My biggest weakness is that I play emotionally when I am frustrated with myself for hanging a pawn/piece, which usually causes me to lose more material. I also have no fucking clue how to play the Scotch as black. I think one of my strengths is my ability to recognize when my opponent is panicking under time pressure and just making random moves, which I then start doing to put more pressure on.
Both are part of the game, so draw > loss. However, both outcomes can be appreciated from a holistic view of your own progress in the game. If you never run out of time, could you get better outcomes overall by calculating more? Could you earn a better rating using the same time per move at a lower time control? I'm not saying that half your losses should be to the clock, but maybe 1-5% is healthy depending on your format. There have to be some complex positions where you could earn wins if you were willing to calculate and put the clock at risk. If you never take that chance, you might be losing more games by rushing yourself through the early-mid game than you would to timing out.
Stalemate traps are just part of endgame play. In fact, they're the most basic part. Like if you learn things like queen+king, rook+king, or two bishops checkmates, you're fundamentally learning how to avoid drawing those positions (which you can't lose) where you have earned the clear advantage. The key to those patterns is to constrain the opposing king's movement in a very precise way, and avoiding stalemate is implicitly part of those strategies. If you let an opponent stalemate trap you in a more complex winning end game, that's just a game where you didn't know or successfully implement the correct checkmate pattern. At the end of the day, your endgame knowledge can only go so far. If you put dedicated effort into learning to avoid stalemates, that would pay off in more wins and fewer draws, but would it pay as well as studying opening theory or advanced tactics? It might, but at some point you have to prioritize your practice time and leave less of one area than would be ideal.
Usuallly I am pretty lazy with Puzzles, but I tried all three Platforms. I think I also liked chesstempo the most. However the Puzzle Games on Lichess and Chess.com are also fun
I've played several orders of magnitude more games online, so I can think and calculate much better with 2D pieces. I'll play OTB occasionally, but I always feel like I'm playing much worse.
Stop saying "New response just dropped" every time someone says something on this godforsaken sub, no, a new response did not drop, just an average mediocre statement that adds nothing more to a conversation, for the love of fucking god. if i see ONE more person mindlessly saying "New response just dropped" i'm going to chop my fucking pipi off. 🤬🥸🤬😠😠holy shit it is actually impressive how incredibly unfunny the entire sub is. 😠😠🥵🤬😠🥵it's not that complicated, REPEATING THE SAME FUCKING JOKE OVER AND OVER AGAIN DOES NOT MAKE IT FUNNIER. this stupid fucking meme has been milked to fucking death IT'S NOT FUNNIER THE 973RD TIME YOU MAKE THE EXACT SAME FUCKING JOKE. WHAT'S EVEN THE JOKE?????? 🤬😠🤬😠IT'S JUST "haha it's the funne nEw ReSpoNsE thingy" STOP. and the WORST part is that new responses were actually funny for like a few years and it got fucking ruined in like a week because EVERYONE POSTED THE EXACT SAME FUCKING JOKE OVER AND OVER AGAIN. PLEASE MAKE IT STOP. SEEING ALL YOUR SHITTY MEMES IS ACTUAL FUCKING MENTAL TORTURE YOU ALL ARE NOT FUNNY. COME UP WITH A DIFFERENT FUCKING JOKE PLEASE...🤬🤬🤬
I hate it when someone talks to me while playing. I either completely ignore them or if it's someone I can't ignore, I prefer to resign and terminate my game. If it is other distractions that don't require my active participation such as music, TV or other people talking amongst themselves, it doesn't really affect my concentration.
This is a great list! I have been a pretty big slump with my chess recently, and have pretty much foregone any of the self-reflection that is necessary to improve. I think I'll try some of this out and see if it gets me anywhere
One of my favorite chess books, and more generally puzzle books, is Raymond Smullyan's The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes. The book is a retrograde puzzle book, meaning all the puzzles ask you to figure out something about what happened in a game prior to the given position. For example, there's the problem on the cover, which asks you what must have been the last two moves in the game, or you might be required to figure out whether a player can legally castle in a given position, or which player must have been last to move, and so on. The first part of the book basically teaches you to do these kinds of puzzles, under the guise of Sherlock teaching Watson, and then the second part gives a bunch to solve. The puzzles are incredibly fun (Smullyan, a logician, wrote a lot of very entertaining logic puzzle books), and the Sherlock theming is cute.
I totally agree with you. If someone resigns, the game is lost for sure. But if someone decides to continue playing, even with lost position, there are many chances to draw or even win! So never resign!
Congrats on the Rosen trophy haha. I feel like playing on online is usually a great idea (unless you're just tilted). People don't necessarily know how to convert a position, so just losing a piece need not be the end. I also appreciate when opponents keep pushing, since frankly I could a lot more practice converting advantages myself.
Did you ever try chess.braimax.com? The puzzles are from lichess, but you can also easily add those which you fail (or that you simply like) to a spaced repetitions system, for free. And some new big features are almost ready to be released...
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