be either good or bad; it is called active just because it ...

Takchess suggested the word piece activity in stead of piece mobility. I think that is a good idea since piece mobility is somewhat tainted. I realize very well that my findings in the previous posts are easy to be underestimated. That is very good, since the enemy is listening too. Since I now know that piece activity is the ultimate positional goal in chess, I will not be left clueless again. For instance yesterday, I had a very difficult position in a cc-game. With the new acquired insights I could formulate what I wanted. After that it took me another 45 minutes to find a move that did exactly that. Now, two moves later, the sun breaks thru the clouds in my position. Alas, I cannot show it right now, since the game is still going on. But I will show it later to you. There is one important point yet. To make a plan, you must forget about candidate moves at first. A plan is based on the future, on an ideal situation, while a candidate move is only the next following move. Trial and e...

Why do I think positional chess boils down to piece mobility and pawn structure ? (I just found out that space is actually another element of piece mobility . It is denying your opponents pieces mobility.) Have a look of the list of Silmans imbalancies: Superior minor piece Material Space Pawn structure Control of lines/key squares Lead in development Initiative Superior minor piece. What else is this then piece mobility? Material. If I'm ahead in material, I already know what to do. No need to record it in a list. Space. Denying your opponents pieces space is to limit their mobility. Pawn structure. Number two on my list. As far as you don't use pawns for enhancing the mobility of your own pieces or to limit the mobility of the enemy pieces, you want to promote them after all pieces are traded. Control of lines/key squares. You want control over a square to make it a secure home for your piece. Controlling a file or diagonal means securing the mobility of a piece. Lead...

Please all give a warm welcome to our newest Knight Grande Merda . May his rating be reciprocal to the rainforests! At this moment I work my way thru "How to reassess your chess" of Jeremy Silman. The book has a very strange tone. Silman is insulting his readers regularly. Or at least he ridiculizes them. His terminology "Silman Thinking Technique" makes a somewhat silly impression too. Because mental aberration is not uncommon under good (and bad) chessplayers I take that for granted. There are a lot of good things in the book. I have read a lot about positional play lately. From Silman, Seirawan, Capablanca, Nimzovitch and Karpov. They tend to give an abundance of idea's and rules. A lot of it is superfluous for players with 5 years or more experience. I mean, if I'm in check, I don't need a checklist to remind me that I have to do something about it. Or that I have to look for tactics. If I neglect all rendundant information, strategical play boils d...

What is the role of understanding in chess? In the pre-strategical era of my chess development, life was easy. Just do as much tactical problems as possible et voila. After about 80K+ problems from different difficulty, I have reached the end of that road. Where am I standing on the path to mastery? If I had to make a guess it would be something like this: Tactical skills: 70% Positional skills: 20% Strategical planning: 10% Endgames: 10% Openings: 30% So there is a lot of room for improvement. Once I have analized about 100 sacrifices on f7. Ca. 40% worked via an identical system. Ever since I found out, it's much easier to know when a sac on f7 is going to work and when not. Understanding is a way to bundle a lot of seemingly different patterns into one system. Such systems give the memory grip on a vast amount of data. In the past I have ignored these explicit systems of understanding in the hope that exposing my brain to a vast amount of patterns would generate implicit system...

I'm in the middle of a change of style. I used to be a one trick pony. I am used to a highly aggressive gambit-style. In daily life I'm not a risk taker. Since I have discovered the strategical style of Capablanca, I'm in love with it. I try to ape his style. With very little succes, to be honest. I suck terrible at strategical play. Right now I'm sitting between two chairs, so my results OTB are terrible too. I hope I can fix it a little before the Corus tournament. That's why I beefed up my efforts at correspondence play. I really need much more experience in my new style of play. I'm very happy that my weakness manifests itself so evident. Only if you see how bad you actually play, you can use this feedback for improvement. To illustrate how confused I am, I even played 1.d4 today for the first time in my life. How long will it last before I play the French or the Caro-Kann? Thanks to Ed we are working thru How to reassess your chess from Silman. PCT is go...

