what the #$%^was he playing and how did he win?

thanks badgersong. Yes, some of the material is over my head, and I am working on tactical 2 movers. Yaroslavl and Jaglavak have been very good about catchng me when I think I understand something, and I don't really. They have been repeating and re-stating their thoughts, and I'm doing my part. I appreciate your concern that some may be over my head, but I assure you its not couterproductive. It 1. can be useful for other people who read the thread and 2. it plants seeds for shoots that I will re-examine later and 3. it gives me something to replay back to the thread, so they can see how I am mis-understanding what has been said.

One of the major discoveries of this thread has been Jaglavak's insight that MANY players throw around terms as if they understand them, when they actually don't.  

just to clarify. nobody has said that 'positional chess' is to be tossed out the window. What Jaglavak has taught, to my mind, has been that positional maxims used after the fact to describe positions are NOT to be used to decide what moves to make. Decisions for moves to make are based on pieces relations to each other and targets attacked and defended. I posted earlier how Dan Heisman says the exact same thing in his article on Hand waving. Maybe you could go read Heisman's article on hand waving, how 'hand waving', i.e. making decisions on the basis of ideas instead of on the basis of analysis/calculation and targetting, is even worse than play8ng hope chess.

This isn't an anti-positional school. this is a school that is emphasizes how decisions are made at the board, and rmphasizes that 'thinking' is inferior to 'looking' for making move decisions. 

that is my way of inderstanding it anyway, the thinking vs. looking. that is not how Jaglavak or Yaroslavl or aronchuck describes it, but it works for me. It correctly diagnoses my thinking process as faulty because at the board I am busy thinking, and not looking. 

I chose the Rook takes on f4 instead of the bishop taking based purely on thinking and failing to look.

The interesting thing I have discovered about my own development is that when I do tactics puzzles I do NO THINKING. I only do looking. I think its because during the puzzle I have no narrative of a game, I have no encumbering thoughts about how a game should be played, none of Chernev's stuff about king pawns yadayada. only how to win the puzzle based on getting some material or defending some material. 

and @aronchuck's post #241 which contains the same error described below.

actually, let's clarify what is going on in the mainline of this thread. People, esp Jaglavak and Yaroslavl are commenting on MY ANNOTATIONS to my game. They are noticing that my annotations demonstrate incorrect thought processes, and they are trying to correct those thought processses by talking about targets, in the case of Jaglavak, and attacked and defended pieces, attacked and defended squares, and weakened squares in the case of Yaroslavl. 

This isn't, hasn't been, and shouldn't become a theoretical discussion of pedagogy that is unrelated to my actual games and my actual annotations. That is what started this thread, and how this thread will proceed. It is not a theoretical discussion ungrounded in the material conditions of my game under discussion. It is fully grounded in my game and my annotations. 

Sticking to that material basis will prevent this thread from devolving into a meaningless discussion. When good chess players discuss they always discuss using diagrams, positions, actual pieces on actual boards. The actual pieces and actual boards for this discussion will be provided by me.

And I have a game coming up in a few hours so I'm going to go and hone some two and three movers. umm, and one movers. 

yes, Jaglavak writes here more succintly what I wrote in #247 above. He adds that this is positional chess; but the positions it speaks about is the combative relationship of pieces to pieces; precisely what Yaroslavl talks about when he writes about defended attacked, etc. 

Jaglavak! I like what you write about 'language better used in physics'. Perfect. Space, Time. bah. h5 f7, yah. 

I realize this might get boring, but I just read this explanation of cxd5 right through to the end of the paragraph without a board, and I followed it in my head.

I realize this is what good chessplayers do all the time, but I don't and I haven't and I just tried to actually read this, and vizualize this, and it worked.

In the past I've always skipped the parts of articles where they list moves and variations; I just read the narrative, and thought I would learn from that.

In fact, I realize now, the 'dry, informant-style' etc, is actual chess, not physics or some other discipline. These actual moves are the language of chess. 

awesome.

hehe, since I read it without a board, I assumed I had an available R on the back rank, probably QR but not necessarily, and that he meant a later rook to c1 (or, I guess, a later Q to c file, but that didn't occur to me then) might apply pressure down the c file, since the cxd takes my c pawn off the file. 

now. Jaglavak, you could legitmately ask what I mean by 'pressure'. Umm, I mean that my rook on an open or semi open c file could threaten to move down the file and move into position to target the king or stray undefended pawns, or participate with other pieces of mine to threaten targets.  

