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.

. . . When I want to judge if a bishop is good or bad, I look at the pawn structure. But not every pawnstructure is suited for such verdict, I realized today. Only when the pawns are fixed such judgement has a long term value. If there is a fixed state of pawns, there must be a pre-fixed stage. Usually that is a state where the pawns are under tension. Solution of the tension can go in two directions. Either the pawns become fixed or the position becomes open. When the position becomes open, the habitual look for good and bad pieces is often useless because all pieces have become active to a certain degree. In those positions it is more important if there are targets and who has the initiative. Tempo's start to count again, so it is in essence a second round of development which has started. If there is a state of tension. there must be a pre-tension stage for the pawns. This is what we usually call development. In order to design development, one must know which tension-states are...

I have tried to put positional knowledge into practice during my games. Allthough I feel a lot of potential in it it still doesn't boost my performance. The problem is that if you have to do 65 things well in a game and you do only 6o well, you are not going to win the game. It feels a bit the same as when I started with tactics years ago. Then you could hear me whining "I'm the only one who worked this game, I have to do everything myself. Even loosing. . .!!" I have to study for my work so there's not too much time left for blogging. But I expect that to change after the summer. Margriet on the other hand is doing extremely well with the new knowledge. I expect her to cross the 1600 line soon. Every seasoned tournement player knows that it is extremely rare for women at age 50 to increase from 1150 to 1600. Usually 1400 is an unbreakable barrier. So I'm very proud.

. . Margriet and I just finished the book of Michael Stean "Simple Chess". We played through all the games. Margriet's play immediately made a huge progress by incorporating the idea's and she started to beat 1700 players one after another. I need more time to digest the matter since I always want to test ideas by stretching them to the extreme and beyond. But once I get the hang of it I'm sure the same will happen. The most difficult was the last chapter, about space. It takes time to get a feeling for that, while it certainly plays a big role in my games. The book didn't mention initiative as a factor. By applying the ideas I noticed time and again that the initiative crops up slowly as a result. Quite mysterious. Chesstiger asked me about colorcomplexes. As soon I have found the game I want to show him I will post about that. We will reread the book again soon.

. . IS the largest. Learning. My understanding of positional chess is boosting lately. My adage used to be that piece activity is the nec plus ultra of positional play. I had discovered this by gathering a lot of positional elements (from positional exercises like PCT) like open lines, outposts etc. and formulating what these elements had in common. Now what have I learned lately? Piece activity as the foundation of all positional elements. There were some positional elements that I had neglected almost entirely. Like the center, centralization of pieces, overprotection, prophylaxe, color complexes, pawnstructure, exchanges, exchange sacrifices etc.. The question was if these elements had the same base (piece activity) as the other positional elements I mentioned or that they were founded on an entire different entity, unknown to me. I found that these elements too derive their importance from what they contribute to the activity of the pieces. Targets. Piece activity pur sang is rat...