Temposchlucker

What is the difference between the middlegame and the endgame that makes it so difficult to get a good endgame when having an auspicious middlegame? In the middlegame the highest goal is to get active. The pawns decide which piece is active and which is not. It remained always a bit vague of what the activity actually consists. In the endgame the activity must be transformed into the achievement of concrete goals. The problem I have is that I'm insufficient concrete in the formulation of my endgame goals. In the endgame there is for the first time enough space on the board to actually penetrate into hostile territory and to attack pawns from behind. During the middlegame you can only threat to penetrate but usually it is not going to happen when there are still too many pieces on the board. Logically it must be all about pawns. However mate with pieces in the endgame is not uncommon it is very difficult to show any common tendencies in that. So I better dismiss that subject for the...

. . . Despite the risks there are still people who managed to infiltrate the Knights Errant. So we have to dismantle our organization and continue under another name. The first step of endgame strategy seems to be to acquire a list with endgames which are favourable. That gives direction at the end of the middlegame where to head for. For the time being it is not too important to know how to actually win such favourable endgames. The first step is to recognize them and to get them materialized on the board. Once I'm able to get them on a regular base the need for knowledge how to handle these positions will arise in a natural way. In general when I think long in a position that is a clear indicator that I have no clue where to head for. Where more knowledge is needed. Now it's the end of the middle game that leaves me clueless and costs me time. Only in very few cases a long think serves a purpose, like working out a long variation or finding a dual purpose move.

. . . This is about the 8th time that I look at endgames. It seems that the time is finally ripe now. My first attempt to get better at endgames was when I picked up an endgame book by Euwe. Euwe is one of those terrible endgame authors who wanted to give his book a whiff of science, I assume. Which meant that he tried to be complete in his writings. Well, sort of. The result is that his book started with 8 chapters with endgames that you get only once in a lifetime, if you are lucky. An author must protect you from wasting your time. As novice you look for guidance, not for completeness, of course. The idea of an encyclopedia is totally wrong for a novice in endgames. It took me about a half year of daily study to get an idea where to start with endgame study. That I count as my second attempt. The third attempt was based on my discovery that all endgames were judged by the underlying pawnending. So I started with SOPE of Muller and Lamprecht. That seemed to work well for some tim...

. . . Blunderprone commented on my previous post: "Being able to reach a middle game position and in my head run through a calculation only to mis-evaluate the outcome is an issue in my mind's eye. Visualization skills are critical for calculation of a position's value at the end of a variation. Much easier to see if it's forced moves with a distinct and clear advantage or loss ( material or space). But to reach a middlegame position and evaluate the correct course is most difficult in static positions. In it's simplest terms, the decision to play a minority attack or try to make your opponent advance a pawn in front of his king first, requires teh ability to see the resulting position and say " then what?" and " who is better?" That's where knowledge of typical endgames from your games could really come in handy. Recognizing a subtle panw structure in your minds eye can give you an advantage. " The improvement of my positional middle...

. . . Some fellowbloggers seem to tend to see my writings as abstract, arcane or theoretically. I'm totally to blame for that. I don't make any efforts whatsoever to make it look differently due to other priorities in using my time. Yet I can assure you that they can't be further from the truth and totally miss the point in my writings. On the contrary, my musings have a 1:1 relation to the games I play. They form the actual guide for my moves during the middlegame. They are very, very concrete. The past year a drastic change in my middlegame approach has manifested itself due to these very concrete musings. In 90% of the cases I reach a very good middlegame position. Even against players with a much higher rating. Most of my opponents agree with that judgement. Due to this new middlegame approach, a new weak element has surfaced though. I can't finish off my opponents. I misjudge a position, I'm drawn into an endgame and lose the game, even without knowing why. I h...

. . . In a previous post I discovered that chess is the ultimate trap . You might think that that leads to a simple algorithm which closes the trap. Just take away as much squares as possible from your opponent's pieces and you're done. Matters are somewhat more complicated, though. As I stated in my previous post, you are dealing with a cage. A cage with walls that are closing in on the hostile piece. This are the problems to be solved: The walls of the cage have a freakish shape. The walls constitue of many different elements like the rim, own pieces, hostile pieces, covered squares and tempo's. The walls are partly invisible. The fabric of a wall can be made of tempo's. That means there are holes in the wall but the opponent cannot make use of it since it takes too many tempo's to walk through it so you can close it in time. The pieces that form the walls have to cooperate in order to close in. The walls can be attacked. Only cages that you can shrink to zero squ...

. . . Writing the previous post I was pleasantly surprised that the proposed algorithm " The position to strive for is to maximize the difference between the current potential of your own pieces and the current potential of the pieces of the opponent" lead to a tendency to walk towards the center without any additional programming. After some thinking I realized that this very same algorithm would create a few other tendencies as well without extra programming: the tendency for a pawn to walk to the promotion square, which brings him closer to its full potential. the tendency to capture pieces. the tendency to trap pieces. the tendency to occupy open lines and outposts. the tendency to base exchanges on the dynamic value of a piece. the tendency to trap (mate) the king. Maybe this should be stimulated by letting the potential of the enemy drop to zero if that happens. This would cause the game to go in the right direction any time. The programming of this algorithm will by n...

. . . This is the hypothesis: All kinds of positional topics like piece activity, king safety, outpost, color complex etc.. can be described using only a few elements. Space and time are two of them. If I am able to express every topic in these same few elements than I can compare them on a realistic basis in stead of awarding them with arbitrary statistic bonuses. I want to stretch matters even further, even the tactical elements can be expressed using these very same few elements. Everything isn't worked out completely yet. That's the reason for this post. Let me give it a shot. What happens when a piece is dumped on the board? Diagram 1 . . . In 7 tempo's, the King can reach every square of the board. That must be his potential in the shortest time from his position on h8. Potential from h8: Space = 64 squares Time = 7 tempo's That shows immediately that there must be better squares on the board. If you place the king in the center of the board, for instance on e4, h...

. . . On my quest to find the pot with gold I'm almost ready with my new PGN-viewer. It took me 3 days of programming and I need another few hours. Of course only when it is finished the actual work begins: writing analysis-algorithms that answer my questions. In the comments on a previous post there were different methods proposed to find the static value of a piece. A static value is some kind of average based on a statistical method. What I'm looking for though is the dynamic value of a piece. Based on what a piece actual does in a position. In the corner a rook sometimes has merely the same function as a pawn, just covering the pawn in front of him. Especially if he has little prospect in the future his value is about 1 (pawnunit, that is) . While a rook that is about to deliver mate has a value that approaches infinity. Usually the dynamic value will be hoovering somewhere in between and can change drastically during the game. The algorithms I intend to write are meant ...