| When 5 days per move feels like lightning fast |
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| Written by Sciurus | |||
| Monday, 02 July 2007 | |||
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 correspondence chess. However, I changed my approach a little: I reduced the number of games I play and try to calculate the possible consequences of my moves very carefully. I try to do this without moving the pieces during analysis to emulate "real" chess where using an analysis board is illegal, in the hope that my chess move calculations become more accurate. Now that I am taking these games very seriously, having only a couple of days thinking time per move seems to be rather short. For instance, I am currently involved in an endgame where both sides have one rook and 4 pawns left. The position looks pretty even but I think I have winning chances and I try to be careful not to blunder (like I usually do sooner or later). I often look at the position for a while and analyze some variations but no idea comes up in my brain, regardless of how hard I think. Often, I decide to postpone making a move - tomorrow may always be a better day, right? Some days fall flat because I have to put more hours into the dayjob and suddenly the deadline looms - only 21 hours left and still no plan!
That doesn't sound so bad if you are use to play Finally, sudden inspiration hits my brain like a lightning. The king does bot have to be a victim, it can also fight a rook at close distance! Clearly not a genuinely new development in the history of chess, but something along this line of thought gave me an idea for the next moves. Most of the time, I simply don't care that much about the next move but sometimes I get all worked up if I see a winning chance in a close game. Does chess become an obsession? Now you may ask if I put more thinking time into making a move, does it enhance the results? As usual the answer is unclear at best... Sometimes it helps but in many cases, the plans I come up with are simply too fancy for my still very limited chess technique and my attack ends up with a badly messed up position or, even worse, with major loss of material due to some miscalculation. In many cases, ideas for risky piece sacrifices start popping up in my head after staring at a position for too long and simply don't want to leave again - a feverish start for a good reason to justify starts. Discipline is required in these cases to convince myself that sacrificing a piece is simply not worth it when the outcome relies on my opponent making a mistake. Therefore, putting more thinking time in my moves seems to worsen my results in the short term. But I am still hopeful to see some improvement, hmmm, someday (maybe?). Comments (3)
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written by dwv16, July 03, 2007 ...
written by Sciurus, July 03, 2007
You wish!
 Even though it seems that I cannot win against you with taking my time, I still plan to do my best. Our games are next on my list (after making a few careless moves in other games while being tired last night, I should really make it a habit NOT to move when I am tired.) Kotov is probably correct. The difference between me and a GM is "only" that the candidate moves that pop up in my head are usually not the best, if not outright blunders. I for my part would be already happy if I could stop myself from considering moves that clearly just leave pieces hanging. Oh well, nobody said it would be easy to play good chess, right? ... written by dwv16, July 03, 2007
Everything changes, and one of these days my win streak will be but a distant memory.
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 03 July 2007 ) | |||
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Play chess in style - 
Kotov wrote that GMs don't calculate more, they just calculate the most likely candidates. Why don't you try that? Seems easy enough!