Reducks

 The pieces of the puzzle seem to add up finally.

It took me 23 years to find the essence of the transformation from knowledge into skill and to devise a usable method.

Since a year, my tactical training has taken off in accordance with my newly devised method.

Immediately, during tournament play, I was confronted with the other holes in my bucket, like poor openings knowledge, poor positional play, poor endgame technique and in general having no clue what I'm doing. Result = what times how. I figured out the how in 23 years, but did not know much about the what.

Since I didn't need to use time anymore for figuring out a study method, I have the time to plug the other holes in my bucket.

In the past, I talked about the two natural targets of the chess game: the two slow moving pieces. I used to call them the sitting ducks: the king and the pawns.

Vukovic put me on the track of the King with the Art of Attack in Chess. He talks about the preconditions that need to be met before you go all out. What lacks in his book, is the phase before the preconditions are met. Well not exactly lacking, but he himself admits that that phase of the game needs further investigation.

My own PoPLoAFun system turned out to fill the gap between the opening and the commitment to an assault on the King. Basically the PoPLoAFun system is about analyzing and increasing the piece activity. With one very important difference with common knowledge. I concocted a more precise definition of piece activity: for piece activity you need both an attacker AND a target. When the target is unknown, there is no piece activity.

Vukovic provided a more precise clue about the points of pressure (PoPs). His focal points are the same as my PoPs. And his auxiliary focal points are the same as my pivotal points on the line of attack (LoA).

The second duck

So the assault on the king is covered. It only need to be worked out in practice. What remained unclear though, what about the second duck, the pawns? I suspected that that was described in My System. I had read the book three times, what led me to that conclusion. But I was put a bit off by deciphering his enigmatic style of writing. It would me take years to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Luckily, GM Alex Fishbein came to the rescue. He has edited My System in order to make it more readable. It is called a Fast Track edition, if I'm not mistaken. I read this book last week, and indeed, as I already suspected, Nimzowitsch has devised a coherent system of how to convert the pawns into targets and how to handle them.

So, together with the middlegame books of CM Can Kabadayi and GM Arkell's endings, I have collected most knowledge of the what I must do in the middle game. That is not bad in only 14 months.

In my last OTB game I got a Queenside majority. Then I blundered two pawns away. It was the first time that I got a queenside majority on purpose. I was so focused on trading pieces that I forgot to look after my pawns.

Luckily my tactical prowess is on the rise lately, so I schwindled it into a draw.

Getting a queenside majority and trading the pieces to convert the pawns into a queen, is accompanied with its own tactics and patterns. So my skill training must be adapted with the right problem set in order to absorb the patterns into skill. Which will be the bane of my further progress. All mentioned areas in this post have their own specific tactics and patterns, and need their own specific problem set for skill training.