Help Alison With Her Terrible Moves

I think you just need experience. So keep playing. You had a winning game going in to the end game. Just need some practice in endgame tactics. Like many of us :) I'm weak in the endagme area myself. Anyway, good luck and keep playing!

Indeed, owltuna; I can't say I'm an exception to that rule! This kind of advice is probably best understood the hard way; when you lose and draw tons of positions you believed "obviously winning" in the abstract, it can really motivate you :)

I'm working on my endgames, but, I must say, it's slow going, and endgame books focus on extremely simplified positions where the method is very clear once learned.....I find real endgames to be much messier than the cozy little book positions in Pandolfini's endgame course. 

Is there a more productive way for a borderline intermediate such as myself to study endings? I actually *like* endings, G-D help me....

I'm reading these days "100 endgames you must know", from IM Jesús de la Villa. He works about the topic in such a practical way! But I guess there's not an English translation...

There´s an english translation. I bought that edition without knowing that there was an spanish edition.

So, you're more fluent in Spanish? ;)

Yo vivo en Portugal, pero no soy portugués 

It is hard to say because as you hinted, the "basic" theoretical positions are very simplified and very unlike the typical positions you get when you first trade the queens (many pawns on the board, etc).

I think a lot of times it's good to just analyze endgames like you would analyze any part of a game you played. See where you went wrong, look for ways to improve your technique, etc. In the first game you posted for example, hopefully seeing how much harder things got after all those pawn exchanges, it may motivate you to avoid them in similar situations in the future. As well as to improve your king and other pieces before starting an attack, stuff like that.

There is a certain balance between practical positions and theoretical positions. I think playing practical positions tend to be a better way to improve -- you often learn the same sort of stuff you learn by studying theoretical positions, but through experience, instead of just out of a book. But it's good to have a little of both.

So one thing you could do is look for an interesting endgame, whether it's in a book, in an article, and play it against somebody. You could even play it against yourself, as lonely as that sounds. But that way you would get the perspective of both white and black.

Same problem with me. I would outplay opponents for most of the game, then lose on a single move or two. What helped me was going back over my games and going to the "critical" moments, and trying to see why I made such a dumb decision. I realized it was a psychological failure. Then I tried to figure out why I would make such a decision. Usually it was a matter of being careless, or simply self-destructing out of boredom or some other strange reason.

I still have this problem but not nearly what it used to be. In fact, a lot more often now, I am the one who comes from behind when my opponent slips! Taking every move seriously is one of those lessons I had to learn. I have a feeling that anyone who can truly learn to play solid through an entire game, will have pretty smooth sailing all the way to 2000 level (as long as they keep playing and learning at a modest pace, of course)

Jeremy Silman, John Nunn, and Johan Hellsten all have a number of intermediate endgame books which will more than do the trick.

Typically they involve bite-sized exercises and sections, 10 to 20 ply deep, rather than massively annotated analysis.

At worst, you'll learn to play much stronger (and faster) in this phase of the game, especially when seeking to convert a winning position, as per your initial game above.

Yo he estado trabajando en mí español....no sé como bueno lo es ahora mismo pero probablamente se improvería en la idioma cuando se estudia ajedrez con un libro en español. De todos modos estoy mas o menos bilingual....mas de muchos norte americanos. 

Generally, I think half the battle is simply knowing what I want from a position and what I don't want - I knew the adage about 'up material trade pieces, down pawns trade pawns', but the second idea never made sense until the analysis on this thread zoomed in on its value. I had this really singular mindset "It's an endgame, so promote a pawn" which is right as a *long term* goal, but my short term was abysmal because I didn't know what my position was 'asking for'. Perhaps I should just go game hunting on chessgames.com, grab a few long games, and try to struggle my way through natural ending positons (using an engine to sniff for tactical errors. 

Simplify through exchanges.  Then promote that pawn.  Simple.

When you have an extra pawn, it's even easier to convert the win.

This book will be very effective towards that end --

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Endgame-Strategy-Johan-Hellsten/dp/1781940185/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404857867&sr=1-3&keywords=hellsten+chess

Unless it's too advanced, then switch to Silman's Complete Endgame Course, or (even earlier) Essential Chess Endings Explained Move by Move -- but the latter may be out of print.

