Nice work. I broke 1500 fairly recently using the same philosophy: spend more time analyzing every move, looking for positional weaknesses on your opponents' side as well as your own. Now the hard part has been maintaining the rating while playing much more challenging opponents. Good luck, and don't worry about rating slipping, you'll soon recover.
Congratz! Me too 🙂 I like you expect to start dropping again, I have shot up by again like you spending more times on my moves and lowering my game amount.
I have also found that if I take a bit more time to look over the moves my opponent could make but look totally irrelevant or harmless to the current position that I find threats against me I would not have seen if I hadnt started looking at the unlikely or seemingly pointless moves, so my advice form someone not that good would be to do exactly that, look at my rating bar, it has shot up 100 points in one go just by doing what I have said here, and I had a higher rated player really helping my rethink my play after a couple of games against him, so my other advice if possible is to play some games against a higher rated player than you with decent commentry during the games.
Its been said here a few times that with some discipline and the exercise of proper board visualization (examining the board consistently for threats, checks, and captures), that 1600+ may well be attainable by doing that and that alone.
That said, if you combine that with any of the other methods of self-improvement available to you, you will progress faster and farther. As you get higher up the rating scale, board visualization and discipline alone are just not enough anymore. Though its certainly a good place to start. You can know all about the finer points of chess strategy: good vs bad Bs, N outposts, strong squares and colour complexes, isolated d pawns, hanging pawns, pawn nails, and on and on... but if you routinely hang pieces or drop them to simple tactical shots, all that knowledge won't help you much. But it will once your board visualization ability catches up and you learn to focus.
Originally posted by Squelchbelch Talking about boozers...
Where were you last Thursday? Another missed chance to get your own back on me at the club 😉
Ive been so busy recently, over christmas I was just out all the time, I have started a new job now too so I have either been working late or I have just been to knackered frankly to concentrate on OTB, but I seem to have improved a little here (not including our games haha, must study that bloody gambit sometime!) so I do intend to return to OTB as soon as I can... oh did I mention that I am trying to move too? so things are a bit crazy right now.
I resent the sly boozer accusation, I hardly ever booze, unless its a friday.
Or a saturday.
21 Jan '08 16:36
yihaaaa
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