Openings and improvement

    So, I just finished up an otb tournament in my state and had horrible results.  My first round I drew an 1800 player, with ours being the last game to finish because he stubbornly played out the drawn position, then lost to 2 1600+ guys and a 900 (who in reality plays like a 1400+ player with bad time management issues), and beat an unrated in the final round.

   I'm starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of progress in chess.  I spend most of my time studying tactics, but actually play very positional openings.  I'm beginning to wonder if the problem is my repertoire, since my losses were due to primarily tactical mistakes (i feel like my positional play is pretty good for a club player).

My current repertoire has been:

White: 1.b4

Black vs. e4: Hyper Accelerated Dragon

Black vs. d4/Nf3: Slav transposing to noteboom/dutch stonewall

Black vs c4: Anglo-Dutch

  I'm not sure what else to implicate in my lack of progress since I've been studying hard and even spent one month training to eliminate blunders with Fritz, which I do commit far less often then I did, so this is the only thing that occurs to me to change at this point.

   So, I have two questions for the able bodied class A+ chess players among you.  Do you think that changing to a more tactical repertoire is neccesary to improve?   What openings would you reccomend for someone looking to play some really sharp stuff, gambits preferably?

Here were some ideas I had:

1. e4 e5 with .... either Halloween Gambit and Traxler   Or Kings Gambit (while messing around with e4 online it seems like King's gambit might be more advantageous since it starts on move 2 if they respond e5 whereas other gambits don't start till several moves later, less cooperation required to get it going.)

1. e4 c5 with 2. b4 Wing gambit

For black.....I'm clueless

Ideally I'd like a complete sharp repertoire to take me to the next level.  I don't care if the repertoire is sound or not, so long as it gets me into complicated messes.  Before doing some more research on my own I thought I'd ask for some opinions.  Thanks in advance.

Don't feel like you have to play sharp openings. Now if you're a decent positional player I have a recomenadation: Take a master game played from a sharp opening like the king's gambit or something (play through the moves very quickly to see if it looks like there lots of complications. Also I recomend putting the moves into a computer [I don't mean use the engine] to put in the lines and alternatives) and fully annotate it.

Explain the majority of the moves to yourself. This will help your positional play further and you can always learn something from the strong masters. But the key part where you improve in tactics  as well is when you choose a point where you feel it's necessary to calculate some moves ahead and in a complicated game there will be many of them. Do this without moving the pieces until you can come to a conclusion about all of the critical lines you analyze. Then you can check it with the engine and/or moving the pieces on the board to see how accurate you were. This has greatly improved my play so far, but it does require a certain level of strength.

You should be 1500+ USCF and have a good positional understanding, since the computer is not going to help you with that, but usually you can figure out the plan if you think hard enough. But any tactical mistakes you make usually the engine can correct. Doing many of these games take time so if a tournament is coming right up tactical puzzles are also good, but there is alot more to a full game than just a tough combination. You will be able to get the feel of playing like a master with absolutely no pressure of course. The sharper the game, the better it will improve your tactics, but why not get good at the other parts of your game all at the same time?

Studying 15 king's gambit games and not ever playing it will still be very valuable if you searched hard for the tactics and learned something new. It is not totally necessary to actually play that opening in my opinion. I'm studying KG games even though I question its true strength but the complications you can study from it are very interesting.

And if you want to get better at a positional chess, do the same with a very positional game. You won't really need to calculate that much for them, just fully concentrate on the subtle ideas. But if you want to play the sharp stuff, go for it. try it out if you want. Some sharp openings are the KG, benoni, sicilian najdorf and dragon, french winawer variation, King's indian, and many others but those are what I'm the most interested in.

It would be nice if you could post these games, so that we have a better understanding of what are your strengths and weaknesses.

If tactics is one of your assets and you think you're not playing to your strengths at the moment, then yes, you can try for sharp openings. Two gambits worth exploring as black are the Schliemann gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 f5) and the Albin Counter-Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e5).

