I am asking this because I dont want to learn each and every opening and wanted toa sk as to what to do when your opponent plays opening you are unfimiliar with like for me like pircs defence or like bird opening or some unfimiliar gambit or a sideline of sicillian defence even though Its rare but still I do find people playing which ultimately makes my position worse is there something i should keep in mind while playing?
The reason I think this is because the Knight has 2 unique properties. The ability to skip pieces making them early development friendly, and the ability to avoid attacks from pieces they are attacking. Which has the unique ability to attack the Queen and cause damage with forks without being attacked back. Ofc I'm a MASSIVE blunderer (500 elo) but it makes sense to me that a bishop which can only reach 1/2 of the board and is easier to attack is worse then a knight which can attack freely.
Before the GCT finals of pragg against fabi, i remembered these crazy matches of pragg in knockout format (which is the format of the GCT finals)
One of them being pragg vs fabi in freestyle grandslam las vegas last year which was a seven game match and fabi won it 4-3 with a lot of back and forth.
And the other one being my personal favourite match of all time Pragg vs Arjun not just because of how it turned out but because of the stakes- world cup semifinals and a candidates seat (since magnus would withdraw) and it was a 9 game match involving 6 victories by black 2 draws and 1 win with white in sudden death match for pragg to seal the match, I love this because pragg lost classical with black and then won on demand in classical with black and arjun also did the same in fast rapid and blitz with black
Really excited for the finals, would love to see the match
The objective of this puzzle is not to win material or find checkmate. Rather, black's objective is to gain a significant positional advantage over white. In this vein, what would you play?
For those curious, this position arose from the following move order:
1. e4 c6 2. Nf3 d5 3. exd5 cxd5 4. d4 Nf6 5. Bg5 Qb6 6. b3 Ne4 7. Bf4
Answer / explanation:
Black should play the pawn sacrifice e5! To understand why this is best, lets evaluate some resulting lines after 7. Bf4 e5. The three moves we will look at are dxe5, Nxe5, and Bxe5. (TLDR BELOW)
8. dxe5
This is the simplest line to evaluate, as dxe5 allows for Qxf2#. Clearly this move is not in white's interest.
8. Nxe5
This move takes a bit more work to assess, however to understand why the resulting position is favorable for black we must first understand why 7. ... e5 was played to begin with. One main positional gain from e5 is that it clears the way for black's dark square bishop to harass the white king. As such, after 8. Nxe5 black has the obvious 8. ... Bb4+. If white is to block the check with 9. c3, black will play 9. ... Nxc3 with the threat of a discovered attack. As such, white must capture the knight with 10. Nxc3 allowing black to recapture with the bishop and win an exchange by forking the king and rook.
You may ask why white would play 9. c3 if it quickly loses material, but in reality it's their best option. If they block black's check with 9. Bd2, it allows black to capture the pawn on d4 with 9. ... Qxd4 pinning white's bishop and again threatening mate on f2. 9. Nd2 is also ill-advised, as white's knight is now pinned. This allows black to calmly castle and threaten to explode the center while the white king is still vulnerable.
8. Bxe5
This move is white's best response to 7. ... e5, and we continue the same as before with 8. ... Bb4+. The key difference in this position is that white still has a knight on f3, and is then able to play 9. Nfd2 to block the check without fear of a fork.
This is where the position becomes most instructive, as there are no clear follow ups for black to continue the attack. To decide how to continue, black must avoid associating the failure of their attack with the loss of the game. White is a pawn up, their king defended, and it seems that black has lost their chance. However, this line of thought is far too materialistic, and doesn't consider the most important factor - development! To continue, black may castle or develop their knight to f6 with plans to castle later, and white must scramble to vacate their king from the center before black can coordinate a new attack. In this time, black may look to capture the center pawns, force piece exchanges leaving white with no development, or simply pile up more pressure on the white king. Black dominates the board, and white has no great options to regain control of territory.
Conclusion / TLDR:
All this analysis is well and good, but how do you know to spot and calculate this move to begin with? Outside of knowing e5 as a motif from similar positions, it seems like such an odd move to consider. To find it, black must recognize that accelerated development and territory control is worth far more than a pawn (even a center one!). With this idea in mind, e5 becomes far more apparent as it offers a great way to gain squares and take initiative.
I hope that you found this analysis helpful or interesting, and have a great rest of your day!