 Jaglavak asKed <One last question bout this position. Other than the Rook, what do you think is the optimum piece to use to attack that c-pawn?>

Jaglavak, I've played out various scenarios, and I don't see the answer. I thought the knight would be best. I just thought with the two bishops I wouldn't want to lose a bishop to a pawn, and that it would be easiest to manouver my knight down to the c7 pawn. So I tried to get my knight down there, and didn't see how. My c pawn is already gone to cxd, so I have b and a pawns still. but advancing my a and b pawns against abc black pawns doesn't seem like much of an attack. So I don't know. The only answer I can fathom is doubling my rooks on c file, so I can have a double rook attack against that black c pawn. 

I haven't figured out how to paste a variation into this post box. McHeath, or FromMutoU or someone else who knows how to do it, can you tell me how I can take my game from the OP, modify it, and repost the variation into this box without changing the original post? When I click 'get PGN' it warns me that its going to change the original game, and I don't want to change the original post. 

@FromMutoYou: stay with this thread if you want. You really are welcome here, as is anyone. Just don't get in a snit. We're trying to be rational, disciplined, decent, open to learning, and serious here. That's where the fun lies. 

Yaroslavl wrote<I had Houdini analyzing your game from the position with White to move after Black's 10...g5. It chose and analyzed 3 candidate moves for White (+4.01 11.cxd5, +3.49 11.f4', and +3.30 11.Qh5. I will write in my next post which move Houdini chose to make and the notation thru move 21.>

wow. I just noticed this! So my 11. f4 wasn't a complete idiot move! Awesome. And, the fact that I didn't seriously consider cxd5 and chose f4 on purely emotion-based reasons still underlines that f4 was a bad move for me to make the way I made it., or a 'half move'; cool term courtesy of Jaglavak. 

I just read this over aronchuck. no board. I followed it. Very clear now. I glazed over it the first time. Now I see it. I don't understand how my bishop 'keeps the centre under control' but you have further emphasized the desireability of me eyeing Qh5 with a view to targetting f7. the irony is I DID think of Qh5, but only to win a pawn, and then I dropped the idea because I thought 'why endanger my Queen to win a pawn'. Yup, that was the thought; I remember it, very clearly. why endanger my queen to win a pawn. The fact that my queen was in no danger, but his K would have been was completely lost on me. Tactics patterns. Attacking patterns. Patterns to attack a castled, and an uncastled king. Yep.

I like aronchuck's style.

awright, I cheated. I was reading over some of the previous posts, and I'm NOW reading the moves!!! So I read aronchuck's explanation of the Queens gambit and I followed WITHOUT BOARD his explanation of the minority attack, with Rook on b1 (not c1!!) supporting an advance of my b pawn and a pawn, which can tie up Balck's b pawn weakening his c pawn. The other attack, which I don't remember what its called (maybe kingside attack) did not target the Queenside, but instead pushed f3 then e4 prompting dxe and fxe giving my castled rook access to f file and giving me an e pawn to e5 kicking the f6 knight and increasing the pressure from my rook on f7. 

yahoo! all without a board or reading the notes. From my head. YAyyy!

the reallly exciting thing is that...because I have developed trust in Jaglavak and Yaroslavl, I am taking this instruction seriously. So, since Jaglavak wrote about aronchuk's post on the QG 'that is how you will learn an opening...I went and read aronchuck's explanation of the QG and found that I could follow it. So,really, this trust and accountability along with the excellent content is supporting me to learn in a way I wasn't b4.  Trust me. I'm not kidding when I say I read chess articles, novice nooks, opening lanes, etc, and only read the english words, never the moves!!! I can't tell you how many wikipedia articles I read on openings WITHOUT READING THE MOVES.

hahaha, that's like reading a novel by only reading the punctuation! A sequence of commas, periods, apostrophes, ...is that Tolstoy or Turgenev? And tell me somebodysson, what did you learn from this book?

I see your point. However, I think the idea of rxf4 is much easier to understand conceptually. It has many basic fundamental ideas to it.

Also, I disaprove of you using houdini to analyze this game. This game is very conceptual and the type of analysis I provided should be the first thing going on in someone's mind when they are playing. He didn't ask for perfect play analysis, just some basic concepts that he overlooked.



