Again, I'll take all criticism, but it seems like I don't make too many blunders or mistakes from the early to middle game. So how am I getting forced into these sharp lines where one mistake loses me the game against players my rating? Is the french defense itself sharp? Maybe I should stay away from sharp openings like KID?
I think it's positional but I'd appreciate hearing what you guys think.
This is going to sound harsh, but the game wasn't sharp, you miscalculated and gave your queen away.
But that's normal. That's fine. We all started in that place. This isn't about openings though. Looking at your game you're missing two things:
1) A drive to finish development.
On move 16 you're a piece up, so the simple way to play for a win is to consolidate your position. An experienced player would be focused on bringing out the knight and bishop and castling.
2) General board awareness.
On move 5 you add an attacker to his d4 pawn. White doesn't defend it. So on move 6 you can capture on d4 and win a pawn for free... but you don't.
On move 11 you say you didn't notice the bishop could capture the pawn.
On move 19 and 20 you say you didn't see the bishop cover c1 (it was a clever idea for a tactic though).
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So yeah, that's what will gain you 100s of rating points practically overnight. Challenge yourself to follow the opening principles and to complete development quickly.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-principles-of-the-opening
And play a lot of games and solve tactics to improve your ability to visualize and develop good calculation habits. Dan Heisman says some good things about this when he talks about what he calls "hope chess." In short the 3 types of moves to focus on during calculation are checks, captures, and threats.
Thanks for the response! Your assessment is correct. I overthink a lot and try to force things that don't need to be forced, or simply throw away pieces. I should definitely focus on fixing these problems before trying to understand more complicated stuff.
chess is hard more like pp hard. sorry