Temposchlucker

While thinking about the opening I return to an old idea of mine . It should be possible to base my positional thinking not on the characterististics of the position but on what a single move actually accomplishes. Since one single move has a vast amount of consequences, that is a challenging approach. Yet it might be the only one that is actually doable. To chart the consequences of a single move can easily take hours, as I found out. Since you have only 3 minutes to think at average during a game that doesn't sound very promising. There is more to it, though. First of all, it is the only way to notice all changes of the position immediately . Compare that with my normal way of moving. If I play 1.f4 I'm totally unaware that I weaken the diagonal where my future king will be after castling short. Twelve moves later, out of the blue as it seems, I am bitten from behind by it since my opponent has a terrible threat due to that weak diagonal. So theoretically , thinking of the ...

. . Yesterday I read my blog posts of the past half year. There is really a wealth of knowledge in them. If I look at my recent games, I simply forget to apply that knowledge though. How come? A few reasons: Old habits are strong. The area covered by the knowledge is too broad. There isn't simply enough time to evaluate everything. What you don't do automatically you can't do at all during a game. Due to lack of time and short term memory overload. On the other hand there are area's in the game that aren't covered at all. Examples are openings and dynamic positions. Let's talk about the opening. There is quite a bulk of so called openingtheory. For some reason I always have difficulty with the word theory here. I can't see a tree of variations with an assesment at the end as theory. To me it is not connected to the knowledge I mentioned above. It remain variations. I play the Polar Bear. That sometimes means that I play 10 or 12 bookmoves in a row and then ...

. . . When Osama Bin Laden managed to trick some people to fly airplanes into the WTC for him, he had a certain goal in mind, of course. To accomplish his goal he has set out a cheap trap for the western society. Yesterday we had elections in the Netherlands. Dutch politicians are obviously no chessplayers. They weren't able to avoid the trap.