@Somebodysson Thanks for the good post, your game is a good game to learn from. I hope my comments were instructive.

Again, it's only the long-winded contributers to this thread that have this idea that positional generalities are bad.  I've watched many lectures, read many books, and even studied with very strong players in person and I don't know a single one who would preach "don't make positional evaluations".

I recommend you listen to how strong players explain their play and decide for yourself what works and what doesn't.

Are you kidding me kriazis? I just read over your explanation of the Rxf4. It was a very clear explanation, and I found it very helpful. The cool thing is, I just read it over again, and this time I understood the bit about taking the bishop away from defending the center pawns. I didn't understand it last time, and this time it was obvious. I guess that's some of what learning is like. It makes no sense, it makes no sense, it makes no sense, and then you wonder how you ever had trouble understanding it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=049NnoR1LGE#t=28m9s

"Whenever your opponent plays f4, you take it. If they play f5 then you can't move."
-GM Ben Finegold

(Of course, according to Jaglavak, there's actually a conspiracy among chess writers and lectures to mislead weaker players with maxims like this.  They don't *really* believe in them.  The only true way to find good moves is pure calculation.  Deciding a plan based on, for example, the quality of your minor pieces or rules of thumb on pawn structure would be crazy.)

thanks FromMutoYou. Nobody is forcing me to follow anyone's recommendations. I am actually following what works for me, and I am telling people when what they're doing is something I can understand, when it isn't, when I don't like what they're doing, etc. I'm not saying everything on my mind, because...that would be insanity. Nobody ever says everything on their mind, unless they're really very very disturbed.

I am taking in as much as I can, (and there's a lot being posted on here) and often I only understand it a few days or weeks later. I actually recently confessed on here that until today I didn't even read all the moves people proposed, all the variations, because until about 48 hours ago I jusT Didn'T ReaD MovEs unless they were very very short sequences.

This thread is actually, I just realized, becoming my chess textbook. It really is. There's a couple more books I'm consulting. I plan this weekend to get down to some study of 'my' openings, and I plan to look at Averbakh on endgames and maybe even a tiny bt of Averbakh on Middlegames. (btw folks, my game tonight got cancelled. The guy I was supposed to play on here couldn't make it. I have a game tomorrow morning. I'll post it when its done.)

FromMutoYou, I have found your chess proposals helpful and important. I plan to go back and review your annotations this weekend. I have found kriazis , the recently arrived aronchuk, McHeath, R-Tist, a whole bunch of people helpful. I forget all their names, but I imagine I"ll learn them if they stick around.

Jaglavak and Yaroslavl have both been there (here?) from the beginning, they have both been exceedingly generous, and neither of them has ever rubbed me the wrong way, and so I trust them deeply. I trust others too. Some have beautiful scintillating personalities, like McHeath, and he has also put time into annotating a game of mine, and expressing excitement about this thread, and I find that helpful.

I'm certainly making my own mind up about what to follow. What I don't like is attacks at people or attacks on people's personal style, esp when they are clearly working really hard to give the best information and advice possible. You may find Yaroslavl long-winded, but boy is he ever on the ball when he asks me "did you understand what I wrote there", catching me on the fact that I thought I did, but I didn't. 

Jaglavak is actually not long-winded at all. But I have no problem with long winded-ness anyway. Written internet communication is very very very short compared to all other forms of written communication (except texting, email and tweeting, of course). I am used to reading a lot, so I don't mind long-windedness, but I definitely mind mean-spiritedness.  I'm long winded myself when it comes to writing. I'm not pedantic. But I'm long winded. There's a dfference. I far prefer pedantic well-spiritedness to brief mean-spiritedness.

I don't want to get into this much more, but I ask you to go over, for yourself, all the posts, and see if Jaglavak or Yaroslavl have EVER bean mean-spirited on this thread. They haven't. Jaglavak has been a stern critic of my reliance on uncomprehended maxims, and his stern criticism rang very very true for me. Yaroslavl has lectured me on a long list of things I need to do when I look at a board, and he has 'nagged' me about it, ...e.g."did you bring the list I gave you to the club and look at it before every move? I think you didn't''. etc. This serious nagging, or what one could call 'repeating important lessons' is very much appreciated.

