Saturday, June 09, 2007

Second area of attention

Those chessvideo's are great! You can learn a new opening in 2 days and play it with confidence. Today I played against the clubchampion (2140).
I played a new system against the Caro Kan, which he always uses with black. I had spent only two evenings at this new opening. I was better in the opening, in the middlegame and in the endgame. My tactical meditation seems to bear fruits. He admitted that I should have won this game, but in mutual time trouble I blundered an important pawn away and lost. You can find the game here.

The point is, I have done a lot of endgame exercises, but I don't have standard plans. While learning endgames I focussed on the details but I have no overview. Endgames are almost always played in time trouble. So there is no time to develop plans, I must have standard plans.

So the study activity for the coming months are evident:
Next to meditation on Polgars brick I will try to develop standard endgame plans.

6 comments:

  1. You have a couple of choices, you can choose more tactical stuff where the game ends in the middlegame usually, or if you are getting better, and you are playing players that take you to the endgame, you must leave more time on the clock for that part of the game.

    Dan Heisman has some stuff about how to use your clock better. If you are losing because time trouble, you simply have to stop getting into time trouble.

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  2. Dutch,
    this was "a sytem against the caro kan" from IM Jesse Kraai from chesslecture.com.

    Previous week it took me only one evening to learn a new system against 1.c4. That was a kind of grand prix attack with black. I could learn it so fast since I was already familiar with the grand prix. My 1951 opponent stood very bad after the opening.

    Especially the system against the caro kan took a lot of effort from my side. I watched the video 4 times. I wrote down all the lines. About 10 variations with an average lenght of 10 moves. I imported them in bookup and trained them.

    Of course not every opening is suited to learn so quick. But the choices that are made at chesslecture.com are pretty darn good.

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  3. HBF
    thx for your feedback. I'm always very happy with comments since it makes me to rethink things that might seem obvious, but aren't.

    The Knights have builded some history in blogging. So on comments you will often get an answer like "yeah, in september 2005 we discussed that and ... was our conclusion". Don't let such pedantic replies disencourage you. If we had really solved the problems by then, we would all be grandmasters now. I will never think that a comment is trivial and I'm always grateful if somebody takes the effort.

    I have tried Dan Heismans stuff, but it didn't work. You can't "manage" time without taking the causes of time trouble away. So time trouble is an indication that I play A CERTAIN PART of the game too slow.

    That part seems to be planning in the endgame. So that's where I intend to study.

    The other part is complex middlegames, which occur in about 70% of my games. My Polgar-meditation is aimed to get a breakthru in that area.

    On the other hand, to lose with still an hour remaining on the clock is rather silly either.

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  4. As for the variation of the C-K, since i play C-K regularly, the setup you have is very similar to an exchange variation with the placement of the pieces. Interesting... I'd have played Qc7 early instead of the Bg4 move. Just a thought.

    As for time management, in a lot of the tournaments in my area, I break the first time control for hte first 40 into 8 time stamps for 5 move increments. I note whethere I am a "plus" score so that I can bank those for middle game and endgame. I rarely run into time trouble these days and have had some great endgames "saves" recently.

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  5. BP,
    with this move order (3.Nf3)things are slightly different. If a CK-player plays moves by habit he can easily run into trouble.

    I have come a long way with timetrouble. Thanks to Blue Devil I have the problem for 90% solved.
    But bisshops against two knights isn't an easy endgame and a slip is easily made.

    I'm happy that I have identified the problem.

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