But maybe it's worth pondering Elubas' advices first

NB : as white, King's Gambit is quite instructive and a fine choice

If you think of yourself as a positional player you might want to try some positional openings.  Your current repertoire seems designed to minimize opening study rather than play the type of game you claim to be best at.  I would point out that good positional players generally are great at tactics.  They have a personal preference for clearer resolution to positions.  WC Petrosian was a tactical whiz but even though he would know that a sac should lead to a good position if the final evaluation was unclear he wouldn't play it and would find another way.  WC Tal would see the same and sac away.  Sometime Petrosian wouldn't win and sometimes Tal would lose.  "Tactical" players tend to enjoy the unclear positions relying on their skill and ability.  In general you would find the "Positional" players win less & lose less and "tactical" players win more & lose more. 

As a final note, you can find many games where Petrosian sacs merrily away and Tal nurses a small advantage to notch a full point.  Cover the names in the game score and you don't know who is playing what.  Positional vs. Tactical is a false dichotomy in chess.

I think your openings don't lead to very active positions with a lot of piece play; you probably get fairly static pawn chains in the center and pretty slow play most of the time. Perhaps not the best for improvement (though that's hard to say in general).

So a switch to 1.e4 as white might be logical, but in my opinion there's no need at all to play gambits. Playing gambits is making it extra hard for yourself -- after all, if you don't keep up the initiative, you're a pawn down. There are plenty of lines where white has good chances to get the initiative without giving up material.

But I'm not convinced this is your problem. You should analyze your games (you do that, don't you?) and show them to us so we can give better help.

You shouldnt let one otb tournament discourage you. My first otb event was a quad and I lost all my games against players 1500-1700 !!  Not a very encouraging start eh ?  In my second tournament I managed to win a game and lost all the rest ! If you want to improve in otb chess the best thing you can do is play as much as possible in otb events. You will improve.

In my opinion, tactics are the soul of chess.  I cannot think of a game that was won by simply executing a minority attack.  Tactics are what decides games at class player level.  So, I believe switching to a tactical repertoire would be fun.  It may not produce great results early on, but if you keep playing those openings, you will gain valuable experience.  Here is a repertoire I would choose for you if you want it to be tactical.

Black against e4: Sicilian Najdorf or Dragon

Black against d4: Benoni (Transpose to KID if White plays 2. Nf3  It avoids some of the more dangerous lines in the KID)

Play e4 as White.  Against e5, play the KG.

White against Sicilian: Open Sicilian

And you can choose your openings against other responses by Black.  Once again, you don't have to use this repertoire, I am just giving you an idea of a tactical repertoire

   Thanks for your comments; I read them all carefully.  Since some posters reccomended posting my games to try to pinpoint what I could do to improve here they are.  I always analyze my games after the event is over with the help of Fritz to blundercheck them for larger mistakes, and try to identify in what way exactly I erred so as to try not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Your problem seems to be tactics, like most of us.  When you say you study tactics what do you mean?  Problems, tactics trainer, etc?  They're helpful but limited.  If I know there is a decisive move it is much easier to find.  It is in knowing that the board is ripe for a decisive move that results are found.  Keep doing tactics trainer, etc but start going over whole games, looking at when and where decisive moments happen.  The general advice is to look at Masters' games but I think you might what to mix in lower levels so you can more easily recognize patterns that are most likely to arise in your games.

I still don't see your openings as positional but the opening you play is really not that important if you're comfortable with it.  Some endgame study would probably help as well. 

Yeah, like I said, tactical (and positional just as much) can be improved by making deep thinks in sharp master games as if you're playing in them (but at least you have no pressure) to see what the best move is most likely for tactical reasons. But I do think that puzzle books (and those are better than tactics trainer, which just has lots of simple problems forcing you to solve them quickly, but if you can't do simple ones then you do have to learn those first) are still very helpful because it helps your pattern recognition which is part of what makes you look for a move and general analysis. But you would have to develop a sense of when to look for a move as well, so annotating master games will be a big help.

