As I mentioned in my last post, my next big tournament is coming up this weekend — the CalChess Labor Day Open — and I have not had time to do any real chess preparation. But last night I did some psychological preparation, and I’d like to talk a little bit about this.<\/p>\n
First, I remembered reading or hearing somewhere about an idea for chess improvement — go over your last ten losses and try to identify the reasons for the loss. I thought I might have heard piece of advice\u00c2\u00a0this from Andy Hortillosa<\/a>, but looking at his Chessville articles I don’t see it there. So maybe I got it\u00c2\u00a0from someone\u00c2\u00a0else… maybe one of the other readers of this blog?\u00c2\u00a0Anyway, it seemed to me like a very good idea.<\/p>\n Actually, I “overfulfilled the quota” and reviewed my last eighteen losses! That’s how many tournament games I have lost in the past year. That, in itself, was quite a sobering statistic. How many people lose 18 tournament games in one year? Not Kramnik. Not Kamsky. No, I have achieved a level of ineptitude that they can only dream of.<\/p>\n (If you’re curious, my overall record for the last year was +9 -18 =9, for a winning percentage of 37.5%. Normally I score\u00c2\u00a0well over 50%, so something is clearly wrong here. Well, one obvious reason is that I challenged myself by playing in a lot of master-class tournaments. But that is no excuse! I challenged myself and I failed the challenge, and now I have to understand why.)<\/p>\n Of the eighteen losses, two are games I haven’t analyzed carefully yet, so they are excluded from this analysis. Of the remaining sixteen losses, here were the reasons I identified for losing:<\/p>\n The numbers add to more than 16 because most of the losses had multiple reasons.<\/p>\n What conclusions can I draw from this? First, play simple chess! This means playing moves that are well-founded on strategic considerations, what Jesse Kraai calls “dynamic imbalances.” It means not talking myself out of the move that my gut says is best. (That happens to me a lot, especially when I go into a long think.) It may be useful to ask, “WWJD?” (“What would Jesse do?”) because he is a big advocate of simple chess. (Conveniently, “WWJD” also stands for “What would Jeremy (Silman) do?” which is another good question to ask.)<\/p>\n Second, I need to include more main-line openings in my repertoire. This is extremely painful for me to admit, because I’ve invested a lot of time in various offbeat variations, and Dana’s Opening Philosophy <\/a>says that main-line openings are overrated. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean they should be avoided completely. The numbers don’t lie: Against masters especially, I’m losing some points because of my openings.<\/p>\n Third, I played too many outright blunders this year. At times I felt like a class-C player again.\u00c2\u00a0I need to implement Andy Hortillosa’s\u00c2\u00a0eight-step approach to avoiding blunders, the most important point of which (in my opinion) is identifying your opponent’s most serious threats, even if they\u00c2\u00a0seem to be\u00c2\u00a0adequately defended<\/em>. The reason is that blunders often happen when you make a move that inadvertently allows him to carry out a threat that you thought was defended.<\/p>\n\n