Selbstgespräch

 This morning I was thinking about why I am so bad at endgames. And I said to myself "because I always see too much possibilities". But then I heard the RCCM chime in "wait a minute, you don't SEE these possibilities, you only suppose them to be there".

And I realized that that has been true all the time. I always felt overwhelmed by chess. Not by the amount of possibilities that I SEE, but by the amount of possibilities that I suppose there are.

On another note:

Invisibility

You win when you see patterns that your opponent doesn't.

To name a few areas:

• tactics
• mate
• pawn ending
• rook ending

The first two I master reasonably well, and that is where I win my games. The second two are a recent discovery: I lose 0.5 per endgame galore.

With the pace I'm going now, I deem that I need a year to fix pawn and rook endings to the degree that I see the invisible patterns. Furthermore, I have reason to believe that a full fix of endings would bring me to 1950 rating.

But I stumbled on another area lately: the invisible invasion square.

The invasion square has only recently been added to my framework of assaulting the king. The invasion isn't specifically limited to the assault though. It can be used to initiate a winning ending too.

In search for more knowledge about the invasion I stumbled upon the Chessable course The positional chess patterns manual which has 13 chapters or sections about weak squares and outposts. What struck me was that most of these squares are invisible to me.

Black to move

r1bqr1k1/1p1n1pbp/2p2np1/3pp3/p3P3/P1PP1NP1/1PQ2PBP/R1B1RNK1 b - - 0 1

It would never occur to me that d3 is an invasion square.