Guys , i have decided to go to a classical tournament in the end on december. I am going to start my preparation . You guys can look at my online game on chess/com . https://www.chess.com/member/decoy-chopper . I usually play rapid games there and serious ones . The ones reading this forum , i have bought a book by silman . I am currently analyzing my own games trying to improve . What i think my problem currently is " i am not thinking about my opponents threat and i do not have a proper plan " i think that is main because i dont have a proper response to my opponents opening , ie . caro khan .
I am starting to read books . and i will very much need your guys help and i will be active everyday .
I had also made another forum , that was very helpful , thank you to all who helped me .
and yeah . lets begin the prep . (also i hv re-exam coming up so got to prepare for tht too )
.
Decoy
What is the time control of the tournament?
What rapid time control do you play?
tournament time control - 90+30 or 60+30
My advice would be quite simple - play an obscene amount of puzzle streak with the goal of getting to a higher max score each day.
The goal is to get an intuition for chess. In chess a strong player is generally going to see a few pretty good moves basically instantly - it's the only way it's possible to play bullet at a decent level. All the thinking then just comes down to picking between those moves. Sometimes in that thinking you discover a really amazing move you wouldn't have otherwise even considered, but it's quite rare.
So the reason for puzzle streaking is to start to get this intuition and feel for where the pieces should go and how they should play together, and to also improve your board vision so that you don't really need to think when seeing a position. In your case this is 110% true. I looked at a few of your games and you're still just blundering a lot. Strategy, books, and all of this are completely useless until you can get these under control.
Similarly, the board vision and such will make it much easier to start forming decent plans and the like. The most elaborate and strategically deep plan is useless if you made an incorrect tactical assumption to start with. As your board vision improves you'll start to see the weakest points in the board, more easily recognize your weakest piece (to the point it'll start feeling bad to have a bad piece!), and so on.
> What i think my problem currently is " i am not thinking about my opponents threat
Just be careful by watching all the potential squares where opponent's pieces can go to. Playing a very sharp attacking style can also be an option.
> and i do not have a proper plan
Attacking the king is the main plan, so you have already one. The rest is strategy, that is, how to build the attack correctly, without endangering your own king. And sometime, it can be better to miss a sacrifice than to play a missed sacrifice.
Best of Luck!
Tactics are very important.
Personally the book Forcing chess moves by Charles Hertan and Woodpecker Method helped me a lot in this.
Focus on solving a lot of puzzles either from a book or some website, Chess Tempo, Lichess or Chesscom just stick to one site and keep solving! I think that is more important for you compared to silman or other positional chess books.
Good Luck!
Say away from blitz, bullet, ultra-bullet: these breed bad habits: playing too fast and too shallow.
Rapid 15+10 is the fastest to play, but still far away from 60+30 or 90+30.
Puzzles are overrated. In a game nobody tells you there is a tactic, or for whom.
Study annotated grandmaster games.
@tpr , what is annotated gm games?
A grandmaster game is a game played between two grandmasters. Annotations are comments for each move.
You can find such games in books, e.g. Zürich 1953 Bronstein, on sites, e.g. Chessbase.
@tpr said in #9:
> A grandmaster game is a game played between two grandmasters. Annotations are comments for each move.
> You can find such games in books, e.g. Zürich 1953 Bronstein, on sites, e.g. Chessbase.
"... I made a copy of some of the commentary on the first game in the Bronstein book on the 1953 Zurich tournament: ..."
https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/a-hack-for-getting-through-a-chess-book?page=2
In the Bronstein book, most moves are not accompanied by a comment. Indeed:
"... It's odd, but for years I have thought that Bronstein's book, while containing some good writing, is overrated. ... Comments that purported to be pearls of wisdom ended up having too little to do with the game at hand, and the most important moments of the game were too often passed over. ..." - IM John Watson (2013)
https://theweekinchess.com/john-watson-reviews/john-watson-book-review-106-zurich-1953-by-najdorf
"... annotated games vary widely in quality. Some are excellent study material. Others are poor. But the most numerous fall into a third category - good-but-wrong-for-you. ... You want games with annotations that answer the questions that baffle you the most. ... masters usually don't make the kind of instructive mistakes that amateurs learn the most from. In master-vs.-master games, the errors are usually minor and the punishment is so slow coming that the educational value is often lost. ... there are major advantages to studying older games rather than those of today. The ideas expressed in a Rubinstein or Capablanca game are generally easier to understand. They are usually carried out to their logical end, often in a memorable way, ... In today's chess, the defense is much better. That may sound good. But it means that the defender's counterplay will muddy the waters and dilute the instructional value of the game. ..." - GM Andrew Soltis (2010)
At https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/what-books-to-read-for-improvement-rating-1400-1500-fide, a number of the suggestions are essentially collections of annotated games.