by mjacobsca
unic wrote:
mjacobsca wrote:
I think that tactics are the weapons that grand strategies are based on, and no serious chess player can play without a thorough understanding of tactics in every position. At lower levels, most games are decided by a) blunders, and b) tactics. If your rating is 1150, those are the two things you should be working on first and foremost.
Yeah, that was (as I said in my OP) my impression. However, the question is how to work on those in a good way?
The best way to work on fixing blunders is to focus on technique and routine to slow yourself down and help you dot your I's and cross your T's. Chess is about patience and self-control. You have to have focus to see the board, and if you are lazy or distracted your board awareness falls. It requires effort to look at an opponent's move, and analyze why they may have made it, not to mention look for any new dangers that may have surfaced. Yet a player who thinks his plan is so rock-solid that his opponent could not have messed it up will find themselves on the wrong side of a checkmate every time. You have to fight impulsivity, laziness, cockiness on every move. This is the real battle of Chess. It's actually my favorite part, because I think it helps me elsewhere in life as well.
Regarding tactics, the best way to work on those is to do them. Everyone has their own favorite tactics book, but I prefer tactics that come from real-world situations rather than made-up games. But there is no substitute for doing them, over and over, over and over. You WILL get better if you do this.