Missed Opportunities in the Opening

Free Stuff in the Opening 

Oh boy, this game is kind of embarassing.    I'm play a Scotch opening and my opponent goes astray quite early, serving me up several opportunities to take pieces/pawns. But I didn't take them, fearing some kind of trap or gambit that just wasn't there. But the calculation was much more straightforward!

Two attackers - one defender.

Same again - two on one.

I should have taken the e5 pawn and the knight in the second image.  Lucky for me my opponent opened the door to me attacking his rooks and he rage quit on move 13. I'm almost 1500 rapid on lichess now.

Study-wise I'm leaning hard into the "On The Attack" series. It will take months to get through the whole lot but I'm determined to find out if it improves my play by recognizing over 1000 puzzle positions. So far....no. But I'm definitely improving at recognizing the puzzles themselves; on about the fourth repetition I'm starting to recall the moves by sight instead of calculating them (if I even can calculate them!).

I'm still completing my last two games in a chess.com tournament. I'm pretty sure I'll come second in my group with 7.5 out of 10, which is pretty good (EDIT: I won my last game, and the tiebreak! I don't know on what basis, but I will be in round 2!) . And I'm playing a lot of slow correspondence games against friends from the chess club. They are very solid players and I may need to start studying something new to learn what I'm lacking in those games. The occasional blunder that throws the game doesn't help either!

Visualisation as the Master Skill of Chess?

One intriguing training site I came across is Dont Move Till You See It. He suggests that if you train your visualization skills just 10 minutes a day you "unlock" the chess knowledge you have learned through studying because you're making your brain work harder during the exercises, compared to when you sit at a board to play. Your "chess mind" will be more forthcoming with the information after you've made it work hard at visualizing with your eyes closed.

His course is free to start; you get enough to work with and you can pay for premium content if you wish.

You can hear the creator talk about his system - and he gives away all the techniques for free - on Chess Journeys ep 82. I've got the five free emails describing the exercises but haven't done them yet.

As Fabiano Caruana says - "Visualization is probably the most important thing in Chess.

Mistakes and blunders, if we strip them down to the bare essence, are problems with visualization."