So stay on here man. You have important stuff to contribute, and as I get better I'll be able to understand more of what you're saying. For e.g. I didn't take seriously your note a while back "f4 wasn't so bad", but now, a dozen posts later, with more coming to light and more discussion, I appreciate, perhaps too late for you but just on time for me, that comment.

And by the way, I don't mind Yaroslavl submitting my moves to Houdini and posting the result here. If he's posting MY little 700 rated game to Houdini, WOW! I gotta thank him for spending that much time on a little pipsqueak like me. And then he posts the result which argues against his own thesis, that f4 was a poor move!? That takes courage, and shows huge moral character. I appreciate that kind of thing.

Just keep the mean-spiritedness out of here. Don't be calling people names like long-winded, unless it has to do with chess. Call my move mindless, reckless, irresponsible, etc..Call a move long-winded. But don't call anyone any names.

Or I might have to kill you , alright!?

ah I see Jaglavak took the bait. I was too long-winded in crafting my response, and missed.

FromMutoYou, what Jaglavak wrote above, about brevity and certainty, rings true. Be less brief, and more true to the spirit of this thread. Be long winded, and well-spirited. This could be an opportunity for you to learn some stuff that others know better than you. I hope you can get past your ego so that this thread can help you with your own learning curve. It is certainly healping me with mine. If you want to argue, argue with me. FromMutoYou, argue with me. Ask me why I made a move. Insult my choice, my thinking process. And when I argue back argue me down. Win the fight with ME. 

And Jaglavak, let me handle this. You're too busy being a great chess teacher. Don't get pulled into this stuff. I need you to be a chess teacher. 

And Jaglavak, let's set the record straight. FromMutoYou has posted some serious chess stuff on this thread. Then he got himself into a snit,  andhe's a bit stuck in it, and I'm working to help him out of it. He is posting on here because he loves chess, and he cares about chess. He just has some other stuff going on that he's going to get help with from ME.

I mean, Jaglavak, your response to him above is very very good, don't get me wrong. I think you are smart, brief and accurate. 

I just don't want you to get drawn into people-management, when I need your chess thinking management so much more. 

Leave the driving to me. You're the navigator. I need your navigation skills. I'm blind, learning to see. 

Like I said, it's a conspiracy between GMs.

"Much of what you are saying is exactly the kind of thing we are trying to avoid to improve our chess. Statements like  'We analysed it from a positional point of view rather than analyisng it move by move,' and, 'The 1st 7 or 8 moves Black plays absolute rubbish', and 'I had him beat in the opening then it all went wrong' are evidence that you, like the rest of us, have been bamboozled into speaking and thinking about chess in terms that are useless for improving to a high level.'

(I quoted you this time so that I don't get accused of "[attributing] false statements to people".)

I don't think highly of you ridiculing someone for using widely accepted techniques in chess improvement and then dictating what is or isn't happening in this thread.  This is a public forum, not Soviet Russia. 

I don't appreciate is when you tell people "No, don't think that way.  Don't listen to GM chess authors.  Obey only my methods of analysis."  It's unnecessary and frankly immature.  From all the marketing you've done in this thread I wouldn't be surprised if you pitched a chess book of your own.  I can't think of any other reason you would be so intolerant of something as simple as "A pawn is a pawn."

I agree with your viewpoint to a certain degree, but personally I've improved most when I start to make sense of patterns.  In many games my knight gets pinned, is h6 or a3 a good move, kicking it?  Maybe I should break the pin entirely with g5/b4?  Or should I just tolerate it?  For these kind of questions I have general rules I abide by.  For pins, if I know my opponent can coordinate 2-3 pieces in an attack on my kingside and I am not as developed there, a move like g5 is out of the question.  I have dozens of these pattern-evaluations I use and I think they help me greatly.  For instance I recently made a rule for myself:  No more f5 in the Nimzo for me unless it's late in the game and lots of pieces have already been traded.  Every time I would fight for central pressure with ..f5 I would have to suffer with a weak backwards e pawn for the rest of the game and it never worked out well.  This maxim isn't a catch all, I've simply chosen to avoid ..f5 unless I have a *really* good reason for it.  And I'm sure there are great players who make ..f5 work.  But I've extensively tested it in my games and found it to be more trouble than its worth.  This is what chess is about.  You find your mistakes and your strengths and you adapt your skills to improve your performance.  There is no right or wrong method of doing this as long as you get results.  It would be rather naive to think that everyone learns best in the same manner anyway.