Chess improvement
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I remember the toughest thing for me to understand was positional play and planning. This seemed very very hard. I had one million and five questions but simply no one could answer them for me. Finally, I ended up printing some scanned books I found on the internet on positional play. Those were mostly positional exercise kind of books. Good move! It actually worked just great for me. I believe this is one of the most valuable chess lessons one can have. Trying first to find his way through the labyrinth of complications, experience the problems the players faced, feel the complexity of the position and only then, only then look at the game continuation and the annotations explaining why this was great, that was absolutely horrible and here black can hold the balance.
Another very simple and probably the best thing one can do is to ANALYZE YOUR OWN GAMES. You'll be surprised how rewarding this is. It would be good to consult stronger players and strong computer programs to make sure your analysis represents the thruth of the position. The only piece of advice I can give you is join a forum of some sort where chess enthusiasts analyze games and discuss chess. www.chessvideos.tv is one such place. I've learned a lot by looking through my games with forum members since I joined. Not to mention the free 200 video lectures and that one can post his video lecture as well! Actually I am starting a series of positional move by move exercises on the site. I hope we can all learn from them. So if you are interested you can join and tell me what you think.I would really appreciate that, thanks
I hope you find my lengthy explanations not too boring and helpful
armis
cheers
Just don’t get checkmated lol
Good Positional Chess, Planning & Strategy Books for Beginners and Beyond...
https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/introduction-to-positional-chess-planning-strategy
I have seen many threads and interesting points on how to improve your playing ability. Many times it has led me to thinking what exactly is it that players better than myself see in positions that I don't.
There are lots of things to consider: Tactics... pattern recognition... looking at the WHOLE board... yada yada. All of these are viable topics...
I have a playing partner that routinely does me the favor of showing me how pathetically weak I am. We were discussing a position in the opening and what move was "book". I played a move simply because it was "book". He asked me why I played it. As we discussed the move he showed me some possible lines of analysis on why he thought it might be book.
It occurred to me... really good players are almost always playing with a plan. All too often I move my pieces around in what may best be described as an intuitive pattern waiting for a plan to fall on my face and wriggle. All too often I find myself floundering around in the middle game with no direction, and end up being manipulated into a lost endgame by a skillful player.
I know plan formation often times reverts back to pattern recognition.
Just wondering what some of the stronger players observations are about weaker players... what mistakes they see over and over again... or any words of wisdom they may have in this area.