Under Rating Blunder Avoidance

Every chess book I have read and all the post on this forum leave me wondering about a missing topic.

That is blunder avoidance. It doesnt matter if you know a single opening or any fancy endgame philosophy.

If you can simpily play a game and give up no major pieces and few pawns you will be a superior player.

But no one every writes about the simple concentration skills and error checking methods.

I get sick of reading about the 10 version of the french opening when the real challenge is playing error free for 90% of us here.

I suspect that the main reason for this is because there really just isn't that much to say... "Don't hang pieces". There's just not a lot to teach. Yes of course it's important, but there's lots of strategy left beyond that level, and on the hanging pieces front, it isn't something that's all that teachable; what do you want us to say?

You can check the following:

I find that as I improve, the nature of my blunders changes. When I first started playing about six years ago, blunders would typically be of the "Not notice the Queen is en-pris" type. Fortunately, the opponants I had at the time were equally sloppy. As you improve, part of the reason you begin to win games is that you cease making these blatant blunders. There comes a time when you "see the whole board", as it were, and a Queen en-pris or subject to a Royal Fork becomes glaring and unavoidable. But you still make blunders. I've won games, apparently elegant, tactically astute games, that I have subjected to computer anaysis. The uncomprimising silicon has resourcefully unearthed problems with what I thought were crushing tactics, and cruelly labelled them 'blunders'. The meaning of blunders has changed to mean tactical flaws that are far from obvious. If you play chess and make no mistakes, well then you would be an easy world champion, crushing the strongest computers with ease. Against strong opposition, especially computers, the subtlest positional error could justifiably be called a game losing blunder. The best thing, I think, is to remember the pain of the obvious ones, and remember the mantra:

"The winner is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake".

ED.

Very well thought our responses to my post. I thank you all. I really enjoyed ErrantDeeds comments. Very true about the nature of blunders and errors. They never disapear. They just get less obvious !

Even Grandmasters blunder sometimes. As in this famous example. 34...Qe3 is a blunder only us patzers would think of making.

That said, I think that the majority of Grandmaster blunders would only be seen by very high level players.  I probably would not notice most of the moves that a grandmaster might consider a blunder.

Many players move too quickly and are reckless.  A sharp chess player will always look out all strategic moves the opponent makes.  Plus, the simple rule and question you should ask as a chess player is " why did my opponent move there... and there has to be a reason he move there."  Too many players fall and assume that when their opponent does something unexpected that they have blundered and they move too quickly to understand that the move was not a blunder.

For me, it is a great feeling to go a game without a blunder.

A case in point:

Sorry, from the first example, the winning mate is:

35. Rxc5 Ra1+ 36. Rc1 Rxc1#. Small technical point.  

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The reason 34...Bxc4 is a blunder is:

Its very simple one can learn only by practising it

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You could try what I did. I feel like it helped; although I only practiced it for a month.

Step one:  Go over your games with a computer program to blunder check them for tactical errors.  I keep records of all my rated USCF tournament games and also download many pgns from this site of games I wish to keep a record of.

Step two:  List and categorize the errors by type.  This step should help you to realize which types of blunders are more frequent.  Once you've identified the types of mistakes you've made, you can implement pattern recognition training for the worst oversights.  For example, if you notice you are regularly missing knight forks (A common problem starting out) you can look at alot of tactical problems involving forks and/or do chess vision drills involving knight forks and movements.

Step three:  Create a personalized checklist asking all the questions you should be asking before making a move.

As an example some of the more general questions you should ask could be:

1. What does my opponent threaten?

2.  Did my opponent just hang a piece?

3.  Does my opponent have any loose pieces?

4.  What checks do I have? 

etc.  And you may have identified going over your games some more specific questions.

4.  Set up a board and put your checklist next to it, then fire up your computer and play some games against it using the board and the checklist.  On every move use the checklist to discipline yourself to ask the essential questions every move.  I played one long game a day against the computer like this for a month.  I kept a log of the number of tactical errors made against the computer during this period and saw some improvement.  Additionally, I refined my checklist over the month and eventually pared it down into a concise acronym so that I would easily be able to remember the things I wanted to check OTB.  

I'm not saying that this is the only way to achieve something like this, but I feel like it worked well for me.  It was somewhat exhausting to implement.  Anyhow, just some ideas.  Best of luck.

Very nice thread. I enjoyed ErrantDeeds game. Even though it never happened the blunder there is exactly the type I hope to avoid.

That is a 1 or 2 move blunder.