Pattern Recognition

First a bit of house-cleaning then I'll get to the main topic. While I'll leave my previous post up, I'll admit it sprang from past insecurities and a bit of the unrealistic tendency that I have to always expect myself to be good at everything from the start.

Honestly, I'm a little embarrassed by the post now, but getting over foot in mouth disease is another thing I need to learn to handle.  After all, in general it's not the mistakes people make, but how they deal with them after the mistakes are made that determine their measure.

Anyway, entry number two.  I had a bit of an epiphany while watching one of the videos on this site.  Someone was commenting on a game and mentioned in passing about pattern recognition and how certain patterns reoccur over and over in the chess games we play.  Combine that with the tactics trainer that's been throwing those patterns at me, and I finally got what pattern recognition in chess means.

I'm much better at poker than I am at chess, and I know how important pattern recognition is there.  You can learn a lot from a poker player if you watch how people drop into patterns of betting depending on what they have and what kind of board texture shows up in the community cards.  From that point, you can use set strategies in your poker game depending on the pattern.

It never really clicked until the other day that the same might hold true for chess. The more the chess board falls into a pattern you recognize the more you can use strategies from the past to either keep it continuing into that pattern or try and break out of it depending on the situation -- which is exactly what I do when I recognize a pattern of play developing during a poker game.

As I said above though, I'm not anywhere near as good at chess as I am at poker, but this is the first hint I've had at how to apply something from a game I know I'm good at and apply it to my chess game.