Temposchlucker

. . . There seem to be two different types of time in chess. First we have the time that we count in tempo's. That is a sort of countdown towards a static ideal situation. In the opening for instance, the ideal state is a position with developed pieces. On the way towards the ideal situation you can spill tempo's. But once you have reached the ideal situation, you can't lose tempo's anymore and to continue counting them is useless. On the other hand we have the time that is related to the initiative. When there is such threat we simply cannot afford to not react to it. If the target is the king, the preconditions of Vukovic are a good guide. The problem is that concrete threats can make all other advantages like material, outposts etcetera irrelevant. Although tactics use to flow naturally from a good position, sometimes they flow against all odds from a bad position where the player has released all positional considerations and material attachment. Sometimes threats ...

. . . A lot of positional knowledge is related to static structures in chess. Take for instance piece activity. Only when pawns are fixed to a certain degree you can say "that bishop is bad". When the pawns are still mobile, it is useless to speak about a bad bishop, even when all your pawns are on the same color as your bishop. Just move your pawns, and the bishop becomes active. Open files are open due to fixed elements in the pawnstructure. Hence is the activity of the rook related to the pawnstructure too. The same is true for an outpost. Pawns are weak only when the structure is fixed. So from a static point of view, pawnstructure is paramount. Understanding the effects of fixed pawns adds greatly to your static positional understanding. Long lasting advantages are only found in this static area. A lot of my games have a point where the position of me or my opponent all of a sudden collapses. I'm always intrigued when this happens. How can you see it coming? How can ...

. . . . In preparation for Tata (former Corus) I play about two games or so blindfold chess each day (typically about 1 hour total). It seems to improve my calculation a lot. Let's see if it gives measurable results. This week I read an article about the difference of mentalization and visualisation in blindfold chess. Quote: "blindfold chess masters consistently report that what they visualize are not images of pieces or chessboards, but abstractions of these with minimal or no physical features. A typical report is, “I do not visualize real pieces but I know where they are.” This remembers me of a description in Kasparovs book which I cited in an old post . Nature seems to be very thrifty with mental resources. Visualisation is very resource consuming. Nature replaces exact copies by abstractions and prefers reconstruction over storage in memory. 100% exact visualization is possible though, as I know from my own experience. It takes months to obtain and it lasts only a few ...

. . . As you can see in the ratinggraph, my tactical performance didn't drop after 2,5 years doing no tactical training at all. The spike in the graph is where I reentered Chess Tempo with a high RD. Hence the big swings. Maybe this is somewhat misleading, since I felt very rusty, but after only one week of training I already felt much sharper. Since I do typically 3-5 problems a day, I might have recovered faster than the ratinggraph could follow. Anyway, my summerdip is over and I started to win again. While doing the problems it became very evident that my visualisation has dropped a lot. Those who have followed my blog for some time know that I go round and round in circles. Which only means that those elements that keep returning must be essential for chess improvement. So I started with blindfoldchess again. A few of the ever returning subjects in my blog: Visualisation Piece activity Dynamism vs static positional ideas Backwards thinking A coach is best A book is the next be...