Actually I don't have anything to annotate at the moment, but thought this might be a good thread for aspiring players who want to improve by analyzing their completed games to post it here with the idea that, having done some of the legwork yourself, a stronger player would (I hope) go over it and correct any errors in your analysis while adding anything you over-looked.
For this to be truly productive and have any chance at all of going anywhere, I recommend the following ground rules:
a. The game and its annotation be in standard PGN format.
b. The game be a an RHP CC game so that it can be previewed first (include a link).
c. If you're going to learn how to analyze you must learn how to do it on your own. This means no Fritz. Yes that means you'll miss things in your analysis, but you'll learn more about how to analyze if you do it this way, which will help you far more when you're playing a game and can't use Fritz.
d. The game needn't be a masterpiece and it doesn't matter if you want to post a win, lose, or draw, but it should be more than a collection of blunders, since if you're making a bunch of those your problem is one of visualization and not analysis. Use your time more productively to do tactics puzzles instead.
e. Subsequent annotators should use words and not Fritz evaluations in their annotations. The game poster likely already has his own copy of Fritz and yours isn't going to offer him any further insight.
f. Subsequent annotators should be at least 250 points stronger than the person whose analysis they are trying to improve upon. Any closer in ratings and he quite possibly could have beaten you anyway, so there's not much insight you can add.
g. Lastly, subsequent annotators should offer their suggestions constructively. This is not a thread to tear down other players over whatever mistakes they made in game or in their analysis, nor a place to lord whatever superiority you think you have over anyone else. If you can't offer well meant improvements, then do everyone a favour and offer nothing.
Thus, this is a kind of informal mentoring thread where you don't have to take on a "student" to contribute by helping lesser players improve in a practical way. And everyone can contribute to this thread whether its by submitting their own games with their first attempts at analysis and annotation, and for stronger players to improve upon those annotations. Note that "stronger", again, means only 250 points stronger than the game poster, leaving lots of scope for intermediates to participate in both the primary analysis and annotation of their own games or secondary improvements to games played by less skilled players.
Originally posted by scandiumI already tried this...the thread didn't pan out because nobody would present any games...
Actually I don't have anything to annotate at the moment, but thought this might be a good thread for aspiring players who want to improve by analyzing their completed games to post it here with the idea that, having done some of the legwork yourself, a stronger player would (I hope) go over it and correct any errors in your analysis while adding anything y ...[text shortened]... ir own games or secondary improvements to games played by less skilled players.
Originally posted by tomtom232Nothing like a little optimism to start things off eh? I can guarantee that won't happen to this thread because if I have to I'll start things off with one of my own games.
I already tried this...the thread didn't pan out because nobody would present any games...
Aside from that I've seen many, many people on this forum practically begging for mentoring and others saying how much they'd like to mentor other players, but it never seems to go anywhere. Well here is their chance to put up or shut up because this is what mentoring is.
No strong player is going to magically appear and whisper all the secrets to chess greatness into anyone's ear because there are none. You get better by learning to identify and correct your mistakes. A mentor can help do that but it goes along way toward encouraging him to take an interest if you (not you personally, you the abstract pronoun) show a willingness to do the work required yourself. An annotated game demonstrates how you play, how you analysis, what you think your mistakes were and what you think you could have done differently.
That not only shows a genuine willingness to improve (because talk is cheap) but it also let's him see the mistakes both in your play and in your thinking process. Give him that and you give him a lot of material to work with toward helping you improve.
Originally posted by scandiumI did start things off with one of my own games when it didn't work...Korch appeared and told me what I did wrong but Korch isn't an active forum poster anymore...I will give your thread a chance though maybe you have it laid out better than I did.
Nothing like a little optimism to start things off eh? I can guarantee that won't happen to this thread because if I have to I'll start things off with one of my own games.
Aside from that I've seen many, many people on this forum practically begging for mentoring and others saying how much they'd like to mentor other players, but it never seems to go an ...[text shortened]... Give him that and you give him a lot of material to work with toward helping you improve.
