Suggestion: To get better change your nym to something more cheerful than Omega_Doom. Actually, I'm not the one to give this advice since I jinx myself with my nym which tells everybody I'm a patzer.
How we can improve
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Very constructive suggestion Mike. I think it will boost my rating to 2000 easily.
Because you play mostly blitz I am assuming , when you are playing a longer game and have time to check all the checks captures threats etc you will find tactics more easily for both you and the opponent .
weaknesses can mean things such as not managing time well too , or not defending well , look over your games. But if you only play blitz your not actually analyzing anything so it doesn't matter too much
It's not a problem to do 50 tactics per day, i can do more than that. It depends on its complexity of course.
Equiv. I play rapid 10 minutes games but not blitz. I do not have enough decent friends to play longer games. And i suppose it's not matter here because we can develop some skill without playing long games. For example we can train to reduce blunders and i have no idea how long games can help us with it unless we think about a move very long tme but it's not the point here.
NimzoMochilero. Your tactics trainer rating is not excellent but your blitz raiting is higher than mine which puzzles me. Maybe it proves the point that chess improvement isn't only about solving tactics.
Keep a log of the mistakes you are making in games you lose... and when one in particular seems to be cropping up more frequently than the others, work on that one.
Jan 25, 2015
0
#8
You're completely right. Solving tactics puzzles isn't anywhere near as helpful as most people think (at least not on its own). In many cases it won't actually help people improve at all.
Omega you can play some long games against me if you want, even if we end up being a mismatch in skill we can analyze at the end . Blunders are going to happen even at a high level in 10m games . There is a GM who sells courses who shares a similar opinion igor smirnov, but his advertising techniques for his courses are a bit too much but check out his free videos on youtube they might have your answer . and no I'm not being paid to say this lol .
If we talk particularly about blunders, solving puzzles maybe isn't the key point. This is more about concentration than tactics. Basically, you just need to keep yourself in a good form: train as much as you need - not too much, but enough. You can either play blitz games (and I think 10min is still a blitz game), long games, bullet or solve puzzles, analyse games, study openings - actually any chess stuff. I think that I am making much less blunders than earlier by doing nothing special against it.
Another thing is your playing style. Maybe you are just playing too aggressively, but not able to calculate so fast, that you could play without mistakes. Try playing some solid games - choose very solid opening and do nothing special to overplay your opponent, let him make a mistake. Such strategy can work well in faster chess formats. Eventually you should find an appropriate balance between solid and tactical game.
I believe that if you are playing a lot and exploring different chess stuff, you must be gradually improving in all aspects.
Jan 25, 2015
0
#11
The way I see it, chess consists only of these few book-learnable subjects, some of which overlap considerably:
(1) tactics/short-term *
(2) strategy/long-term *
(3) openings *
(4) endgames
(5) positional understanding/analysis (could be considered strategy)
(6) on-the-fly mini-pattern problemsolving (rare)
(7) premature termination (currently treated the same as tactics)
(8) mini-plans (a combination of strategy and positional understanding)
The first three are the most important ones that everybody mentions. Books and free online sources can help you with strategy and positional understanding. I personally liked Pandolfini's "The Chess Doctor" but there exist many other good books on these topics of positional heuristics. The same with openings.
Where I personally feel there is a huge gap is what could be called *advanced* positional understanding. Books keep listing the same few dozen (at most) heuristics over and over, but I've *never* found a book that listed opening patterns that somehow expert opening analysts seem to learn from somewhere, or more subtle positional factors (like not making a pin on the same side as your fianchetto), or opening-specific positional heuristics (like drive off White's QN in the Najdorf Sicilian). Pandolfini's book I mentioned is better than most since it starts to get into more subtle issues, but there is a *lot* more knowledge that could be taught that nobody seems to be teaching.
Don't forget about a physical preperation. Running, swimming, and yoga are oftentimes recommended.
Positional imbalances tell us what our plans should be. The prevention of freeing pawn moves is of the greatest importance for positional play, followed by overprotecting important points in one's position and consolidation. A strategy looks at the positional imbalances as a whole, determines which are most important, and then candidate moves are found and calculated that tells us which move is best.
Hello everyone. Actually it's quite interesting topic. I've heard a lot that we need to solve tactics and so on but it's not an answer. Tactics is helpful but not everytime. For example i can solve a sophisticated tactic but i can make blunders or my chess understanding can be very low and i can go on. People say that we need to understand our weaknesses and work hard to get rid of them. It makes more sense than advice to solve tactics. I'd like to know more about these weaknesses and ways to get rid of them. Can you help me with that or it's sealed secret? First i think is simple blunders when people put undefended piece in a wrong place or don't remove it. Second i think is undefended piece when people forget that their piece is undefended and discovery is possible. I'm sure that it's not a problem to see it in the tactics trainer but it's a different story when it comes in real a game. I'm not sure how to get rid of such weaknesses. Fritz software has interesting features like "Attack" and "Defence" training which are worth trying.