new member (General)

by Don Lester, Wednesday, October 11, 2006, 06:44 (6765 days ago) @ mihaela

? Hello everybody!
? My name is Mihaela Sandu, I am WFM and I have just joined the chess team
? on improveyourchess.com.
? I am member of the coaching team for the moment, but I intend to develop
? new study material on endings and maybe openings.
? Any suggestion on what you would like it to be is welcomed.

Hello to you, too!

I am possibly the most amateur member here. I base that assumption on other questions posted here which are usually saying things like how easy the advanced tactics puzzles are, or something like that. I don't find those easy, and even have a difficult time imagining a day when I would find them trivial.

Something I wish there was more of here is strategy. Probably focussing more on the middle game. Silman has some books that do this pretty well, but once you have read them you can't really go back and do those assessments again because you recognize them instead of figuring them out. It would be great to have a section here that has middle game positions that get you in the habit of looking at the board and evaluating the imbalances in the position, formulating a plan, assessing candidate moves, then finally selecting the best move that helps you toward accomplishing your long-term plan.

There is really good material here, but most all of it, even the stuff calling itself strategy, is really more tactical than strategic. Even the HGIYC, one of my favorite features here, doesn't usually go into much strategic planning. Moves are selected or refuted based on tactical success or refutation.

Having said all this, it is certainly much easier to say that a cool strategy section like this would be a nice addition. Implementing something like that would be a lot of work. Finding positions would be easy as there are millions of middle game positions to choose from, but then those positions need to be analyzed and content developed around them. I know it would help me though, and I am sure it would help a lot of others as well.

I just had a game on Sunday night vs a 1800 something player, and I had him fussing and squirming through about move 20, then it all fell apart. When I got home and put the game through Fritz I found myself in a very solid position, with at one time a 3 pawn positional advantage (material was even), and then I attacked on the wrong side of the board.

It looked logical to me. I had more space over there, plenty of firepower, but it was still the wrong thing to do and even now I don't know why, I just know it was obviously wrong because I lost, and because Fritz kept recommending moves on the other side and the more I moved on the wrong side the more my advantage withered away until I was completely hosed.

I would like to be able to say that is a rare event, but I am finding as I practice tactics more and more that when I play a challenging opponent I get into stable positions where I eventually get outplayed and don't know what has happened until it is too late, and I am not losing material, I am just getting squished.