My love/hate affair with blunders

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Avatar of aglitatta

     Please don't get me wrong, I'm a lousy  chessplayer,and I make many blunders when I try to play a game. When this happens, I feel badly about it,that's the hate portion. The love portion concerning blunders comes into effect is when my opponent makes a blunder which leads to a win for me. In other words ,if it were not for my opponent making a blunder,I would not  win a single game.

Avatar of MickinMD

What's happening to you is not unusual!  Let me see if I can find the intro to Dan Heisman's The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book, which contains a key passage I've quoted before.  Ah, here it is:

"Well, Dan," Howard Stern's familiar bass voice intoned, "now that I am up to 1000, that's about it. I can't seem to beat those 1100's.

"But Howard," I protested, "you're just giving them free pieces and they are taking some of them. They are giving you free pieces and you aren't taking as many of them. If you just stop giving them free pieces and take all of theirs, you will beat them every game...basically, it's as easy as that."

Four years later Howard was rated 1700 ICC (Internet)."

 

I also make lots of blunders - even in daily games.  I think the best way to cut down on them is to improve my ability to see tactics patterns and recognize potential tactics by name.  So I've been studying tactics more than all else put together.  Do you know the difference between a Skewer and an X-ray Attack? How about the similarities between a Dovetail Mate and a Swallow's Tail Mate?  The name is a "hook" that our brain uses to facilitate rapid retrieval by us.  If we don't know what these things are by name it's no mystery why we miss them on the board!

There are good patterns videos here by IM Danny Rensch and on YouTube. Here are two good places to start memorizing tactical motifs:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples

https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html