Here you see a typical gameflow. I played the grand prix attack (closed sicilian?) with white. I was on the upperhand during almost 4 hours, but I just couldn't finish him off. In time trouble I made an error giving the game away. I'm not bothered by the blunder, but why couldn't I finish him off earlier in such great position? That happens very often. Are they such great defenders at my level or do I just suck? You can find the game here . In disgust I hadn't have the energy to analyze it yet.

Yesterday at Nezha's blog I claimed that thinking happens in the study room and not during a game. Blue Devil asked me a question about it. Tempo, you always say you don't think, but you end up in time trouble...hmmm. What are you doing in your tournaments, flirting with your wife? I will try to explain. First you have to know that I'm not very impressed by my own capabilities to think. Or the capabilities to think of mankind, for that matter. 20 years of self observation in a Gurdieff based school deprived me from most illusions in that area. I have looked for two hours for a clue in the position of yesterday. Without reaching a conclusion I finally made a move because, well, I had to. What have I done in these two hours? Basically my thoughts went around in circles. in a desperate attempt to find a begin. A clue. The fact that I lean heavily on my short term memory during this process makes that I repeat myself often without notice. As GM Donner put it in "The King...

A week ago I encountered this position in a cc game (already finished). It left me staring at the board mesmerized and clueless. I lack the skill to find a reasoning that clears the situation. It shows definitely a weak point of me. There is a lot of work to do in the positional area. White to move. I'm going to study this position for a while to find out why I have so much trouble with such positions.

I have to apologize for the following metaphor since most readers of this blog reside in a place where soccer isn't popular. And for the fact that I know very little about soccer myself. Well, I had played it for about a year in my youth when my coach proposed to change to a martial art, given my style of playing. My ball treatment was non existent, but no one could pass me. Without stumbling for the rest of the week, that was. And so I started with jiu jitsu, judo and boxing (I never do things half). In soccer there is a strategy where you try to work at the half of the opponent for as much time as possible. I even belief that this system is a dutch invention originating from 1974 or so. The idea is that statistically the chance is higher to shoot in your opponents goal than in your goal when you play at his half. This kind of play is characterized by a ball possession during a great amount of time, and playing from left to right around the hostile goal. This kind of play I like t...

Please all give a warm welcome to our newest Knight Errant Reborn Chessplayer . May his rating grow like a German belly at a bierfest!

There are a lot of (semi-)irregular openings around. They can easy lead to a quick defeat. As J'adoube found out lately with the Benoni and the Benko gambit . Since there are quite a few obscure lines adopted in my own repertoire I know it all too well myself. Yesterday I encountered for the first time in my life the Grob (1.g4). It took me about 4 hours to find out what this opening is about. And although I don't know all ins and outs, at least I have an idea where the danger comes from. Boy, was I glad it is a correspondence game and not during Corus! In the end it is all pretty logical where white is after. This story expresses clearly the problem at our level with opening study. If I'm catched off book, it takes me an enormous amount of time to analyse a position. If that happens OTB, you probably find yourself at the short end of the stick. Being worse or even worse. Or having a big plus in time trouble. So if you learn openings by heart and play the main lines, the d...

If you look at the web, you see mainly two schools of chess, who consider themselves opposite to each other. I'm talking about the tactical or strategical approach to chess. The tactical afficionados belief in the geniality of mankind and see a tactical move as one of the highest creative outings of the human mind. These guys have a romantic image of mankind. The strategical afficionados think that chess is actually too difficult for mankind. They realize that no one can oversee the full impact and length of all variations of a complex combinational move. Hence they feel it as an act of gambling to make such moves. Since they hate risk, they prefer to keep the game as simple and surveyable as possible. They tend to accumulate little advantages and try to condense them to a win. Capablanca is an exponent of the strategical school. Basically he always moves forward, denying the opponent as much space as possible. If an enemy piece hinders him, he trades it off. But he never goes back...

I'm a bit carried away by playing correspondence chess lately. It's really an ideal method to improve on openings, plan development and endgames! I'm playing 15 games at the same time right now. I have to build up some rating first. That makes it easier to get stiffer competition.