rating plunge. THROW IN THE TOWEL??

My rating was improving steadily but then suddenly I just can’t seem to win a game and it’s taken a huge plunge and so Ive stopped playing just now.I know I’ve learnt a lot about openings, using the London System, french defence and sicillian. However,I seem to get to a situation in most of my games where I’ve got a nice opening set up and everything is protecting everything else to the point where it would seem difficult for my opponent to safely threaten any of my pieces. The problem is, It feels like the whole board has become tied up and therefore I can’t find any safe attacking move myself. Basically I find that the openings I’ve learnt work very well to start with from a Defensive point of view but then I find I spend the rest of the game constantly reacting to moves my opponent makes until eventually he finds away through my DEFENSIVE play. I just can’t seem to coordinate my pieces into an attack plan, almost as if I can only seem to play in 2 instead of 3 dimensions, if you like. I’m now starting to miss playing but wonder if maybe I haven’t got the right kind of mental process to get any further in this game in which case maybe I should throw in the towel, as it were.

Well, if you want to win a game of chess, you need to be able to checkmate the opponent's king. So I'd suggest to look / read up some articles that focus on being aggressive but solid instead of sticking to a defensive play. Defensive setups seem unbreakable at times but in reality they're not, because you won't be making any moves to make your position stronger whereas your opponent has all the time to coordinate a break through.

I've never played rated games because I don't want to care or know about my strength in comparison to my opponent, so I play anonymous games. Perhaps that can help you get back in the groove. Playing is the best remedy in most cases.

Thanks wildekaart