Help Alison With Her Terrible Moves

AlisonHart Interesting game, at first I thought it was going to make me cry (ok it did) but you started to play a bit better later on. The position is completely winning at the end, the simple Rd4!! wins right away. Rd4 Qxe2?? Qxe2 Rxe2 Rd1+ Rc1 Rxc1#, yah Rd4 was just 0-1 even with 5 seconds.....was there an increment? What was the time control?

Welcome back. I enjoyed playing through your game and reading your annotations. As far as suggestions for an improvement, I think 28...Bg4! winning the piece looks strong.

It was a 10 minute game, no increment, so I might have been able to bang out the sequence if I had seen it, and I should have tried Rd4 anyway, as it's the most natural continuation even without calculating anything (skewers, attacks the queen, centralizes....all of the things chess coaches tell you to look for, and, as was shown, also forces mate with precise play)

Alison, that last game was good!

Lol!

perhaps....... *facepalm*

Alison, what are your thoughts on 28...Bg4

Obviously the best move - I can sort of blame time pressure at this point, as I had a minute or less by then, but I was making a classic mistake - moving the same piece over and over and not calculating the potential of other pieces properly. My move was enough to do the trick, but 'good enough' is not good enough.

I think this last game was not too bad. You were too fearful of your opponent's opening assault, but it is not easy to punish overambitious schemes with a relatively quiet system. The queenside attack was slow, but ultimately set up the central advance that ruined white's game. You missed some tactics, but that is normal at this level.

Hello Alison.

I have looked at your game and your rating.  You seem to know what went wrong, and where your weaknesses are.  Comments on specific moves or positions in the game don't seem what is needed.

Your rating of 1215 is quite low, and your tactics seem typical of that kind of rating.

However- "players in my class are always doing this....I find it dumbfounding....they have a stalker like obsession with pinning knights and then simply trade the bishop unprovoked....OK then - bishop pair for Ali"

That is not the comment of a player with a 1215 understanding.  1400 maybe more.  A big difference.  Incidentally, your opponent has not only given you 2 bishops but your bishop is better on f6 than g7.

Now, tactics are more important relatively once you get well down the totem pole compared to GMs, the players who have their games published.  At our sort of level a tactical lapse is much more likely to decide a game than at GM level.

The tactics trainer is probably a good way forward.  The best kind of training is that the soviets used to use, developed by Kotov.  Look at a complex tactical position from a real game and work it out from looking at the board w/o moving pieces around.  Just like in a real game.

The part of fairly basic chess books that tell you the elements of tactics, back rand, overloaded piece et al should be looked at if you haven't.  Get to know it backwards, especially as your tactics seems a problem.

If you are working at chess an hour a day or more, your play should improve fairly fast.

You are trying to improve your endings by looking at endgame manuals.  A lot of nescessary work there. Try looking at endings from real games too, maybe more than endgame manuals.An old book called "Capablanca's Best Endings" that is great for this.  Its hard to overstate the amount a good understanding of endings can improve your play.  If you know an ending will be good or bad for you, you can seek or avoid it as appropriate.  You need to know about the ending to understand openings such as the Berlin and Exchange variations of the Ruy Lopez.

Finally, if you have time look at the Carlsen Anand games over the internet.  The commentary by Peter Svidler [a top player, played in the last candidates] and Sopiko Gramashvilli is engaging and it is great to see such important games in progress.  You pick up information by osmosis from the commentary.  True it will help your strategy more than tactics.

Anyway, good luck.

PS just had a look at your last game.  You played well generally.  

But you missed a win with 10 ... d4.

And your early h6 does not force the knight to retreat.  If white ignores it and you take, he get the rook on h8.

Tactics milady.

Thanks for the interest and the tips - it's really very helpful!

First, I'll say that tactics are definitely on my mind: over 3600 TT problems done and I'm sure there will be thousands more. My rating there fluctuates with ~1080 as a floor and ~1250 as a ceiling. I'm seeing improvement, but I also miss elementary problems on a regular basis. It's a frustrating process.

As for my other studies, my favorite chess book so far is 'Soviet Middlegame Technique' - a little outdated but absolutely superb. I just started 'Techniques of Positional Play' today, and I feel like it is going to rock my world, so I'm excited for that as well. I also do in-depth famous player studies - my first was Richard Reti. I went through 2 games (one win - one loss) for every one of his active years, tried to guess each move, and checked my work with an engine. I love Reti's quirk - his instinct to gambit a pawn every time he's in trouble, his lateral pins, his creative endgame play. Now I'm working on Petrosian - playing through entire tournaments as the Iron Tiger, and I'm not ashamed to admit that he's *very* hard to understand. His positions are beautiful - they move like amoebas, amorphous, always changing, always moving in their own direction. It's impossible to get into his head, but Petrosian helps you see every single square you're influencing and account for that influence - artistry. 

I have been following Carlsen Annand with the Svidler/Gramashvili commentary! Svidler is simply incredible - you don't get to hear guys at that level talk about chess very often (because they're still competing and don't have time to teach), and I really appreciate Sopika's energy - she always has four candidate moves ready to go, even when Svidler starts to get impatient. 

Anyway, thanks again - off to the tactic machine!

Ok so i

went over your game in detail and decided to hopefully post some instructive lines. 

"I have been following Carlsen Annand with the Svidler/Gramashvili commentary! Svidler is simply incredible - you don't get to hear guys at that level talk about chess very often"

Haha, indeed. I don't think I retain a lot of the info he gives, but it's cool to get some impression of a 2700s chess mind.

I like this quote by Yermolinsky about Svidler in "The Road to Chess Improvement":

"Visualization is the point where chess players begin to differ from one another, ranked by a degree of natural talent.

Visualization is a pattern thing. It's much easier to mentally analyse a game you just finished, rather than someone else's; yet I get surprised every time I try to engage my opponent in a little post-game blindfold talk. Mostly, I get a blank stare in return, and even after consulting their scoresheets most of my opponents - I'm talking 2200 strength, not my esteemed GM colleagues - are not able to understand what I'm talking about. Makes me wonder how they can play at all. 

Probably, the same thought has crossed Kramnik and Svidler's minds quite a few times while they watched my feeble attempts to keep up with their blindfold analysis between drinks in Wijk aan Zee bars. Everybody has his place in this hierarchy, but that doesn't mean it's set for all times and there's nothing one can do about it."

If Svidler was doing the commentary during the Grunfeld game, I need to get the replay somewhere...

Personally, I'm a builder....I like to create strong, aesthetic positions with tremendous centers, so Petrosian's style of trying to make his own positon 'perfect' before bothering to break his opponent's open is something I really appreciate. 

CP6033 - 

Your annotations were amazing and touched on everything I've been doing wrong - from the planning process to tactical oversights to nuanced opening suggestions to defensive ideas. Top to bottom, it's everything I need to work on in a nutshell. Thanks so much.

"Personally, I'm a builder....I like to create strong, aesthetic positions with tremendous centers, so Petrosian's style of trying to make his own positon 'perfect' before bothering to break his opponent's open is something I really appreciate."

Yeah I'm definitely the same. I enjoy building nice positions step by step, taking away squares, getting my pieces to the best squares, etc. But of course one does have to learn how to hold back their desires sometimes. Sometimes you do have to play more dynamically and tactically when the position calls for it.

It should be on the website.

world championship match