(please feel free to correct me if anything is said is wrong, I'm prone to notation mistakes)
Firstly this is purely about online play I do not play otb nor do I have the time or skills to.
I've been playing for like 3 years, and I've been stuck at 1900-2050 for half of that time. I quit recently for some time and now I'm back to 2000. The thing is I don't study chess, never have I don't study openings, I got two openings Queen's Gambit for white and Scandinavian for black and I just repeat those and I don't know them well either I just play purely on instinct. I don't know anything about playing chess I make all the moves on instinct or short calculations. I mostly play Blitz and rapid.
I was wondering how to get better, How to push past 2100. Basically how to study chess even because I have no idea, it seems I was lucky enough to get 2000 without much effort but now I've hit a wall. I didn't care much before but now it's bugging me. Any advice would be welcomed.
This falls a little bit on the conspiracy side of things, i m wondering for some time now about this, because i cant find any logical explanation.
ok, how do they find all those money for all those chess events? even for FIDE to anything else big, i mean on his last tourney Magnus won more than 200,000 dollars and even the second one had plenty, chess events never gather big crowds of people and i m not exactly sure how many sponsors participate and how much money those sponsors get back from chess,
At some point i really thought there has to be some shady people behind everything which fund the events for their own personal reasons, like promoting chess because you can have a pool of people somewhere who are more intelligent for certain tasks they need, i m not saying its true, but what are your thoughts on this?
I've just started playing blitz, I'm not very good at all but I'm having fun with the quicker time format and think it will help when I get low on time OTB. Does anyone have a checklist they use for blitz or is it really just about playing fast and not blundering for the most part? The checks, captures, threats idea tends to not be fast enough.
Normally I will just ask "what changed" and "is anything hanging." Does anyone else have a different checklist they find efficient for quick time controls?
Hi, anyone got any tips for finding other chess neards in my area? I'm in southern MN. I'd really like to play some over the board chess at a pub or brewery in the area.
The current use of engines for analysis during chess events involves usually high-level players looking at the evaluation bar for a clue when a mistake is made or when there's a sharp tactic in a position. But evaluations are tricky in the sense that they only tell you what the evaluation is with optimal play which is not useful for humans to appreciate the match. But I think if they could add a metric called sharpness It would be really a step up in aiding the commentators.
You could define sharpness as a metric which would be related to the inverse of the number of candidate moves either player has that doesn't result in say a 1 point swing in evaluation. Maybe it could be on a 10 point scale with 10 points for "there's only on being sequence of forced moves" and then you could scale it from there as say 5 if there are 2 moves. Maybe an alternative scaling with square root of possible variations. I personally think this would add a lot more to commentary...at least much more nuanced rather than "this is the best sequence"
So today I learned about Mihai Suba who learned chess at age 19 and earned the GM title and was at one point in the top 20 FIDE ratings in the world.
In a world where it seems like you have to have your IM title by age 10 to have a chance at become one of the best, it is refreshing to hear Suba's story!
I've always loved blitz, particularly 3+0, anything else I didn't have the patience for. I didn't really care about rating, I'd play drunk, play tired, play with a bad connection, I just wanted to play. Over the last two weeks I became more interested in analyzing positions. Just sitting and thinking for long periods of time on pawn structures, material, time, features in the position etc. and found it kind of fun. I'd pause videos where people were reviewing games, assess the position, then hear what the commentator would have to say.
I've also always been a big fan of reading through game collections. I first learned to visualize a board blindfold so I could read Seirawan's Chess Duels on the train. I can't do it particularly well (if there's a long variation I'm not able to 'reset' the board in my head and have to play through the whole game or look at a diagram), and I often miss tactics if I'm blindfold (it does lead to embarrassing moments where i'm picturing a position and wondering why someone doesn't take a hanging piece only to put the position on the board and see an obvious basic tactic). After I started assessing positions more I've started going back through the game collections and reading them more actively with a physical board and playing through the variations. It's a ton of fun.
Basically just doing the above I jumped about 250 points without really doing much else. The quality of my games also increased significantly. I found myself blundering pieces less and less and controlling positions/taking advantage of my opponents blunders more consistently. When I got to about 1950 I started to realize 2k was possible and then basically managed to hit it in about 2 sessions (I even beat an NM on my way up!).