Yes Alison, I think you're right in your distinction between long term and short term goals. You want to promote your pawns, but only when your army is ready to support the advance.

"Perhaps I should just go game hunting on chessgames.com, grab a few long games, and try to struggle my way through natural ending positons (using an engine to sniff for tactical errors."

A good idea.

Everything has already being said, but I will hammer one point.

Resignation in the first game is way, way, way premature. Psychological reasons are bad reasons for resigning if you want to get better (if you just want to have fun, it is okay to resign when you feel like it).

Let us imagine the next sequence (by the way, you could at least wait to see whether your opponent saw the fork...):

OK, so Black has one less piece for a pawn. However, I am not even sure this is objectively lost, and in any case some factors make it worth playing out. What follows is a lot of words but you better had try to move the pieces around to see by yourself how this pans out.

1-As White brings the knight and king to eat the b2 pawn (which will be needed sooner or later) the e pawn may advance.

2-Protecting both b1 and the g4 pawn with the bishop needs it to be at f5, but then the protection might be interrupted by ...e4 and in any case the bishop will have a hard time stopping that pawn afterwards.

3-If you can sacrifice the bishop for the g4 pawn (for instance if it advances to g5) then your opponent will need to demonstrate (after some pawn-eating) mate with bishop+knight. This is objectively lost, but (a) the opponent might not know it, (b) it might be worth to look at how it is done, even without learning it in detail. (B+N mate is easier than most people think to learn, but also much more rare than most people think)

After I blunder I always play on at least one or two moves - just to make sure that I am not resigning out of disappointment over the blunder.

When the disappointment has faded a bit I am in a better frame of mind to answer the question, "how lost am I?"  If the answer is hopelessly, then fine, resign. But if you can at least make it quite a bit harder for your opponent to win then I find that playing on is a good idea. Not altogether because of the, probably rather small, prospect of the game turning round but rather because finding resource when defending is a fun part of the game.  It is always great to spring an unexpected sacrifice on an opponent when in a position to attack but it is almost as satisfying to surprise an opponent with some defensive resource which suddenly makes them work really hard in a position where they had thought demonstrating a win would be mere technique. In any event I have enjoyed quite a few more compliments from opponents after a really stubborn defence than I have after a strongly played win.

Most endgames at a low level are won by a huge material advantage or tactics. Concentration and tactics are probably more important than traditional endgame study.

Post 64, 55...Rd8 should just never happen. No point reading if you miss one move tactics.

Shereshevsky, Endgame Strategy, is a great book.  Buy it and work through it, cover to cover.

In a nutshell, there's a corpus of endgame knowledge that you must imbibe, learn cold, and essentially be able to play inside a 5 second time increment.

Once you can do that, you will slay many opponents, and do so with aplomb.  

So Go For It.  Regardless of "boredom" from the material.

A forum thread CANNOT substitute for this hard work, unfortunately.

http://www.amazon.com/Endgame-Strategy-Everyman-Mikhail-Shereshevsky/dp/1857440633/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404917822&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=Shereshevzky+chess

Very good!

So I took a break from chess for a bit in order to take care of things in my life, but I'm happy to say that I'm back in the fray and blundering better than ever!

I've disciplined my opening repertoire a bit - switched to d4 full time (Nf3 is still my favorite opening move, but the resulting positions are numerous and advanced - d4 just makes more sense right now), quit the blasted Alekhine defense once-and-for-all, and begun to play toward the safer, cleaner stonewall Dutch as opposed to the super sharp and filthy Leningrad.

Today we shall be addressing NONE of these positions as the game I'm showing is yet another closed Sicilian. I lost this game, but it wasn't due to a tactical error - I ended up a minute and a half behind my opponent and resigned with 5 seconds on the clock versus 1:30. The reason I'm posting it is that I think I did fairly well and managed to build a better position, but, at the end, I was stuck for how to make progress, so here's the game: 

So here they are - Alison's terrible moves. What am I doing right, what am I doing wrong, and what should I be thinking about moving forward? Thanks a lot for the attention, chess.com braintrust - it's a huge help!

Oh, and I do see that moving the rook will skewer my opponent and win an exchange....probably allowing me to swap everything and have a knight versus pawns ending - not something I can win in 5 seconds....but very promising!