GP Tactics: Endgame Oversight

I will be publishing some of the tactical problems, labeled with the “GP Tactics” tag,  that were data-mined from my own games, as described in this previous post. 
A tactics set generated from your own games not only provides variety in difficulty level, but variety in motifs.  For example, many of the problems involved endgame positions.
For the position below. Black seems to be making progress on the queenside.  Analyze and evaluate 1…Nb4:

Solution after the fold

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Creating Tactics Problem Sets From Your Games Using ChessBase Products

I’ve played a lot of blitz online.  A LOT of blitz.  It seemed to me that if these games could be mined for tactical errors, they would make an ideal set of simple tactics problems for drills.  Manually mining them for gold, however, would take forever.  I routinely store and analyze my blitz games, but have been negligent in saving positions into databases for tactics or blunders (a project I started but didn’t keep up with).

One day I thought: what if I take Rybka and tell it to analyze the games to a depth of 5 ply?  That should roughly correspond to a Chernev and Reinfeld-ish “Seeing Three Moves Ahead” or simpler level of tactics, and should be fairly quick.   I was familiar with the ChessBase interfaces for Rybka and Fritz and new that it could automatically generate “Training Annotations”: when you load the game or position, it jumps to a position and opens a window prompting you for the correct move.  I decided to test this idea with my 800 most recent Blitz games (about 10% of my total games on record).

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Pardon the Mess...

{Edit: I'm pretty much done tinkering with the blog layout.  I still can't get one-click editing to work, but split posts do.  I've decided not to delete this post to maintain the comment thread.}

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Shifting Focus

{Coincidentally, in an interesting example of parallel evolution, there seem to be many other bloggers that have recently taken self-improvement much more seriously as well. Check out Blunderprone's blog for more info on his ACIS (Adult Chess Improvement Seekers) movement.}

 For the last while I've been content to learn more about chess –endings, opening repertoire, reading some of the classic game collections such as Alekhine's NY 1924 and Nottingham 1936 tournament books, and Botvinnik's 100 Selected Games, etc. However, as I enter my 40^th year of existence, I look at the sidebar of this blog ("hopes to become a B-class player before senility sets in") and the subtitle ("Do as I Say, Not As I Do") and have decided to do more of what I say.

For me, I identified the following areas as needing the most improvement:

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Suggestions for Digital Chess Clocks?

I'm getting ready to start playing rated tournaments again, and I've decided to get with the 21st century and replace my analog clock with a digital one. The main features I'm looking for are durability (I'm worried about opponents bashing it around in time trouble) and readability (so I can record the time taken by me and my opponent after every move easily). I'm assuming that all digital clocks allow a time increment, which is another mandatory feature.

I would welcome any suggestions for clocks that fit the bill. Price is a lesser consideration--I want to find a good deal, but I don't want to buy something that's going to break after a few rounds of blitz. Some of these plastic clocks I've been seeing my opponents with lately, such as this and this, just feel like they're too delicate.

Heisman's "Three Showstoppers"

Last month, Dan Heisman's column at ChessCafe.com ("The Three Show Stoppers") set a lightbulb off for me. Which is odd, because he's discussing issues of time management, piece safety and piece activity that he's written about before. However, these concepts came together to form a "perfect storm" of chess instruction.

A theme of Heisman's is that there are certain basic skills such as time management and playing what Heisman calls "real chess" consistently on every move of the game. The trick, of course, is consistently. If 49 moves out of 50 you play properly, and 1 move out of 50 you launch a stinkbomb of a move because you moved too fast or a piece was hanging, then your chess strength is severely diminished. I think that, for most people, working on improving this aspect of their game will likely produce greater dividends than just about any other chess-related activity.

Easily said, but as the byline of this blog says: "Do as I say, not as I do." It takes gumption to work on this, and if most of your chess is online blitz then you're not going to be able to play "real chess" a la Heisman unless you're pretty gifted. However, in this column Heisman reduces the essentials to three principles:

• Time Management: not moving too fast or too slow, but using the appropriate amount of time for each move
• Safety
• Piece Activity

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Mate in Two

The following Mate in Two problem is from Yusupov's Build Up Your Chess I, and I think it's the hardest mate in two problem I've come across so far.



I'm not going to give away the answer, but it's a good test of your ability to analyze a dense thicket of short variations.

Laszlo Polgar's Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games has a ton of mate-in-two problems in it, and I occasionally turn to a random page and try to solve some. Some of them are really devilish, and are good practice for practicing Kotov-like analysis (trying to analyze each branch of a variation once and only once).

I'm going to try and get a couple more chapters of Yusupov's book knocked out this afternoon.