Road to 1800 Day 3
Trying to hit 1800 within 100 days!Day 3: JM here. Still!
Thank you to the person who suggested I study endgames. I did today and suspect that most of my work for the next little while will be studying king and pawn endgames and then I’ll work from there: minor piece endgames, then rook endgames then queen endgames and then with what time I have remaining I’ll study tactics.
It scares me that I’m not directly addressing my horrendous win-loss ratio as black but it wasn’t always that way and maybe was the result of studying gone wrong. I’ll just play Karo-Kans and improvise my way through everything else. If I don’t know what I’m doing, there’s no way my opponent can know what I’ll do, right? Unless I walk into a trap but that’ll happen. Whatever you do you’re chancing something. You’re risking not doing something better but the other option is doing nothing and that has no chance of working. I like the idea of moving towards my source of strength, not away from it.
The counter argument is that you need to study openings to reach strong middle games and then learn how to convert them. It doesn’t matter how consistently you can get draws down a pawn if you find yourself down two. You’ll always fight uphill battles if you don’t know how to come out strong. I hope this is wrong.
There is such beauty in king, pawn endgames. All of the other pieces have left and the game becomes a simple yet precise dance. At the start half of the squares have pieces on them. 16 pawns, 4 rooks, 4 bishops, 4 knights, two queens, two kings. By the end, perhaps six squares have pieces on them. Two kings and maybe two pawns. A single move timed incorrectly loses a win. The start of chess is wide open, messy and expressive but the end is simple sudden death. There is always a correct move. With less than seven pieces on the board, the best computers know for a matter of fact the single best move in any position. For the rest of us, pawns serve as clocks and kings as protectors and marauders alternating defense and diving into an open space before . . . .
To the person who said these sound like the writings of a mad man, yes. How can we be anything but in these times?
We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there!
Godspeed--JM
