People not playing past 3rd/6th ranks

What do I do against these people? It really annoys me that they sit back and do nothing and have no regard to what your doing. Develop and wait them out? Attack with some yugoslav/bayonet type attack?

Grab space. Put your pieces on better squares than they can because you have more space. Push pawns to open the position. Win material. Convert material advantage in an endgame.

If they aren't doing anything, then dominate them... grab the center, develop, and kill.

Right. Take your time in developing. There's absolutely no rush as they are doing nothing aggressive. 

Take the necessary time to really put every piece where it would be effective. Typically your pieces will stand mostly behind a wall of pawns stretching across your first four ranks. 

Once this is complete, decide which pawn(s) to push to the fifth. You may want to create more than one contact point between your pawns and theirs - for example, you can have pawns on d5 and c5 as his stand on d6 and c6. Create some tension. 

Then you would need to do a bit of calculation, at which point in time and on the chessboard to go for a pawn exchange in order to start opening the position up in your favor. 

When that happens, if you played your cards right, he will have less manouvrability of his pieces, because of less space. His pieces will get one in the way of the other. He will have a difficulty moving his pieces from one side of the board to the other. Your pieces will enjoy more freedom and flexibility - and generally (unless that player is way stronger than you and would stop that from happening at some point) this is all you need (except for love). 

Good luck!

Ok thanks. Is material all that important? Every single one of these guys use the same tactic to grab a pawn off me. So could I just gambit one off and stay ahead in development?

Stop falling for it.

Just sac all your pieces and mate them

Im not falling for it I just want the lead in dev

At Goob63, it's called turtling. People do those things in fighting games as well like in the Street Fighter games

It's better to sacrifice THEIR pawns than yours. The witty 20th century GM Savielly Tartakower said that. Google him. 

If you can see that giving up a pawn would ACTUALLY and INEVITABLY result in a REALLY crushing position, or winning more material, or at least getting the pawn back later with some advantage - or maybe checkmate or a really fierce and undefendable attack - then go for it. 

Otherwise why panic? Why start offering pawns? You would just be playing to their hands, and giving them what they want. 

Chess is a game of skill and patience. And yes, material IS that important :-) Never give anything without knowing what you get back and considering that you get back enough for your purposes. 

When they play closed, be like the spider. Patiently weave your net, until they fall into it like flies. Slowly and inevitably they would be strangled if you play correctly. They would have fewer and fewer good moves available... then they would either jump into your web - THEY would be those insanely offering pawns - just to breathe! - or you should do what I advised you in my earlier post. Good luck!

p.s. I also don't like it when people play that way against me - but I consider that they are actually offering me an advantage to start with. The answer: don't rush it. Squeeze. Take your time. You should enjoy the process!

Yes, well, it's kinda easy to win when you NEVER MOVE YOUR BACK ROW!

Yeah, doctor :-) Try this against me some time, in live chess :-) we'll say what you'd say then. 

Goob63 wrote:

What do I do against these people? It really annoys me that they sit back and do nothing and have no regard to what your doing. Develop and wait them out? Attack with some yugoslav/bayonet type attack?

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Advantages in space are very difficult to exploit for players at your level. Your opponents are usually playing some modified variation of the hedgehog defense system. That gives White an advantage in space. As you know there are 3 advantages in chess (time, space and material). What is even more important to know is the difference between static and dynamic aspects of the 3 advantages in chess. Static aspects of advantages are more permanent in nature. Dynamic aspects of advantages are more fleeting and tend to dissipate with every move in the game.

Of the 3 advantages in chess time and space advantages are dynamic. Material advantages are static. Keeping that in mind it becomes obvious that an advantage in space has to be exploited early and consistently in order to convert the space advantage to a material/static advantage of a more permanent nature.

There are well known techniques for exploiting advantages in space. The first is do not exchange pawns or pieces unless it will either increase your space advantage or convert it to a material or an indicated time advantage. The rationale behind this rule against exchanging is that every exchange takes pawns and/or pieces off the board creating more space for your opponent's pawns and pieces and therefore decreasing your space advantage. Second, space advantages have to be exploited throughout the board by alternating attacks against the queenside and then the kingside or vice versa with the ultimate aim of converting your space advantage to a position where your attacking move cannot be defended against by your opponent because the square for the piece or pawn is already occupied byanother of his pawns or pieces. This is the definition of your opponent's lack of space and it's exploitation. The other possibility is to convert your space advantage in space to a material/static advantage or a transitional time advantage.

As you can see exploiting a space advantage is a complicated process and very difficult for the average player.

There are other techniques for exploiting a space advantage. If you would like to know more regarding the techniques for exploiting advantages in space and specific moves please let me know.

Ok perfect, thanks guys!

It seems like your complaint is that your opponent doesn't do what you want them to, I don't know much about chess but isn't what you are encountering called hypermodernism? And like other contributors said, focusing on tactics and straight foward development should, either win you games or, give you valuable lessons on improving. Like I said, I am not great at chess, that is just my two cents, but you can't blame your opponent for winning. Your enemy is to be respected, because she/he is your equal. If she/he is not your equal then crush her/him and now she/he is not your enemy.

Depends. At some times, the other guy is slowly preparing some pawn break, and you need to reach cruise speed before you have to worry about mosquito stings.

It is easy to fall for the "he is an idiot, so I don't need to think a lot" trap.

You play blitz or other short time limit games. From what I have seen hanging back is a tactic adopted in such games so as to have available lots of moves that can be made immediately - without spending time on thinking. The object, I suppose, is to gain a time advantage and win that way.

If you can calculate quickly and are good at pre-moves, building up an attack is probably a good counter to that tactic. If you are not quick enough then you might try fighting fire with fire - move even more quickly (and meaninglessly but w/o blundering).

But I am not a good person to comment on tactics in short time limit games as I don't play those sort of games.

(Or you could try playing with a longer time limit.)

(Disclaimer: Ok this is not a perfect example and I play it only 1min games and I don't think it would be useful for anyone over 1600)

In this game what black is planning is to delay castling and then overrun my castled position by castling on the opposite side.

The way to deal with this is to attack the centre. Usually I exchange their fianchettoed bishop on the side they have castled, and then either play a4-a5, and/or attack the c-pawn. 

It gives them too much problems to solve to do anything about attacking my position.

Here is a game that might give you some ideas. This is not my game. 

Or this. Or just think about tactics.