Chess is my weakness.
Players 100- 2000 - what do you think your biggest weakness in Chess is?
My biggest weakness's are blundering, Mistakes, Lack of plans in the middlegame and endgame, And bad at every endgame but king and pawn endgames.
So I started this post a year ago, and tracked the feedback I got. Forgot about this project but it was brought back. Thought I'd share the results so far with you guys, having updated for the most recent posts. Note that some players gave multiple answers, all of which were counted.
Though I think a lot of the time people might be wrong about what their weaknesses are, I think there is still some value in considering what people consider their weaknesses to be.
Many of the answers, since they were quite long, required a bit of creative license on my part to fit neatly into a category, but I trust that I did my best most of a year ago to correctly assign categories.
Tactics and calculation seem to be the main self-ascribed weakness over all categories, except the 1800 - 2000 range, where psychological obstacles are the narrow leader.
I would encourage anyone 1000 and up who feels like their calculation is bad to consider using chesstempo.com. While the puzzles can get rather brutal, if you take your time and have some patience with yourself, I can guarantee you'll start to harvest the fruits of your labour - or, at least, you will feel better because you are actively working on what you consider one of your biggest weaknesses!
Here are the full results thus far:
2000+
Replies - 10
Weak in or Avoiding Tactics/Calculation: 5
Weak at Openings: 1
Weak at Middlegames (positional play): 1
Weak at Endgames: 1
Attacking too much: 1
Psychological obstacles: 1
1800 - 2000
Replies - 10
Psychological obstacles: 3
Weak at tactics/calculation: 2
Weak at Openings: 2
Not recognizing and exploiting advantages: 2
Weak at positional play: 1
Time trouble: 1
Weak at Endgames: 1
1600 - 1800
Replies - 8
Weak at tactics/calculation: 4
Weak at positional play: 2
Time trouble: 2
Psychological obstacles: 1
1400 - 1600
Replies - 15
Weak at Tactics/Calculation: 6
Weak at Endgames: 4
Not recognizing and exploiting advantages: 2
Weak at positional play: 1
Weak at Openings: 1
Weak at Middlegames: 1
1200 - 1400
Replies - 7
Weak at tactics/calculation: 5
Psychological obstacles: 1
Attacking too much: 1
100 - 1200
Replies - 17
Weak at tactics/calculation: 10
Psychological obstacles: 2
Weak at Middlegames: 2
Weak at Endgames: 2
Weak at openings: 1
A year ago, I would say my mistakes and blunders but I improved on that. Now I would say the misses. I can spot mate in 1 or 2 but anything more I would more then likely not find.
tactics arent really too much of a problem, but pawn storms are hard to defend against and the opponent trades off the knights early so i cant use them to defend
basically 1600 daily, 1400 rapid. pawns. both not dropping them and having the courage when I am up one pawn to go ahead and simplify if it is the right course of action. but having identified it, I am working on it.
My worst enemy is time pressure and knights forks 😄