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

I missed Jaglavaks last post, it wasn't there until I refreshed the screen, so my post seems to ignor what he just said so I'll qualify my comments. If you are choosing an opening for the 1st few moves whether it be a Caro-Kann, Stonewall or anything else your choice will be importent. As Jaglavak stated openings are irrelevant for you, but if you choose a known opening line for whatever reason it has certain consequences so please take my comments on the Stonewall as specific for that game only.

what can I say. Jaglavak, you make enormous sense to me. And QueenTakesKnightOops...yes, I found your thread, and I did a quick read of the relevant sections of the book in prep for this morning's game. However, I knew that the g6 fianchetto was probably a refutation of the stonewall, yet when I saw black's 2...g6 I was a deer in headlights, and couldn't believe what I was seeing, and instead of converting to the QG I remembered one of the posters to your thread who wrote about the pawn storm, and decided that I remembered more of the stonewall, at that point, than of the QG (highlighting Jaglavak's point of last minute changes to opening...if I had spent the little time I had deepening my understanding of QG I might have utilized that...and done better, instead of flying with the seat of my pants with this superweapon stonewall that can be defanged by ...g6 and that I really didn't understand how to use. 

the irony is that everything you write about the stonewall, the Bd3, the Nbd2  and the reason for it. the Ne5, I remembered all of that, yet I didn't know how to use it, and the real problem is that I was using some half-understanding of an opening instead of playing chess. 

An earlier poster, perhaps it wa badger_song, noted the similiarity of the crticial fatal mistake in this game...the excitement at having an attack and getting 'ahead' a piece, and not checking to see that it was safe. Hence, thought process, move selection, care. 

and, it's definitely true what you're seeing, what Jaglavak is noting. This beginner sees little. The particular opening might not make much difference. Working on developing a thinking process, a discplined approach to move selection will likley go a lot further.

I believe that JAglavak is also on to something when he notes the information overload. My head is filled with all kinds of ideas, and these fill my head and I 'think' of these, which distracts me from 'seeing'. Thw thinking distracts from the seeing. Thus, Yaroslavl's injunctions to check, to look, to see, are important. 

I will work on 1. looking, at 2. targets, and on 3. care. A three point process. 1.Looking, 2.targets, both which of my pieces/squares are being targetted and which of the other sides pieces/squares I'm targetting, and 3. care. 

A simple three point questionnaire. 

We have accomplished something in generating this list. 

this is my current three point process. 

I will continue to post my tournament games here. Thanks folks. I plan to improve. I really do. 

I'm not sure if the g6 move is a refutation of the Stonewall but it certainly makes for some headaches for White. I may reactivate that thread & see if a push with the h pawn has any merit.

Information overload as Jaglavak pointed out is becoming an issue. You are getting lots of very long posts all trying to help & containing good stuff but trying to process it all & then use it OTB is going to be a struggle.

I'm not sure how I would go about it but I am using some of this thread to modify my teaching methods so I have a question for Jaglavak.

If we adopt the idea that openings are irrelevant how do you propose selection of the 1st few moves? I see meret in your idea but I learned Chess in a totally different way so I need to get a better understanding. I studied openings starting with the 3 in "How to Think ahead in Chess & then I went through Modern Chess openings & studied everything I could picking & choosing the ones I liked & seemed to suit me. Finally I bought books on specific openings for more in depth analysis. Almost every opponent will play some degree of Book response to almost any opening move you make because they have all been analysed. My wife is already studying openings but my daughter may be a candidate for playing tactical Chess using more of your approach.

I realize your question is for Jaglavak (altho I think I know his answer...) but I'll just tell you this. A friend of mine has a son, who I taught chess to. Very easy, the moves the point, very very little, just watching me play chess. He doesn't know any openings, any maxims, nada, none at all. He plays super exciting chess; he makes bold moves, unconventional moves. He creates openings. He tends to play openings that look hypermodern; weird flank openings. He goes for the quick kill, goes hunting right away. He definitely sees targets. He makes blunders by not looking at what is targetting his stuff, but he also wins games, and plays very exciting chess because of his target consciousness and his freedom from maxims. I am actually not a blank slate. I am a blank slate only insofar as target consciousness, but my head is full of ideas which I don't understand. My ideas aren't shorthand for intuitively understood concepts, they are, rather, longhand for misunderstood concepts. 

My friends son knows nothing, and plays with hyper target consciousness. Its breathtaking to watch him play chess with his buddy. 