[Event "Rapid Game"]
[Site "chesshere.com"]
[Date "2007.11.30"]
[White "elonater"]me
[Black "dadyar"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "1682"]
[BlackElo "1489"]
1. e4 g6 2. d4 Bg7 3. c4 d6 4. Nc3 Nf6 5. Nf3 O-O 6. Be2 Nc6 7. d5 Ne5 8. Nxe5 dxe5 9. O-O e6 10. f4 exd5 11. cxd5 Nh5 12. Bxh5 gxh5 13. Qxh5 exf4 14. Bxf4 Qd7 15. h3 f5 16. e5 Qf7 17. Qh4 Qg6 18. Rf3 Qb6+ 19. Kh1 Qxb2 20. Rg3 Qxa1+ 21. Kh2 Kh8 22. Rxg7 Kxg7 23. Bh6+ Kf7 24. Qf6+ Ke8 25. Qxf8+ Kd7 26. e6# 1-0
Originally posted by tomtom232I have a pretty good framework laid down I think. And this is a win-win situation for everyone who contributes for just some the following reasons:
I did start things off with one of my own games when it didn't work...Korch appeared and told me what I did wrong but Korch isn't an active forum poster anymore...I will give your thread a chance though maybe you have it laid out better than I did.
1. Its one of the oldest axioms in chess and possibly the truest: if you really want to improve, you must analyze your own games.
2. If you ever reuse your openings you can avoid reinventing the wheel while learning more about the typical ideas arising from that opening by analyzing and annotating your game. This gives you something to refer back to when you find yourself in a similar position again; you know what's good now and why its good. The act of annotating also helps cement ideas into your mind.
3. Submitting it for a stronger player to review will give you the opportunity to discover things you overlooked, and not just variations but typical plans, ideas, and most importantly the why.
4. Stronger players get to add annotation to a game where some of the legwork's already been done for them and where there's no emotional baggage or preconceptions attached. This will also improve their analytical skills.
5. The weaker player you help today maybe the FM tomorrow who repays the favour by offering to mentor you.
Okay that last one is a little unlikely, but you never know. And honestly this is how the process works. You can throw several hundred bucks at titled player to coach you and likely this will be a component of that coaching. Of course you're unlikely to get that level of instruction here but you're not paying anything for it either.
Originally posted by tomtom232Okay you get points for trying to get the ball rolling but you didn't read the ground rules 😉
[Event "Rapid Game"]
[Site "chesshere.com"]
[Date "2007.11.30"]
[White "elonater"]me
[Black "dadyar"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "1682"]
[BlackElo "1489"]
1. e4 g6 2. d4 Bg7 3. c4 d6 4. Nc3 Nf6 5. Nf3 O-O 6. Be2 Nc6 7. d5 Ne5 8. Nxe5 dxe5 9. O-O e6 10. f4 exd5 11. cxd5 Nh5 12. Bxh5 gxh5 13. Qxh5 exf4 14. Bxf4 Qd7 15. h3 f5 16. e5 Qf7 17. Qh4 Qg6 18 ...[text shortened]... 1+ 21. Kh2 Kh8 22. Rxg7 Kxg7 23. Bh6+ Kf7 24. Qf6+ Ke8 25. Qxf8+ Kd7 26. e6# 1-0
1. RHP CC games only with a link so they can be previewed.
2. You must annotate the game yourself.
Thats what I get for not reading 😛
Game 4223240
will submit annotation tomorrow 🙂
Originally posted by tomtom232Interesting game, took a quick look through it and it seems like an excellent candidate. Our ratings are too close for me to really go over it, but hopefully once you get your annotation up one of the many 1800+ players here will take a little of their time to go over the annotated product and make suggestions/corrections.
Thats what I get for not reading 😛
Game 4223240
will submit annotation tomorrow 🙂
And then maybe others will follow suit, myself included once I decide on a suitable game to annotate and post here.
Game 4317569
[Event "Clan challenge"]
[Site "http://www.playtheimmortalgame.com"]
[Date "2007.11.28"]
[EndDate "2008.01.14"]
[Round "?"]
