i think you should look at endgames too
maybe
wnat to play some 3 0 ?
Should I study more than tactics?
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Well by the sound of it, you lack strategy? And don't confuse Strategy with Tactics!!
Depends on what you want to get out of chess.
Study nothing but tactics can get you to 2000
If chess is something you truley want to improve at then i would suggest an all around study of the game
You've only played blitz chess according to your stats. Why not play some longer games. 24 hours is enough, to analyze more deeply and apply some tactics and a little opening experimentation. The time element in blitz chess really makes it hard to delve into tactics too deeply. I did some tactics training on an iPad app I use earlier, and there is no way I could solve those problems if I were playing against a n opponent and a clock. Also, pick a couple openings as white and a couple responses as black and try to play only those lines, for hundreds of games. Do not look for quick fixes.
"Every now and then someone advances the idea that one may gain success in chess by using shortcuts. 'Chess is 99% tactics' - proclaims one expert, suggesting that strategic understanding is overrated; 'Improvement in chess is all about opening knowledge' - declares another. A third self-appointed authority asserts that a thorough knowledge of endings is the key to becoming a master; while his expert-friend is puzzled by the mere thought that a player can achieve anything at all without championing pawn structures.
To me, such statements seem futile. You can't hope to gain mastery of any subject by specializing in only parts of it. A complete player must master a complete game ..." - FM Amatzia Avni (2008)
Dec 11, 2015
0
#7
Whenever i lose to a person higher rated than I am it is usually because of a tactic... Of course a bad position was reached on my end before the tactic in some cases, regardless, in all the cases I could have done something to avoid the quick demise, maybe save for one... :O...
As you can see good positional knowledge and tactics go hand in hand. The strategical concepts get you to the tactics, and knowing the tactics help guide your strategical thinking to "setup" the tactics. I think it would be a big mistake not to invest time in learning the positional aspect of the game. If you like to analyze games and openings, as much as you like playing games like you mentioned in your post, I'd say analyze the games in a book called my system, written by Aron Nimzowitsch. Also, make sure you do some tactics. Go through some on chesstempo each day, and also if you want to get better quicker invest in a topical tactial motif themed book and keep doing those until you can do them in your sleep. You can make a game out of it when you get good by timing yourself to finish each section of the book. Or better yet the whole book! I do not know what type of tactics you are interested in, but I suggest you google dan heisman, and go to his website, there he has a lot of good tactics books to choose from, but I do not know if any are appropriate for what I think you should study so I'll give you a good one. 303 Tricky chess tactics by Fred Wilson and Bruce Alberston. That book covers all the basic common tactical motifs excluding the study of the removal of the guard tactic. These arn't basic tactics as per the name of the book they are very tricky.
When I first started reading My System book I thought I was beyond the first 8 chapters already and was sort of let down after I bought it. After re-reading the first chapter for like the 4th time I realized there is a lot to be gained that I don't know in just this first chapter! I even found an exorcise he sorta hints we should do in the first chapter to increase our positional awareness.
Personally I think if you just do tactics you will not know how to apply that knowledge into chess games. I had that trouble when I first started playing on chess.com. I've learned how to apply tactics in chess games over the years by simply just playing games. I eventually learned, and got better at setting up tactics. Now I want to know more so I turned to My System. A lot of guys will try and tell you to read Amateurs Mind by Jeremy Silman like they told me, and I bought that book, and later found out that book was for a more advanced student. If you havn't read My System than you should read My System before you read The Amateurs Mind.
Well that's pretty much all that I have to say. Good luck to you in your chess endevours!
Chess mentor is great! I have done over 3000 courses and still have more to learn from it! It is great. What I did was to focus on either tactics, gameplay, or chess mentor. Either way is good, but after some time you have to vary. My blitz rating is what I tend to look at when I look if I have improved, and I have went from 1700+ to 2100+ during this year (2015).
Ofcourse this takes time, but if you want to do it, you can do it!
I like how I started this 8 months ago and occassionally people still give me answers.
I haven't tried chess mentory and I was under the impression it only came with premium accounts. I'll try it, thanks.
Ultimately right now, I am just make tons of blunders. I mean it is not even a matter of tactics, just look at these two "wins". Normally I would show losses (which I just had a streak of 8 in a row) but I think the wins show how "practice" is needed more than "tactics" or "strategy" when you look at how many blunders these games have.
And look at this, is my "tactics" lacking or my "strategy" lacking: you decide!
It's amazing that an entire game came down to one tempo of one pawn.
The point is, if I had my current tactical and strategical knowledge but simply never gave away advantage, I would be well on my way to 2000. So really the best option right now seems to be to keep practicing and get focus rather than tactics or strategy. My problem is not gaining an advantage (in the first game, the computer listed 11: ...Bh4 as - 2.3) but keeping it.
I am very comfortable with endgames, and even with complicated ones I am good at not giving away any advantage I have, including something as simple as an extra pawn. I completely blitzed the endgame to my second game and assigned from the mouseslips did it perfectly accurately. There were faster or better moves, but my win never turned into a draw. The reason I was so confident (yes it would be funny if it turned out I did give away the win) is because I was familiar with the position and knew exactly what black would have to do to draw and saw that he wasn't doing that, so I just followed through with my plans (he should've focused on moving his king to the queenside where he could've helped blockade the passed pawns with his knight. Instead he kept going to the kingside and eventually that let me sac the exchange and march without opposition) I wish I had the same confidence in middle games so that I could tell exactly would was winning and stay winning if I was rather than produce wild computer evaluations. I would be a lot better if I could said "I am familiar with this middle game position: this was what white has to do and this is what black has to do." Then it would just be a matter of technique and my tactics and strategical knowledge would be much more useful. Now I am just sort of playing random moves. In the endgame I know exactly what my plan is and how to convert my advantage but in the middlegame not so much.