Over to you Jaglavak. (I think Jaglavak will say that his comments about openings were directed specifically to me, because he has read enough of my annotations to see that at this point, learning any more 'knowledge, including 'knowledge of openings' will only exacerabte the sense that I know something, and target consciousness, according to Jaglavak, does not involve knowing anything, but seeing as much as possible. ) Ok Jaglavak, over to you. 

I don't mind who answers my questions Your friends son sounds like a great player to watch & I think this is the future of Chess, the only way to conbat the influence of computers. I had an interesting experience years ago in a social game over a few beers. My opponent had an acquired brain injury from a motorcycle accident. It effected his ability to process what he read so he had no book influence at all. I was playing pretty strong club level chess & learning from books extensively & to be honest I didn't take social players seriously. I always won easily. Not with this guy though. We got to a middle game where I thought I had an easy win when suddenly attacks started comming from areas I never expected. I managed to keep fending them off & he kept generating them. Finally in desperation I exchanged down to an endgame & got the win but after being involved in this thread for a while now I can see where the power he had in OTB play came from.

Jaglavak's last post was just great.

I wanted to add that I think that you (Somebodysson) really need to be more disciplined. I've noticed that you are very "romantic" in the way you describe your thoughts and the ideas that cross your mind. This is what you wrote that you thought after Black's second move: 'I have to do this pawn storm. Its too late. Its my only hope'. This kind of dramatism is what I'm refering to. It is evident that you are a very emotional person, you said it yourself, but, more importantly, it shows. And that's fine! It's just that it's getting in the way of your chess. I think that, on the board, your untamed emotions are a source of distraction, you can't search for targets and calculate if you are concentrated on how you are feeling, you lose focus this way, you are attention is divided in half. Each second that you pay attention to something other than the concrete understanding of the position (targets/weaknesses, worst pieces, etc), being up-to-date with the changes made by the most recent move, or calculating lines (if this then he has this main three options, so for each of those moves I have a reply) is a second invested on bigger chances of mistakes. I think that this will start to fade as you play more and more games, but remember that if your attention is split, your efforts are split, and it'll be difficult to beat an opponent if he is faced with only "half-you" and he is entirely on the task at hand (the game). I think that, for you, learning to keep a cool head is as important as learning tactics or learning to search for targets or wathever, because if you don't learn this then you are simply not going to be able to give it your all. You'll do that the moment you forget about everything else and your head is only filled with the game. I am sure that you know what I mean, that you understand the "state of mind" I'm trying to describe, because I think that you probably know it too well. Or, tell me, when you play the piano, do you pay attention to how you are feeling? I'll guess that you are only paying attention to the music, listening and reacting accordingly (which of course does not mean that you are not feeling anything, on the contrary). I get the impression that, as you are playing, you are writing a tale, a tale of feelings, of expectations and surprises, sudden twists, and you associate the situation on the board with other circumstances which may lead to colorful and entertaining annotations but do not have anything to do with the game (see for example the explanation you gave on the knight retreat: "I'm in full defense mode, this is trench warfare, the defense of Stalingrad", and this explanation wasn't a colorful add-in to a concrete explanation, it was all you commented about that move, and it does not really explain it).

Well, I would like to offer you something concrete you could use regarding this (on the case that you think that you want to work on that) but I don't know you, so I can't, so I hope at least this can be useful in one way or another.

Ok, I just tried to test Jaglavaks theory. I played a computer game at low level. I have had computers since 1977 when after a phone conversation with GM CJS Purdy I bought what was the best on the market to help with training when I had no opponents available. Today I hate computers because they do unnatural stuff at low to intermediate levels & at high levels they beat everyone. For example try playing the Stonewall Attack against one. The damn thing attacks with its King & then makes up in calculating power for what most would consider a suicidal strategy. I played a blitz like time control to try & force myself not to think the way I usually do & I focused on targets.

It worked, I had a good win, ok maybe I got lucky but I will try it a few more times & see what happens but I played a totally different game to what I normally play & the result was quite satisfying.

I'm not sure if this will help Somebodysson, but its a line I am going to investigate further. My problem is I learned the traditional way & it is not easy to change my total mindset, the tight time control was the only thing I could think of. Normally I hate Blitz & recommend beginners stay away from it, but maybe in my case it now has some merit.