     Elubas, it sounds like earlier you were talking about what Dan Heisman refers to as the Stokyo exercise.  I've done that myself going through games by Alekhine, but I'm not sure how much help the exercise has been.  I've found it so far to be one of the hardest of exercises; it can really take its toll on you.

       I've been studying tactics for the past year, and I definitely feel like they've gotten better, but if you take for example my second game and the large mistake I made there by failing to move Qd8 on move 34, it's somewhat typical of the types of weird oversights I seem to make in OTB chess where I  overlook obvious moves because I fail to observe something like "Now I move to Qd7 and my opponent's queen is pinned and my queen is protected" 

     I rejected that move simply because I did not see that it would then be protected on d7 on the third ply.  And I'm not sure how to eliminate mistakes of that type.  It's like a weird type of blindness where I miss important and sometimes obvious facts on the board while calculating ahead. And I'm starting to wonder if I'm really addressing that with the types of things I've been studying and whether playing positional openings is keeping me from learning that.

AnthonyCG, not looking at the board does seem to be a valid point.

In the Qd8 example, if you'd already established in your head that d7 was a guarded spot for your queen, I very much doubt that you'd have missed it in your calculation.

Make sure you're clear on the features of the position first, before the long calculations.

Happyfanatic: Some games would take a lot of work but the point is that you make a deep analysis each move where necessary as if you were actually playing and see how much you saw. And again it requires a certain level of play to be able to do it fairly well. It may be better for you to get a good book on puzzles right now. Tactics trainer ones are too simple.

I would switch to a more mainstream opening as it is too easy as black to equalize or take advantage of white's play in the Solosky Opening.  Maybe 1.e4 to develop your tactical awareness.

1.b4 d5 2.Bb2 Qd6

1.b4 c6 2.Bb2 Qb6 3.a3 a5 4.c3 and white's position does not inspire much hope.  Look at the poor bishop!  This is my weapon versus the Solosky.

Sorry Conquiscador, but I think that you've become a victim of the bad theory machine.   

While it may be true that black can equalize against the Sokolsky rather easily in many ways,  lines such as the two you mentioned are sometimes described or thought of as "busts" to the Sokolsky when in fact white has a perfectly playable game in front of him.

See this thread  http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-openings/sokolsky-opening where I discuss the second line with someone.  

For the Qd6 line white has to hold off castling to contest the center but the poor position of the black queen can lead to problems in the middlegame.

http://www.amazon.com/1-b4-Theory-Practice-Sokolsky-Opening/dp/1888690658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252400409&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Play-1b4-opponents-Sokolsky-Everyman/dp/1857445600/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252400435&sr=1-1  

My two references to this opening which I have sitting next to me here.

Gonnosuke,

I appreciate your comment, I read once that Dvoretsky reccomends getting up and walking around for a second and coming back to the board with fresh eyes.

By the way, the answer to your main question is NO. You need to study tactics, but you don't need to play tactical openings that you don't like. Tactics explode in many openings anyway like the french and KID that seem closed. Defend the polish all you like; white gets a playable position because he's white, but it just doesn't look like black has many problems and he has plenty of chances for counterplay against the queenside pawns or in the center while white's b4 pawn is not very threatening. The b4 pawn can turn out strong, but so can black's trumps in that 2...Qd6 line. It might be interesting to try out, but it's not something I would want to play all the time.

And speaking of tactics, I think playing against a computer is underrated. It can be annoying facing one but I think it can be a huge help to your tactics. On chessmaster ds the highest level is 1850 and it plays strange moves (like Qb3 in the king's indian after d5!) and even though the center was closed it was amazing how it kept on tactically opening up the center and getting away with it! Computers will never blunder and force you to stay on your toes, and I can't say the same for most human players at least below master. It reminded me that even in strategic openings sometimes you can win just on tactics! And of course in tactical positions that's definitley what it's like when playing a computer. I think it teaches you to have as few blunders as a master to outplay it with strategy. I wonder if I could beat the full strength of chessmaster with piece odds or something!

I checked the other thread and the line given is

1.b4 c6 2.Bb2 Qb6 3.a3 a5 4.c4

What about 4...e6 threatening to win a pawn?