Tactical prowess on the rise
I think that it is safe to say that my tactical prowess is on the rise again. Yet it is difficult to convert that into a win. I score much better against lower rated players than I used to. But my positional approach is still below any standards.
Poor opening and middlegame play
There are two main reasons for that. The first is that my opening play is poor. The reason for that is that I adopted three new openings not so long ago, and events in life lately caused me to forget most of the essentials.
Addressing poor opening play
I try to address this by a threefold approach.
- I register and analyse my games with the aid of a mind mapping program. The goal is to identify the problems
- I try to find ways to solve these problems with the aid of literature, Stockfish and opening databases
- I bought Chess Opening Wizard professional (former Bookup) to train these solutions.
All this is new to me. I never had a clue how to analyze my games. It will be a matter of time before I will reap the fruits. TANSTAAFL
Addressing poor middlegame play
I have defined my goal in the middlegame: attack!
But I must admit that my approach isn't very subtle. In general, my opponents see through my straight forward approach very easily. And hence they have little problems to defend against it.
This means that I will have to add another layer to my moves. To meet the preconditions of the Art of Attack in Chess, there must be a certain imbalance between the attacking pieces and the defensive pieces. This means that I will have to attack on two fronts. Since I must lure away the defenders of the enemy king. Only when they are lured away AND cannot be back in time, it is time to assault the enemy king. Again this is all very new to me. I have been so obsessed with tactics the past two decades, that I have never given this part of the game many thoughts.
Overall happy
Overall, I'm happy with the new developments in my games. As mentioned numerous times, I'm finally able to add logic to my games. My mind is not so easily overwhelmed anymore. That my approach is overly simplistic, is not a reason to worry. The slow rise of tactical prowess feels as a bazooka on my shoulder which is a bit too heavy. I have trouble to keep the balance, and can only slowly change the direction. So my enemies have a lot of time to duck. Lower rated opponents I can catch by surprise when they miss what is going on.
Feedback
For the first time I get feedback from my games. It is a matter of time before I get the hang of a more subtle approach. TANSTAAFL
Which websites / tools do you guys use for opening statistics?
ReplyDeleteLichess
ReplyDeleteChess Tempo
ReplyDeleteI finally made some definite choices which openings I want to play for a longer time, hopefully for the rest of my chess career. The past week I entered them in the Chess Openings Wizard, so I can train them seriously. I focused on broad variations, not on deep ones. I made a plan for adding the feedback from openings of my games. I'm pretty content with my choices!
ReplyDeleteThe next step is to abstract some rules from my openings. I intend to visit two nine day tournaments this year. One in the summer and one in the winter. The preparation is a three stage rocket: openings, the Art of Attack in Chess and tactics.
Online, I use Lichess and chesstempo.
ReplyDeleteLocally on my computer I use TWIC, chessbase (Megabase2014 is the last complete version I have, hence supplemented by TWIC), and League4545 (for amateur games ).
Chessroots.com is an interesting way to explore Lichess , Kingbase and an engine-generated base.
For opening statistics reference, I use the ChessBase database (Big version rather than Mega) integrated with the Master database from HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro. The online ones should all be fine as well. As usual, the important thing is figuring out when a statistic is actually meaningful. Some of the opening ones can be misleading, due to an inability to recognize results of later position transpositions.
ReplyDelete