How to crush 1200 rated players positionally

There are no fancy tactics or cool mating combinations. It's just about slowly suffocating my opponent positionally. Giving him basically nowhere to move.

Let me know what you think of it.

Hmm the game doesn't appear to be loading. But here's a link to it:

https://www.chess.com/live/game/5382261218

The game widget will work if you include it in your SECOND post instead of in your first. It's an on-going bug, and chess.com is working on it.

Thank you.

So here is the game:

Very instructive indeed ,although I am 1100

TBH you are a 1700 rated player and he is only a 1200 rated player so it is pretty clear that you will win so instead of defeating somebody 500 rating points behind you, you should try to defeat somebody whose rating is closer to yours

Thank you all.

I thought this was pretty instructive, because a lot of strong beginners / weak intermediate players would automatically capture the bishop on c8. Their logic would be "well I trade a knight for a bishop, so that can't be too bad".

The problem is that our knight is just so crucial to killing off black's counterplay. By leaving the knight sitting here, on b6, we completely shut down both black's bishop (on c8) and black's rook (on b8). So it's super important to leave the knight sitting here and not give in and trade it off.

But that won't be as instructive.

The point isn't to brag about a win. The point is to learn something about a position.

A game like this is very educational, because you can clearly see how white gained a positional advantage over black. It's an extreme example of one player having active pieces, and the other player being completely tied down and having no space to move.

If I show you a game of me beating a 1900 rated player because he got the move order wrong in the Sicilian Najdorf and I exploited that because I knew the opening theory better than he did, what is there to learn from that?

But with a game like this, you can really see the power of prophylactic thinking. You can see how crippling it is when you refuse to give your opponent any space at all to develop. So there's a valuable lesson to take away from it.

Really nice

How to flag a 1200 opponent positionally?

I’m 1100 rapid 1200 bullet and 14 blitz

The main theme of the game shown here is blockade.  Even though it was materially even black's queenside bishop and rook were essentially entombed behind immobile pawns for the entire game.  It's almost like playing a whole queen down.  The persistent 6th-rank blockade of the d-pawn reminded me of a tournament game I played early this year:

The opponent here was utterly hopeless right from 13. Rf2? Bd3!!, the blockade of the d-pawn with the bishop crippled white's mobility so badly that I thought he might resign immediately.  There's no way to release it without losing material.  The opponent here actually did well to limit the damage to a pawn, but even then his pieces weren't really liberated and my queenside pawns quickly became unstoppable.

A lot of popular openings leave either d3 or d6 weak as they advance both the e- and c-pawns before the d-pawn, but this leaves an ideal blockading square for the opponent, especially if they can open the d-file for themselves.

Nice game

Well played!

And yes, you're absolutely right. These games are about blockades. It's such a powerful tool when set up correctly.

You mean "Why would a beginner play a bad move?"

Because they're beginners, and they usually put very little thought into their moves. They will hear a general rule like "bishops are worth slightly more than knights" and they'll take that rule to the extreme, and trade their knights for their opponents' bishops in every single situation, without looking at the specific context.

It might be obvious to you, but I can guarantee you that a lot of low rated players would play Bishop takes Knight here without thinking. Low rated players have a bad habit of trading too often without good reason. I know this because I used to do it a lot myself. But learning to keep the tension and resist making trades is a skill you slowly develop as you get more experienced.

Nice game, although I don't think this really follows the same theme of positional domination using blockades, like the games that Dsmith and I have shown.

Beautiful Game Buddy

A very good example ... although I am on the losing side

Impressive!!