What is your playing style?

What is your playing style in chess? Do you always try to spice up the game and win with your calculating abilities? Or slow down the pace of the game and squeeze your opponent to death? Or do you kidnap your opponent and put them in a forest where "2 + 2 = 5" where it is only themselves playing?...

Well, how would you know this anyways? How do you know how you, well, beat your opponent in chess (let's be honest: what you really wanna do is take their soul)? And why is this important anyways? For how you find this out, look at the best games you have ever played (or 3 best games of the week). What was special about the way you played these games? Even if you got slightly off at some point in the games, this is still part of your style.

Of course, many people will just feel good if they played well according to the engine. It will feel nice (and thankfully my playing style as I will tell you at the end is very similar to an engine's), but remember that even engine's have their own playing style. They definitely can calculate very very deep (at least 20 moves ahead in seconds), but remember that even their own calculation cannot go past a certain amount of moves. This means they have to evaluate the final position and judge whether it is the best option for them or not, which can only be done based on their playing style. So while you can always check what the engine thought about your game at the very end, do not take it so deeply. For instance, stockfish really does not like attacking play (although it will do it if it is the "best" option). Stockfish doesn't do this because it is actually a very very good defender which can easily obtain better positions from slightly worse positions with crazy defensive resources. But for many who are great attackers, they just cannot rely on stockfish to tell them if their attack was a good one or not just because there is a practically unfindable resource (which is why when I ask you to send what you thought were the 3 best games of the week, I also mention that I do not care about what stockfish says). So, when finding your playing style through these 3 best games, DO NOT HEAVILY RELY ON STOCKFISH (I also do not like how brilliant moves are decided because these all support tactics [even the easiest tactics] and never the brilliant unfindable positional ideas, or genius defensive resources, etc.).

Anyways, as I was saying, look at what you considered your 3 best games. These do not have to be games you won either as just because you lost a game does not make it a bad game: it is just a game where your opponent happened to be slightly stronger, or slightly more resourceful, etc.

So what do you do once you have found your playing style? (Well, I'd first rather you found your playing style before doing this, but if you are still struggling, this is a good quiz to get close to finding it: https://www.chesspersonality.com/ ) Now that you have found your playing style, find which Famous Grandmaster has your playing style or at least resembles it the most and analyse their games to build up this playing style. You can do this within this website: https://www.chesspersonality.com/type/professional

As you can see, it thought my personality was a "professional". One thing I will say is it got my playing style very very accurately, except for one thing: I am a more intuitive player than a calculating player. I mean if I do get given a tactic, I will find it and seize it, but I generally tend to evaluate plans rather than calculate deep variations. Other than that, I certainly do like to take control over the position and deny my opponents from doing anything, but make any positional mistake and I will torture you with it. But another thing not mentioned in this playing style given is that I tend to suffocate or squeeze my opponent to death.

So, what is your playing style? Feel free to share it here!

I've got Barbarian as result, as Nakamura. It recommends the QG and the Sicilian. I like both, but with white I play many things. I like the Catalan now. For the Sicilian, I love it and study it a lot. I am planning to create a huge study on my Sicilian Repertoire on Lichess. I also like Tal and Morphy games. I sometimes play very agressive, but if I know that my opponent is very strong at tactics, I can squeeze him in a slow, many hours long positional fight.

That’s nice! Well, you do not have to follow the openings it suggests, but generally following games of grandmasters who play with your style is good as you are doing.

Is it just the first one it pops up on at the end of the quiz? Then I am a professional.

It recommends:

• White: Nimzo-Indian; English Opening
• Black: French Defense (Winawer); Sicilian Defense
•  

I don't like any of those!

And I am not positional, if there are too many pieces on the board for too long, I just end up making useless moves because I don't know what else to do, and it ends up being a really sad game for me.

Yeah. That's sad. I recommend you to calm down in these positions. You know, if your opponent is on the same level as you, they are feeling the same. And if they see that you love your position, they might panic. I mean just look at Petrosian (sorry if it's someone else), he was the player who always loved his position, and had pretty good results.

it called you a professional? just like me then! I could teach you some positional ideas then which could help you

Yay, cool.

Okay, thanks.

Petrosian had great positions many times and was famous for his exchange sacrifices. there was a saying that:

if Tal sacrifices a piece, take it

if Petrosian sacrifices a piece, don’t take it

(and now I guess if stockfish sacrifices a piece, it doesn’t matter as you are going to lose anyways!)

Karpov in my view is one of the greatest positional players, but petrosian was also a great positional player too. Karpov however also tried to deny the opponent any counterplay

Yeah. Tal sometimes was wrong with his sacrifices.

Karpov was definitely on the top of positional play.