So that is what I am currently dealing with, 8 months after the initial post. Ya'll seem so interested I made a write-up. Thanks for all the suggestions.
Tactics are going to be most important for most of us simply because most of our games are won by brute force tactics rather than complicated strategical play. Even if you play amazing positionally, sooner or later you'll need to use tactics to make your opponent lose because he likely doesn't want to lose for you. And this takes us right back to those brute force tactics that give both sides chances, however slim.
So yeah... tactics are going to be #1 for a while but the other parts of the game are still important to work on. In the first game I think you just got confused by the opening. You can play normal developing moves and be ok there. In your second game, even better than the extravagant 7.Bxf7+ is the simple 7.g4 when the knight on h5 is trapped.
ALways study tactics, but trust me - even at a lowly blitz 1200 level, you will run into plenty of opponents that make zero big tactical blunders, and if you do not make decent developing/positional moves, you will have zero chance to deploy a tactical shot on them.
After about 1250blitz rating here, you can still win on tactics, but without any positional understanding, it'll almost always be due to a 'cheapo' meaning opponent grossly blunders or misses an easy tactic. It's hard to get your rating over 1250 as a result - since about half the time, they'll blunder, and half the time they won't.
I'll also (ad nauseum) point out the blitz and standard ratings here on chess.com are NOT meant to be equality. A 1600ish standard rating here will correspond to roughly a 1200-1300ish blitz level player on this site. So don't interpret your inability to be a 1600 level blitz player that 'you're bad at blitz' - you're likely perfectly fine at blitz, and just misunderstanding the blitz vs std ratings here. (Everyone misunderstands it at some point, including me.)
Strange how I am below 1800 in Standard and ~2100 in blitz.. Hmm
It varies by rating, so at stronger levels, the ratio reverses.
See:
http://www.chess.com/blog/smarterchess/chesscom-rating-comparison-2015
Most folks, like the OP here are closer to 1500-1600 std rating, and thus, should be lower rated in blitz here. Likely due to the lack of significantly weaker players who can even survive a 5-min blitz game and thus don't participate.
I see a lot of advice for beginners my level and I'm not sure which to follow and which not to follow. Some of this advice includes:
- Tactics, tactics tactics.
- Don't bother with much opening study.
- Position chess comes later
etc.)
I know everybody thinks they're special, so I wanted some objective opinions on what can effect my learning ability.
1: I am very good at memorizing opening lines. I am bad at visualization, but I have discovered that I have an almost idenic memory for chess positions. I watch a "introduction to [opening]" chess video once and all the variations discussed will be memorized, and I can often pull up positions from chess games I've seen a long time ago. This is far from perfect (and anxiety often compromises memory which is perfect in analysis) and so is getting better from practice, but it seems like a waste to ignore learning tons and tons of opening lines when I pick them up so easily. Should I focus more on memorizing openings than players my level usually do?
2: I LOVE studying openings and analysizing so much. It seems like for most players it's a necesarry evil, but to me, analyzising openings with or without engine is just as fun as playing. If there is a mate in 4 and I don't see it, brute forcing it by playing literally every sensible move one after another is my idea of fun, and I uncover a lot of things about the position.
3: In the past, I was really excitied about combinations and tactical shots, but now my chess fireworks come from the games where players get slowly outplayed move by move. Games like this I like to described as forced mates from move 1. They're especially cool when it seems like no individual move the loser makes made him move. Should I follow my interest or stay at my level? What would it be like to have 1800 level understanding of how to play chess but a 1200 level understanding of tactics?
4: My tactics is excellent. Or rather, has been. Right now, I haven't been doing much practice over the past 3 weeks or so and you can see the effect it has in my games. In addition, I of course mean excellent for my level. I am also awful at blitz. I simply cannot think on time control and play at roughly 400 - 500 points below my standard time control level. While in standard chess I have a good understanding of tactics, I hang my queen in about half of my blitz games. No unsound sacrifice or anything just "Oops I didn't realize that square was attacked by an enemy piece." I say my tactics is excellent for my level because a larger than average percentage of my wins are wins in less than 20 moves because of a forced mate my opponent didn't see. Again, this is less so recently because I stopped studying tactics so much. I don't know how chesstempo tactics rating converts to chess.com rating, but I am rated about 1500 in tactics there. The very least I can say is this; I know how to improve my tactics. I have spent a lot of time studying them and know how to practice practicing tactics.
So for most players, people saying that 1200 rating is too soon to start trying to think of chess like a GM does, but should I change my approach because of any of these factors? I've never had a chess teacher or read a book, and based on the way I often get beaten in games and the trouble I have, it often seems like my opponents have. I have no understanding of what to do after my development ends (all I do is search for tactics) and many of my games suffer from goal-less developments. So I wonder what I can do next to get past the 1200 barrier and start playing real chess.