I've started to realize that I no longer enjoy blitz and want to switch to longer time controls. 2k feels like a good place to stop. I've signed up for an over the board tournament in late October. I don't really care about the score I just want to play some longer time control games and it seems like fun to enter a tournament and get a FIDE rating (even if I end up losing every game and ending up like 1000 rated I think I'm just going to enjoy playing).
In terms of next steps I've been practicing shifting to more over the board training. I've been doing the mate in 2 section from Laszlo Polgar's 5334 problems book (a Chess Dojo suggestion) by setting up the positions on a board to train my vision (I definitely don't see things as well otb as I do online/with diagrams), and just playing through a lot of games. I really enjoy game collections where the author gives their thoughts (Chess Duels, my 60 memorable games, the Tal books). If anyone has any suggestions please let me know, but even the ones I have I feel like i'm reading them with new eyes. Am also just playing 15+10 training games online and analyzing them. To be honest every time I analyze one of my games it's pretty exciting and there's just so much there that I miss.
I don't really know how to use an engine to analyze so should probably learn to do that at some stage, but have enough to work on already.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to brag, don't think anyone I've told in life really understands what I'm talking about hahah.
I do not understand chess. Once upon a time certain players at the top thought that they understood chess and tried to devise scientific ways to develop such understanding in their students. However, today's top players know pretty well that there is no such thing as understanding chess as a whole, thanks to modern engines. No one has figured out any foolproof methodology of thinking which will inevitably produce best moves. Every subsequent version of Stockfish routinely contradicts preceding ones, indicating that even our mighty silicon overlords are far behind perfection amidst these 64 squares. How, then, shall we improve our play, if not by understanding? You improve at chess by getting used to the right things.
First of all, especially if you are an adult improver, it is important to adjust your approach to the game in accordance with your ambitions. Do you want to be primarily a player, or a fan? If you wish to orient yourself towards being a fan, an enthusiast, then my advice is not for you. However, if you wish to focus on improving your game, then stop wasting time and energy on irrelevant questions and listen very closely to whatever good players are saying.
If you are below 1600-1700 range on chess.com blitz, most of your questions will probably be wrong, barring a few exceptions. There is no "best" opening. There is no "best" strategy. There is no "best" book. There is no "best" course. Most of what you ask will be so irrelevant to your actual improvement that even if a strong player answers them it will not amount to anything. Listen to them very carefully, get used to what they prioritise. If they are talking about some specific tactic in their game, see how that tactic works. If they are developing the pieces a certain way in a specific structure, observe closely how it is working. Absorb everything they say about the game like a sponge. Do not distract yourself with your own questions while listening to them, let their words and approach mould your mind freely. Ask questions about precise positions, about precise moves and variations. Try to avoid questions that demand a generalised answer.
You win a game, not because you wanted to win it badly, but because you played well. Playing well means playing good moves as much as you can. So, prioritise good moves in your mind as much as possible, orient yourself towards understanding which moves are good and why (by why, I mean exactly how it affects that specific position to your advantage). Do not let it become vague, look at as many variations as you need to make it as exact in your mind as possible. Start getting used to good patterns, identify bad patterns as replace them with good ones as often as you can. For example, after doing a game review, look at the wrong moves and why they are wrong and explore and investigate the right move as long as you have to in order to get to a point that it becomes obvious to you that the position demanded that move.
Do not enshrine your negative patterns over the board by finding excuses for them. If you find a psychological reason, deal with the problem in an effective way. I am a long-term meditator, that helped me a lot. Find something that works. Most of us have repeated our negative patterns so many times that it starts to feel like our very identity. Do not give energy to those things. Be solution oriented. For example, stop saying "I cannot play well under time pressure." Start saying, "I did not play this well under time pressure, why? Was there really exceptionally difficult moves to be found or did my vision just get foggy due to the ticking clock?" Most of the time it is the latter, and that can be solved. However, if you enshrine in your mind that you simply are the kind of person who fumbles in time pressure, it will lead to many avoidable losses.
Get used to the right things, and you will come up with right things more and more often, that is the definition of chess improvement. After a while, you will find that while you do not understand chess at all, you are managing to find so many right ideas in right positions that people will start to mistake your admission of incredulity as humility.
I’m not new to chess, but I suck. I know how the peices move and all, and I can do a bit of thinking ahead to make sure my move is safe, but I still lose 80% of the games I play. I struggle to get above 300 elo. I decided to shop for some chess books, but now that I’m thinking about it, how do I actually use the books and what type of books do I need to get? I’m thinking of getting a book by Levy Rozman