Yup, speaking to CJS Purdy was something I will always remember. We spoke for about 20 minutes, his 1977 edition of Chess Made Easy had an update on computers on the last page, that was what prompted me to call him. He died a couple of years later over the board at a Chess club. A sad day for Chess but his impact was huge, his books are still selling well. Even Chess Made Easy is still in print. I have a 1942 1st edition that escaped the water damage that got my Philidor book

I simply disagree,in practice, with  much that is being said here.I believe we are leading Somebodysson astray.Many here are presenting a thought process  for the OP to assimilate  and use that is predicated upon the user already being skillful in the basics of chess.The OP is,in fact,lacking understanding of the very basics that would make said thought process even useful.Doing this is the equivalent of handing someone a road map and saying" Call me when you get there!",to wit the driver responds "I don't know where to go.",and the map giver says,"Well...call me anyways." There are many well-intentioned posters to this thread,however,I believe they are presenting the OP with material that he does not have the chess-background to utilize effectively,while at the same time neglecting to present him with the kind of material that he can effective use right now.In addition,this thread is failing to show the OP,in a concrete manner,how he can study critical topics much more effectively than he does at present.I believe that Jag is an outstanding player and instructor,but in this particular case I believe he is heading in the wrong direction.Somebodysson doesn't know the fundamentals,or at the very least has hasn't internalized them to the point he can use them in a game.He cannot find targets in a game because he can't recognize them,or at least most of them,most of the time.Asking someone to look for targets when they can't recognize them is counter-productive.Combinations are made up of two or more tactical patterns,a given tactical pattern is determined the geometery of the board.For  example,the discovered attack/double attack  on whites queen can only occur because there are two opposing "line-attack" pieces facing each other on the same open file,with critically a piece inbetween.If one knows what makes a discovered attack work,and why it works,and can do so quickly,then one can start looking for that "target".One cannot look for,let alone play,what they can't recognize;this is why a chess engine evaluation of class-players blitz games will consistantly show a preference for certain tactics of a certain type and the missing of others of a certain type.The OP does not,as a whole,have the ability to recognize the nuts and bolt elements that make up a given tactic OTB,like,for example,knights fork pieces on opposite colors,a line-piece opposing an enemy piece but shielded by another piece(of either side) suggests a skewer/discovery/pin,a piece protected by a dissimilar piece(or multiple pieces) suggests a removal of the guard,and so forth.If one knows things like that,then they can craft a thought process involving"targets" that is meaningful.This involves more than just practicing tactics.

Well-meaning game-reviewers in this thread repeatedly refer,in their reviews, to nuances in both piece and pawn moves that are simply beyond the skill level of the OP to understand.It would be best if reviewers stopped this practice.What does "treat the opening like the middle-game mean"?How is that supposed to help?The OP doesn't know how to even play the opening,even if only by principle,let alone how to approach a middle-game.I don't question Jaglavak's chess abilities,however,I think he and those advocating similar things, are off-base in this particular case.Of all the things Jag rightly claims is necessary to reach Class-A playing strength,the OP can do none.The OP can't target--period.He can't because he doesn't know what makes a tactic..any tactic, work...thus;1)because he doesn't know why a tactic works,he can't look for those features on the board; and 2) because of that,he can't look for potential targets,both his and his opponents; and 3)because of that,he can't create combinations;and 4) he can't even consistantly improve the position of his pieces because that leads straight back to (1) above."Don't get off track."? Much of this threads advice is off-track and has been so for a while.Most of the advice of this thread is inappropriate for the skill-level of a player like the OP.Instead this thread should be working to assist the OP ,in concrete fashion, on how to improve  his chess fundamentals...and this thread is not doing that.I am  tempted to advise the OP to walk away from this thread entirely.

This thread is about a month old.The problems with the OP's games are problems with basic chess fundamentals.The problems that were present in the beginning are still present;problems that ought to have been resolved with a week-ends study and play.If the posters to this thread are really interested in aiding the OP improve,that fact should cause concern.I don't believe the OP's problems,are at heart thought-process problems,the vast majority of chess players progress from complete beginner to C-Class without ever possessing a methodical and effective thought-process.

I fear,that if the OP continues to adhere to the advice of this thread,to the detriment of learning,studying,and internalizing chess-fundamentals,the only thing he's going to experience,OTB ,is a long series of beatings.

