On Opening and Being Aggressive

I've been playing chess for almost 16 years now (I'm going to be 24) and I have always just played the game as it came to me. I've never memorized or studied openings and I have never read a book on tactics.

This seemed to not matter to me because I have been pretty successful as chess player. I've always just played my own sort of chess and wiggled my way out of tough situations.

If there is one thing that I love about my style, it is that I find myself having to come up with some very creative wayes of mating people. I take the old sports saying that "Defense wins champiponships" and this is no less true in Chess. Playing good defense allows you to develop pieces and make use of your opponents "transitional" moves.

I call these "transitional moves" because they are moves that really only serve to get them somewhere. By maximizing the meaning of your defensive moves, you can ensure that your transitional moves are made as a part of your defense.

I often surprise myself at how effectively and ruthlessly I can go from a strong defense to a ruthless attack with 1 or less transitional moves. You can be guaranteed that once I get the pressure put on you, I won't let up until the job is done.

My struggle here, though, is that I end up losing games that I could have won very easily if I had a more defined and well planned opening. I have strayed from this because I have always though that playing an opening is like playing what you've read from a book, and I want my opponents to play me, not a book.

So I have decided to try a nice hybrid of letting the game come to be and still using the structure of an opening. This means that I will analyze the end result of an opening and try to make sure I can duplicate that in some other way. This means I can get more varied results while still playing the "it will come to me" style that I love so much.

We'll see how that works out!

Examples of some of my more creative wins to come in the future.