You open too passively. You seem to love playing b3 as your first move with white. It's nice getting your bishop on the a1-h8 diagonal, but you're grabbing it before you know if it's going to be locked up or not. Since you're not getting center control with B3 you are giving your opponent the chance to make that decision. Try E4 or D4. You can play B3 later if it is advantageous.
You give up too early. Going down a piece does not mean that you should resign. You need to play further into the game and give yourself a chance to see and execute some clever tactics-some good pins and forks and skewers and combos. At our rating blunders are common-you might have just made the first one.
Good job following GP's suggestions on thread titles.
Cheers,
Darax
It's called playing an opening.
I lose because my opening sucks? Homey don't think so. I lose because I play bad chess. At least I'm getting good enough now to see bad moves and determine good and bad players by how they play. I lose to some really bad players. But I beat some good ones too. But over the past couple of days I've been losing to bad players.
I'm better than all the people that beat me.
Wait a minute...they're beating me.
Regardless of ratings, playing styles, etc, on any given day you play at the level of the game you play. And regardless of how many stupid moves your opponent made and how many chances you missed, on that day the player to come out on top was the better player.
Originally posted by EladarI've actually found myself losing to a couple RHP 1300's players and wondered WTF? What I think was happening is I wasn't taking the game seriously. What I mean by that is I wasn't respecting them as chess players.
It's called playing an opening.
I lose because my opening sucks? Homey don't think so. I lose because I play bad chess. At least I'm getting good enough now to see bad moves and determine good and bad players by how they play. I lose to some really bad players. But I beat some good ones too. But over the past couple of days I've been losing to bad players.
Even though I'm rated 150-200 more, they still can come up with clever attacks. I still have to take them seriously and consider my moves as carefully as I would a stronger opponent.
Since you say they "suck" perhaps the same is happening to you.
Edit: A more accurate statement is I wasn't respecting their game. I respect everyone as players who enjoy chess.
Originally posted by EladarIn that case, you know what you have to work on, right?
I never said I was better than the people who beat me. 😉
Darax has a point about the b3 opening though. It's a fine, though somewhat passive opening if you play it right, but what I've seen from the games I looked at, you're not utilizing the potential of the fianchettoed bishop at all. From your last game:
For the first part of the game, the bishop sat there staring at the c and d pawn, looking like a third, slightly bigger pawn. Eventually, the c pawn moved, but the sorry bishop continued to bite into the granite wall of his own blockaded d pawn.
Black's bishops, on the other hand, which only took one move a piece to develop, both have active roles and are enjoying the view of tasty open diagonals.
So, in conclusion, the fianchetto has it's place in chess, but only if you make use of the bishop.
Just my advice of course, there are other openings such as the KIA where the bishop eyes its own pawns for a bit, but in general if that's the case, it's not worth spending two moves developing it.