Jagalvak wrote:<Eventually, after years around 1900 I learned from Purdy what a target was. I reread Reshevsky and to my chagrin, realized he did a pretty good job of explaining it himself - I just understood targets  in terms of maxims, so I read him with an agendena instead of an open mind.>

Jaglavak, can you say more about how Purdy broke through your understanding. Can you write what you read from Purdy, to your recollection, or the book or article by Purdy, as in a reference? Thanks man.

QueenTkesKnightOops: cool experiment. Can you say more about how you de=programmed your mind of what you know, and in as much detail as you can about how you practiced target=mobility chess? thanks.

jojojopo: yes, perfect, exactly.

badger_song: umm, its true that many of the move discussions written here are not going to be remembered by me. But the annotations that people are writing here can be 'understood' by me. Mostly there are not not long variations, there are hardly any variations at all, so mostly the notes are wordy, and I can certainly understand them.

By the way, can someone please answer the question that I asked earlier, about QueenTakesKnghtOops annotations, using grey color and then red color for the variant? What is the significance of the change in color? I ask this because eventually I would like to be able to understand how to read variations in notes, and when people use different colors or different styles in the variation, I don't know why they're doing it.

badger_song: to go back to your opinion about the advice being offered: I appreciate your concern; in fact, I also had the impression that what people are saying would  be assimilable by someone in a weekend; however what jojojopo and Jaglavak have identified is very very persistent, i.e. the emotionality which takes over and gives narrative which interferes with my ability to focus on the board, and the pre-existing knowledge of narrative, obtained by reading chess literature for a year without reading any of the moves or notes, just the narrative, and having my head filled with half understood concepts and ex post facto narratives, which only support the distracting narrative that is going on.

So I think that maybe, badger_song, with utmost respect for you, I think that maybe you are not understanding what Jaglavak is saying. He is merely saying 'look at the board. Don't listen to your head. Look at the board'. He is telling me to 'use a different sense, not the sense of hearing (narratives in my head) but the sense of looking, and look at the board'. He is telling me to look deeply into the relationship of pieces to each other, to where they are pointing, to what they can reach, and to try to the best of my ability to base my decisions on such considerations. He is asking me to post the results of my looking, so that he and others can help me with my evaluations of what I see.

So I try to do that, and as jojojopo points out, I end up writing dramatic variations composed of streams of emotions, instead of streams of moves. People see that. They say "okay. Enough talk of emotions. Try harder to look at pieces, squares, goals for pieces, etc." Rinse and repeat, as the saying goes. 

In saying 'treat the opening as the middlegame' Jaglavak is saying that I should start playing chess from the first moves. He is saying that the maxim "play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the ending like a machine' is not going to apply to me, because time spent learning to play the opening like a book the ending like a machine will be taking away from time spent learning what the magic of chess really is, which is looking for, finding, and evaluating targets. 

He is implicity saying that book openings and machine endings already incorporate target-focus into their content, and that to develop as a chess player I am best to develop that target consciousness, so that I could improvise openings and justify them based on targets.

and, he notes, 'not all icons are to be smashed'. He wouldn't argue against castling early. That has to do with the king being a target early in the game. He wouldn't argue against getting your pieces out; that is consistent with sending them out into the wilds to find targets. 

badger song, also, about the explanation of the geometric relationships which give rise to tactics. Nobody would argue against you on that. And nobody really is. That is included in finding targets. 

badger-song: about your concern that 'this thread is a month long and I don't seem to be improving, and that is evidence that the thread is misguided'. Umm a couple of things. First, there are other people reading this thread, who are not posting, and who are finding it helpful. Second, and relating to me; what is being identified is how difficult it is for me to follow the advice given, how filled my head is with emotional and maxim based content, and how I easily go to these narratives instead of the facts on the board based on the relationships on the board.

I think that, if nothing else, this thread is a laboratory to see if it is possible to retrain a completely mis-trained chess player. People are trying to do that. There is no lack of will on my part, and, as you note, there is plenty of generosity and good will on the part of posters. Note QueenTakesKnightOops recent post about his experiemtn against computer using Jaglavak's advice, and his saying how hard it was.

It was actually easiler for him than for me, becuase he already, unknown to him has a full lifetime experience of looking for targets. All he had to do was turn off the narrative-generator and let the target-generator take over.

what happens with me is if I turn off the narrative generator there is no target generator to take over, and I so easily slip back to the narrative generator. In the most recent game this was faciliated/exacerabted by my recent reading about the stonewall, and having my head filled with half understood stonewall narratives. 

