You learn the most from losses. It only helps if you remember the lessons learned when you play the next game. In this Trompowsky Attack from Thursday's chess club tournament, I forgot the basics in the heat of battle.
On move #12, I made two basic mistakes: (1) Up until then I was playing with a plan. Black had already opened up his Queen-side and that left the King-side for castling. I planned on castling Queen-side and advancing the King-side pawns to break up his remaining castling option. On move #12, I stopped thinking about the plan and started looking for and playing the best move for the position. (2) Advancing the h-Pawn to h3 left me with a very inferior King-side pawn structure – an inverted V. The weak pawn structure also resulted in my f4-bishop being left unguarded and allowed Black to occupy the weak h4 square.
Lessons learned: (Opening) Until development is complete, the primary goal should be development. (Middlegame) Play with a plan, never revert to playing the ‘best’ move. Pay attention to pawn structure. (Endgame) Continue to blunder-check each and every move.
P.S. The reason for the delay in posting was to determine the root cause for the above failures and a correction method. The cause seems to be bad habits picked up from playing against my chess engine. It makes moves quickly and I respond in kind. A two-fold solution: (1) Play the practice games on a real board (using one of my nice sets) moving the real pieces as the chess engine dictates. (2) Use a report card type of game analysis summary. Some categories to be graded are development, planning, blunderchecking and pawn structure. Not sure to use A-F or VS/S/F grades yet. Anyone else have a suggestion on correction or grading categories?
No comments:
Post a Comment