How do I win games when I don’t make any blunders?

Moonwarrior_1 · 2021-01-06T04:24:14-08:00

In a lot of games I notice that I may make 0-1 blunder and still lose, does it just come down to mistakes or failed to make a good plan? This is talking about a full 30+ move game btw.

Sort:

MorphysLaw1860

Jan 6, 2021

#41

Dsmith42 wrote:

On the game you posted, two obvious things stand out for me:

1) Minor piece play - If you're going to trade off your light-square bishop, then your pawns need to move to light squares to keep your other bishop mobile. 10. ..e5?? is a colossal, unfixable positional error, even though the Chess.com engine says it's OK. Further, 11. ..Nb4? is a mistake (the engine gets this right), because the exchange on e3 is also wrong. Your opponent's center pawns are all on light squares, so that's his bad bishop, it's worth less than a knight. Judging the quality of minor pieces takes practice, and the engine will often steer you in the wrong direction.

2) Rook activity - It was critical to contest the d-file, and to prevent your opponent's rooks from penetrating to the 7th rank. A play like Be7, followed by Rd8, accomplishes this pretty easily. Allowing doubled rooks on the 7th rank almost always loses.

These are serious weaknesses, which even with otherwise clean play is a recipe for consistently losing in the endgame.

Very nice of someone to take the time to provide this analysis for you. It's a good point about the positional error and sometimes the unreliability of engines. I am studying a course by Jeremy Silman and plan on buying his book "...Chess Mastery Through Chess Imbalances" His emphasis on positional play and the advantages you can gain over your opponent with a better understanding of it is very enlightening for a novice chess player like me and I think can help players all the way up to the 2000 rated player. I feel like if you are diligent with his material you can see big improvements in a short amount of time.