I hope this helps. 

thanks for the principled, intersting, and important conversation everyone. 

first, a beginner's question, that I have asked in another forum, and didn't understand the answer. Wolf 183 wrote variations in two different colours, in 16. and 18,16 and 18 in grey and in red. What is the difference between the notes in grey and the notes in red? What does the different color signify? 

So, listen to this, a bit of humor. When I was playing my chess buddy in Summer of 2012, my chess buddy thought he was a 'positional player'. At least I knew that I had no idea what kind of player I was, and I knew that I won most of the games where I didn't tell my buddy to take back their lousy moves. I also had a sense that at our level to refer to ourselves as 'postional' or 'tactical' was ridiculous. the one thing I was sure of was that we were terrible. I thought that was the only word we could use to describe our style of play.

I am just going slowly through the last week on this fascinating thread, but thought I must raise this as one of the most honest and amusing insights I have seen on this site.  Such self-knowledge is rare and admirable.  I suspect like most people who have followed this, I am wanting OP to do better and better in every game he plays.

Like Eric Schiller says in Encyclopedia of Chess Wisdom before you become an accomplished master you don't have a style, you have a group of weaknesses. 

Well, I just had an idea.

what happens with me is if I turn off the narrative generator there is no target generator to take over, and I so easily slip back to the narrative generator. In the most recent game this was faciliated/exacerabted by my recent reading about the stonewall, and having my head filled with half understood stonewall narratives. 

Why don't we train this "target generator"? We could take positions from games and have Somebodysson look at them and say where are the targets for both sides. If they are middle-game positions that arise from the openings that he will play, all the better because it will give an idea of what to do in his games. Perhaps he needs some assistance to find targets so that he can start to effectively do that on his own when he is alone at the board.

Well, I didn't reply before because I'm not aware that the colors actually signify something specific. I just asumed that the colors are there to help easily differentiate lines (it would be harder if everything was the same color).

Thats quite funny,cabbage.

Good point. I agree.

what is a target? good question. I have already said that I do not know what targets are. when I do tactics puzzles I know that the target is to win material, or to successfully defend. So I look around on the board to see a way to win material, or to successfully defend. Unfortunately, I think that most moves in a chess game are not like tactics puzzles, they neither directly win material, nor do they have to defend against a direct an dangerous threat.

Maybe I'm incorrect in what I just wrote. But that' is the current state of my understanding. 

So, given that state of understanding, I am truly at a loss to determine which is my worst placed piece; I will often pick my best places piece and make its position worse, in order to 'activate' it. 

So, that is another question. How to determine which is your worst placed piece. 

These are two questions I have never seen discussed in any way whatsoever in chess literature. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm right and we ill proceed to discuss these. 

But, I don't want to evade your question. To my mind, a target is a piece that I want to get rid of, or a piece I want to force to move from a square where it is doing something useful for my opponent, to a square where it is not doing something useful for my opponent. (I have already found in my games many instances where I have forced an opponent to move a piece, and, to my horror, I forced him to move his piece to a better square, not a worse one. )

So a target is 1. a square I want to bring a piece of mine to where it can participate in a material winning tactic, or a mating attack, or from which it can prevent my opponent from developing a material-winning tactic or mating attack 2. a piece of my opponent's which I want to trap, capture, force to move to a worse square.  

@cabbagecrates: I'm thrilled to read posts like yours. Thanks. and thanks for hoping that I get better.

@jojojopo: I love your idea. Let's see if we can develop this idea, as a way of testing out Jaglavak's very strong and compelling ideas.

@Jaglavak: I'm not against discussing chess pedagogy. I'm against us becoming too liberal in our use of this thread and letting in become a grab bag of any kind of discussion. So you misunderstood my remark if you interpreted it to mean 'I don't want to discuss how OP should go about learning; I only talk about what he should learn'. That is not the way I meant it. I meant it as a means of discouraging abstract chess pedagogy, instead of concrete chess pedagogy to further the aims of this thread, i.e. to see if this thread, which is my primary means of didactic instruction, can help me become a better player.

So go ahead Jaglavak. Don't let me stop you. I will only attempt to stop things which I think dilute the thread, make it rudderless, or make it unfriendly.   

Ok, that defines it nicely Jaglavak, now we can get down to exactly where OP is heading & what will help.

BTW my experimantal game has taken another step, I started with the computer on "Easy" just to test it, today I went to the next level & got another win although I thought the computer played a rather suicidal Dutch defence. I'll try for 5 wins then raise the level again