2000-2200 players advice

learn stuff

better than being stuck at 900 though, i only first played chess a month ago.

Nicholas Pert has done two DVD thingies:

Typical Mistakes by 1600-1900 Players

Typical Mistakes by 1800-2000 Players

hush, don't speak

it's a secret

Ahlapeanutbutterandjellysandwiches!!! thanks to the Beatles and Elvis Presley, my heros that make this post so freaking awwwwwwwesome!!

buy a book by Hartston and you'll be sucking diesel in no time flat!

Exactly haha.

they do play simuls, so they have match practice against the various patzer grades.

It's not as if  all 1800s are bad at the same thing,

But database work and polishing openings sounds like something most people have already done by 1800, so that sounds wrong. But...

my suggestion would be to study something you've either neglected or an area where you're weak. If you don't have an opening repertoire, then sure, building one will help.

Other areas may be e.g. endgames, attacks on the king, strategy, calculation, tactics.

In silmuls you typically don't know the player's ratings.

But in any case the point is ratings far below you are indistinguishable. Blunders are blunders.

If a book is titled "how to improve from 1600 to 2000" it likely wasn't the author's choice. The publisher would push this kind of title for the sake of marketing.

So you've played at levels well over 2200 and couldn't recognize the difference between 1600 and 1900 ?

Wow! that's impressively weird :)

Incorrect. As I said, ratings far below a person.

Ratings +400 tend to be indistinguishable as well.

I can distinguish them without difficulty and I'm sure can plenty of others. on the other hand, if your memory ain't what it used to be .....

The main difference in classical chess, between 1800s and 2000s, in my opinion, is better calculation and evaluation. Often, in a match, it seems as if the 2000+ is controlling the flow of the game against the 1800. 

(First, I believe ratings over 200 in difference can be *generally* distinguished at higher levels; for example, the difference between a 2300/2500 is often the experience; thinking process studies have shown the GMs tend to have better intuition and just "know", based on more experience, what the right idea is more often than FMs. On the other hand, I have no idea what makes an 800 different from 1000 (fewer blunders?).)

1800s aren't likely to make blunders during a typical game, as long as they're not under too much tactical pressure. A 2000 can go into variations that an 1800 thinks is OK or just didn't consider pretty often, because the 2000 has calculated the consequences of that line more carefully. This is how I beat a lot of my sub-2000 competition at the Manhattan Open in 2012; often, their worse calculation/eval skills allowed me to get and keep a solid positional, or even material, advantage in the middlegame, and I converted it. 

My 2000+ opposition at the 2013 Atlantic Open were quite different. They didn't go into bad lines as often (or not at all). It's clear that they evaluated and calculated better, made errors of less magnitude, and eventually, after mutual errors, the game was decided. 

However, both level of players generally lack that "magic touch" of masters, who seem to "know" what the right move is in far more positions. 

So, the answer: improve your evaluation and calculation skills more. The latter is easier than the former, but both will take time. 

For this post to be legit they'd need to be your REAL heroes.

Coogans-Fluff wrote:

Ahlapeanutbutterandjellysandwiches!!! thanks to the Beatles and Elvis Presley, my heros that make this post so freaking awwwwwwwesome!!

buy a book by Hartston and you'll be sucking diesel in no time flat!

When I went from 1899 to 2001 (I didn't touch the 1900s until decades later), there weren't databases. 

I recommend studying really good annotated books, endgame manuals, and your own games. 

And play at least 20 minutes a day. Think of chess as athletic training. If you want to be a competitive athlete, you gotta do the daily training.

Holy Gwakamolay!! kudos to my real heros, Johnny Rotten and Adam Ant! it just might be that the great mathematicians among us are ability to do those types of ELO calculations on the fly Huey.

That's more like it

Acroches toi a ton reve