Another brick in the wall…
Recently my play has reached a new high, my chess is more consistent and I’m performing well against stronger players, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve run headlong into another brick wall.
Until recently, my games usually consisted of me throwing out some opening theory for the first few moves, then shuffling the pieces around in the middlegame waiting for a mistake to take advantage of, blundering myself, or allowing the opponent to get too much activity and overwhelm me.
Nowadays, I still throw out the same old opening theory, but I’ve strengthened my tactical play over the summer and so now I see those chances more easily, I can hold onto my material instead of chucking it away. The result of this is that I win more convincingly against the weaker player, but the games against stronger opponents seem to involve a titanic struggle for control before reaching a deadlock or else I simply crumble under the pressure.
This is where I run into my wall. Against the better player I’m hardly ever going to win unless I can capitalise on those small positional advantages, but as soon as I obtain these, the play is too subtle for me and equality is soon resumed. My games are starting to behave like an elastic band – to keep stretching till the band breaks you have to keep applying pressure, but more often than not, players round about my level don’t know how to keep applying that pressure and the band returns to its state of rest.
It’s apparent that working on my tactics is no longer as effective as it was as I’m not generating positions where tactics generally appear. The tactics which do appear are often hard to spot and would require a huge amount of study for a small return.
I’m looking for faster gains than that, so I think my next step is to work on building up those positional advantages and learning how to use them to create that extra pressure.
I think it’s time to learn some STRATEGY!
Friday, November 21st 2008 at 12:12 pm
I’ve worked pretty hard on tactics and other areas. This has made a large difference in my play generally but I still feel that there are more difficult tactics that I miss fairly regularly.
MHO is that continued tactics study with strategy is important, though using more challenging puzzles. I have also found that memorising the games from GM ram has had a curious effect on the standard of my play and I have been drawing regularly against people 20-30 ECF more than me. In fact my loses this season are all against those just above (+5) and far below (-30+).
Sunday, November 30th 2008 at 7:19 pm
Know exactly how you feel. Although mostly I play on the Net, rather than OTB, I reached a point in January this year when ( after losing in 14 moves to someone who was similarly rated ) I decided to be a bit more seriouys about my chess.
Good progress in the past months, but now a similar point as you. I don’t make so many mistakes, and so beat weaker players, but those around and above are very tough. If I make it to an endgame, I generally lose, so that’s what I need to hit next.
Keep blogging, its a good blog.