[White "truthinpositions"]
[Black "wittywonka"]
[WhiteRating "1835"]
[BlackRating "1816"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[GameId "4317569"]
Sicilian Defense, Moscow Variation
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bb5+ Bd7 4. Bxd7 Qxd7 5. O-O Nc6 6. d4
The first "out-of-book" move, but certainly playable.
6. ... cxd4 7. Nxd4 Nxd4?!
Not the strongest move, in retrospect. This allows white to bring his queen to the center, relatively uncontested. Better is simple development, either 7. ... g6 or 7. ... Nf6.
8. Qxd4 Nf6 9. Bg5
White poses a difficult question. Either I must grant him precious tempi by repositioning my knight, or I must accept a far inferior pawn structure. I opt for the latter.
9. ... h6 10. Bxf6 gxf6
I choose to recapture with the g-pawn in to allow myself to fianchetto my dark-squared bishop and put my rook on a semi-open file, which later assists me in attacking white's king. I wasn't too keen on isolating my d-pawn with a line such as 10. ... exf6 11. Rd1 Bd7 12. Nc3 O-O, which seemed to tie me down defending, but nonetheless I would have been able to castle.
11. c4 Bg7 12. Nc3 Rg8 13. Nb5?
White manages to temporarily place his knight on the b5-square, but at the cost of a pawn.
13. ... f5 14. Qe3 fxe4 15. Qxe4 Bxb2 16. Rab1 Bf6
At this point, I believe black has a slight advantage, but his king is uncastled and white's pieces are more strongly developed.
17. Rfd1 Kf8
Unpinning black's e7-pawn to protect his d6-pawn. Now black's advantage grows slim as white manages to develop both rooks to open files.
18. Qf4 Qh3!?
Simoltaneously protecting black's h-pawn and utilizing the presence of the g-rook, but leaving black's queenside pawns a bit shaky.
19. g3 Be5 20. Qf3
A nice move that attacked the b7-pawn and gave white a way to more or less defend (on g2) if I had managed to continue a kingside attack.
20. ... Rg5?
Attempting a rook lift, but at too great a cost. From here, I managed to more or less calculate the final moves, but I did not see that white could still pick up a pawn (e7) to equalize again when I picked up his a-pawn. Better may have been 20. ... Qd7, defending until I could better develop my a-rook and defend my a- and b-pawns before returning to the attack.
21. Qxb7 Rc8 22. Nxa7 Rxc4 23. Rd3 Rh5 24. Qg2 Qxg2 25. Kxg2 Ra4 26. Nc6 Rxa2 27. Rb8+ Kg7 28. Nxe7 Kf6 1/2-1/2
Originally posted by scandiumI personally think 250 points is a tad much; I personally think I'd have plenty to learn from someone rated 1950 or 2000. I'm also not sure how many 2050+ players will be that willing to annotate.
f. Subsequent annotators should be at least 250 points stronger than the person whose analysis they are trying to improve upon. Any closer in ratings and he quite possibly could have beaten you anyway, so there's not much insight you can add.
Just my two cents, but I'm willing to go along with the rules either way.
Originally posted by scandiumAnother well-wrought chess analysis thread, scandium. I'm looking forward to the day when your rating reaches a level where your lucid, logical, insightful prose can be put to work by a publisher. Meanwhile, I can enjoy and benefit from it here.
. . . .That not only shows a genuine willingness to improve (because talk is cheap) but it also let's him see the mistakes both in your play and in your thinking process. Give him that and you give him a lot of material to work with toward helping you improve.
Incidentally, the quoted paragraph is exactly the premise behind Silman's The Amateur's Mind. And it's how he describes the mentoring process he provides his students.
While no book can function as a chess coach, the illustrations of this process (involving his own students of various ratings from 800 to 2000, but most often intermediate) give a sense of the process; and the appendix added to the 2nd Edition attempts to apply this process to the reader, by giving 26 tests and questions about them (some of which consist of games which the reader is asked to annotate, comparing his own notes with Silman's in the answers). The answers are pretty extensive, adding about 100 pages to the book's length.
