Sounds like you are interested in planning and developing longer term plans for a position. A plan is important as it helps unify moves. For beginners, it's still important to work on tactics and board vision as most losses and due to blundering material, but having a plan makes the game more enjoyable. Plans are often based on long term weakness and features of a position that are to your advantage, as these change slowly. It's no good basing a plan on attacking a piece if your opponent can easily move it. Couple of things I found useful... playing though GM games for beginners such as Logical Chess by Chernev, look out how weaknesses are provoked and attacked. The Amateurs Mind by Silman is a good introduction to evaluating a position and planning, aimed at 1300ish player. Website Simplify Chess has some good explanations on pawn structures and typical plans. Learn about some basics of positional chess such as weak squares and pawns.
Adapt the strategy to each new move or thinking ahead?
Good Positional Chess, Planning & Strategy Books for Beginners and Beyond...
https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/introduction-to-positional-chess-planning-strategy
Having a long-term plan is vastly superior. You will not achieve your strategic goal in 2 or 3 moves. If you can play a tactically correct move that helps achieve your strategic goal, choose that move rather than others that see just as good for the immediate situation. Of course your opponent may completely surprise you. If they play a good move you never considered, or a bad move that opens up unforeseen possibilities you will have to adjust your strategy accordingly. But "a bad plan is better than no plan" (Tartakower).
Some positions are amenable to long-term planning. Many are not.
Typically, if the position is "quiescent", with little going on in the way of tactics, then long-term planning is very important. But if the position is tactically unsettled, with both players exchanging blows and feints, then short-range tactics will dominate the play.
Of course immediate tactical considerations always predominate. Which threats to make, which blows to strike, which way to respond to threats, should be guided by what you are trying to gain. If you have a better pawn structure you might wish to force exchanges and reach a favorable ending. When planning to open the center you want to think about what weaknesses you will expose or can create in your opponent's position. Strategic planning is the mapping out of long-term goals, tactics are the means of realizing those goals. Keeping your eye on the objective while figuring out which immediate steps to take is important. We all realize that when calculating tactics one of the is consideration of the favorability of the resulting position. Naturally, if you see your opponent has blundered you should take advantage of it, but you must always assume that your opponent will find a good move, don't just hope they will fall into a cheap trap. Even in sharp positions there will usually be a choice of playable moves, so having an overall goal will help you choose the move that will lead to the best result in the long run.
Hi! You want to try your best to find a forcing winning line to beat your opponent. If your opponent is playing well, then sometimes waiting until he or she makes a mistake is the best way to win.
You want to try your best to find a forcing winning line to beat your opponent.
You won't find a forcing winning line unless you are already in a winning position.
This should be pretty easy to understand... losing moves exist in every position, but winning moves only exist in winning positions.
Plans and strategies often feel like synonyms and I'm guilty of this. I tend (try) to think of strategies as conceptual. There are normally a limited number of well known (canned) strategies. Plans are the execution of strategy. There can be many plans for executing a strategy. In the absence of a concrete target I might use the 'Improve My Pieces' strategy (vague and conceptual) with a plan of improving my bishop with Bb2 and routing the knight to the outpost on c6 via Ne2 etc. So plans have specific/concrete moves. If my opponent then takes on isolated pawns, I might change to Trade Into Winning Endgame strategy (again general and conceptual) and start planning concrete moves that are likely to force exchanges. What do others think?
Of course this means plans look only a few moves ahead and constantly being tweaked and adjusted. Strategies are longer term, their scope can be refined, and may be replaced completely. I presume strategies are also guided by evaluation according to a strategic framework: force-time-space-pstructure-kingsafety, but now I'm out of my depth 😁. Maybe @blueemu will post the link to his helpful thread on this.
Of course the Improve My Piece strategy could a be Improve My Space-Time strategy. Now I feel dizzy.
yes yes
... strategies are also guided by evaluation according to a strategic framework: force-time-space-pstructure-kingsafety, but now I'm out of my depth 😁. Maybe @blueemu will post the link to his helpful thread on this.
GM Larry Evans' method of static analysis - Chess Forums - Chess.com
Hi, guys!
I've know how to play Chess a long time, but only recently I came to play it again out of curiosity and I notice that I like it more and I'm better than ever before, which is great and is giving me the urge to play more and more every day
However, my style of play seems to not have changed much in a fundamental detail: I seem to mostly adapt my way of playing, responding and creating strategies when my opponent makes a move, only projecting possible actions within 2 moves (mine and my opponent's afterwards).
I obviously understand that adapting to unannounced situations is important, but, is it waiting for the opponent to make a move to decide the next 1 to 2 moves a good way to play Chess?
Thank you beforehand for any feedback!