The penny drops

I'd like to hear about when others have had 'aaah I see!!' moments in their chess education, what was the realisation that you made and did you notice an immediate improvement in your games and results. Examples are an understanding of where bishops are better than knight, the opposition, colour complexes, that sort of thing.

Originally posted by Knightlore
I'd like to hear about when others have had 'aaah I see!!' moments in their chess education, what was the realisation that you made and did you notice an immediate improvement in your games and results. Examples are an understanding of where bishops are better than knight, the opposition, colour complexes, that sort of thing.

I first learned chess in a couple of games when I was 8. Nothing
happened chesswise till college, 10 years later. I was learning again,
and they mentioned rooks were stronger than bishops. So being
a pragmatic and curious type, played a few games where I arranged
a trade between my rooks and his bishops to see what would happen.
Lo and behold, I found out they were right, but when I first looked at
the concept, I saw the bishops and rooks covered the same number
of squares, at least 2 rooks v 2 bishops so had to have it proven
the rooks were stronger. Thats when I noticed a rook could
cover both colors but a bishop was stuck on one color. It was an
interesting experiment.

Currently reading "The Amateur's Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery" by Jeremy Silman.

There were moments like that, for example, using well placed pawns to stop your opponent getting strong knight positions. Also identifying bad and good bishops, and what situations a bad bishop can actually be good.

Also there were a lot of those moments when going through the lessons on this site:

http://www.chesstactics.org/