Originally posted by scandiumI just think that point f is one you should scrap. The capacity for doing some good annotations doesn't have to do that much with such a big rating difference. Two 1700 can have a monumental gap on annotation ability. So I think it is better to just say that the next annotator must try to point out something that the previous missed. Or something he thinks that the previous missed. But this is your thread so it's your call.
Actually I don't have anything to annotate at the moment, but thought this might be a good thread for aspiring players who want to improve by analyzing their completed games to post it here with the idea that, having done some of the legwork yourself, a stronger player would (I hope) go over it and correct any errors in your analysis while adding anything y ir own games or secondary improvements to games played by less skilled players.
Mark, thanks for the generous feedback; I may be a little too old to ever become a titled player but I think with hard word and dedication an OTB 2000 rating is within my grasp, which has always been the grail for me. Thanks also to Witty for being the first to submit an annotated game of his and thus providing the proof of concept that this thread does have a chance of succeeding.
Witty and Adam, your suggestions are well taken and I think there's room for a compromise that preserves the purpose I had in mind with point F while also keeping games as accessible to subsequent annotators as possible, within that purpose.
When I elaborated point F I hadn't thought through what it would mean for 1800+ players who submitted their games since the 2050+ club is a very small group. At the same time (to pick a random rating) I wanted to avoid a situation where a 1250 rated player submits a game, a 1300 spots a couple mistakes and annotates it beyond those mistakes with well-meaning suggestions that are, unfortunately, inaccurate or worse yet completely misleading.
Alternatively, using the same example, the 1300 may not have enough faith in his judgment that he checks his improvements against Fritz, discovers Fritz has even stronger alternatives, and annotates using those moves instead, but without understanding why they're better. And in any case, any checking against Fritz defeats the purpose of this thread; after all, my goal here is not to get to the authoritative "truth" of the moves in any game, but for annotators to improve the strength of their analysis and evaluation through practice and feedback.
Again, in the above example of the 1250 player's game, a 1500 is sufficiently stronger to find reasonably accurate improvements and with enough confidence to trust that even if his judgment or advice is a little off the mark, overall his insights should add far more good than harm.
So the compromise and the new section F (too much time has passed to edit my original post):
f. Subsequent annotators rated under 1700 RHP should limit their submissions to games where the original annotator is 250 or more points below their rating. Subsequent annotators between 1700-1900 RHP can reduce that restriction to a 150 point rating difference. Players rated 1900 or above should feel free to submit improved annotations to any game posted, without rating restrictions.
I think that should satisfy the spirit of the original section F while ensuring that regardless of who submits a game, they can get some appropriate feedback that'll help in their future games and analysis efforts. Note that the 1900+ club here at RHP is a pretty small group, so at that level the focus isn't on mentoring so much as peer review.
On Edit, one final thing to add: Witty the clean and clear style of your submission is the model for all future submitters to try and adhere to as closely as possible.
a. The game and its annotation be in standard PGN format.
b. The game be a an RHP CC game so that it can be previewed first (include a link).
c. If you're going to learn how to analyze you must learn how to do it on your own. This means no Fritz. Yes that means you'll miss things in your analysis, but you'll learn more about how to analyze if you do it this way, which will help you far more when you're playing a game and can't use Fritz.
d. The game needn't be a masterpiece and it doesn't matter if you want to post a win, lose, or draw, but it should be more than a collection of blunders, since if you're making a bunch of those your problem is one of visualization and not analysis. Use your time more productively to do tactics puzzles instead.
e. Subsequent annotators should use words and not Fritz evaluations in their annotations. The game poster likely already has his own copy of Fritz and yours isn't going to offer him any further insight.
f. Subsequent annotators rated under 1700 RHP should limit their submissions to games where the original annotator is 250 or more points below their rating. Subsequent annotators between 1700-1900 RHP can reduce that restriction to a 150 point rating difference. Players rated 1900 or above should feel free to submit improved annotations to any game posted, without rating restrictions.
g. Lastly, subsequent annotators should offer their suggestions constructively. This is not a thread to tear down other players over whatever mistakes they made in game or in their analysis, nor a place to lord whatever superiority you think you have over anyone else. If you can't offer well meant improvements, then do everyone a favour and offer nothing.