Improve your Puzzle Rush score by looking in the right place

Here's a nice tip for improving your puzzle rush score - at the start of each puzzle make sure you're looking at the TOP of the board (your opponent's pieces), not at your pieces along the bottom.  I don't remember conciously deciding to always start by looking at my own pieces, but I stumbled across this by accident and today I went from 21 in 3 minutes (which I've done many times) to hitting 22, then 23 in just three attempts.

I'm also doing aimchess's Tactics Challenge, where you do tactics puzzles with either 1, 5 or 10 minute time limit. You also have a time limit per puzzle: 10 seconds, 30 seconds or 2 minutes.  You pick the level of difficulty; try and pick something slightly challenging for yourself.  My "instant solving" stops around 1200; you want a length of time that matches a typical "have a think about this move" in a real game. If you like blitz, pick the ten seconds or 30 seconds options to simulate what you'll be doing in a real game.

I'm a bit annoyed at myself for pushing my puzzle rating up too high on lichess (2100) and chess.com (2500 peak).  It means when I click the "puzzles" button I'm looking at situations I can solve if I reeeeallly take my time.  Those are fun in a way, but not helpful for the typical game situation I find myself in.

I still make blunders in blitz/rapid games and I think that doing a ton of 1200-ish level puzzles, with tight time requirements, will help me.

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I recently played 12 5+3 blitz games in a row on lichess and lost 10 of them, dropping from 1350 to 1300.  I'm looking to see how the lines I played, and my opponent replied, matches up against the opening training I'm doing on chessable on the Scotch (white), French and Queen's Gambit Declined (both black). The short answer seems to be "not much - it goes off track after 4 or 5 moves most of the time".

If you're not sure how to do this, open the analysis board on lichess. Look at bottom right and click the leftmost button, the one that looks like a book.  Then click the third tab, the one with your name on it. Lichess is now showing the stats from your own games (rated only, no imports or casual). You can filter further with the gear icon on the right. 

Pro tip: change from your white games to black games by clicking the third tab again.  

Use this great tool to see where you typically makes mistakes or where your opponents tend to do the same.

I've found a really nice free endgame course

 "Basic Endgames" on Chessable is a free collection of exercises in endgames you should know. I've just started it but I know it's something I've been looking for. Chess endgames are full of motifs and drills/exercises that you just need to know, like how to get a single pawn to the other end of the board, or if you're on the other side, how to STOP a single pawn getting to the end of the board.

The sections include: 

1. Pawn Endgames
2. Queen + King vs King
3. Queen vs Pawn
4. Mating with King and Rook
5. Rook endings
6. Bishop vs pawn

It goes on, but you get the idea.  You can also practice some of these endings on Lichess in a way that doesn't demand perfect moves. 

I can also recommend the six specialized endgames section from lichess: pick the piece type you want to focus on (ie pawns, bishops & pawns, rooks & pawns etc) and try to do ten puzzles from that area. If they are too hard, dial down the difficult with the Difficulty setting in the bottom left. 

There is benefit in doing puzzles that take a while to figure out, but there's more benefit (I think!) in doing a bunch of puzzles that you can solve quite quickly - under 30 seconds maybe? That's the kind of speed you need for most games you'll play and practicing those fast ones until you see the answer without even thinking about it...that's a good feeling!

Never Give Up! Never Surrender!

 

Galaxy Quest (you really should see this,if you haven't)

What a game! I played some blitz (5+3) this afternoon and this game was an air-punching victory for me!

It started with a pretty dense cluster of pieces in the center, during which I made bad moves, swinging the game to my opponent. We are both rated around 1300 on lichess.  I shuffled my pieces around trying to fix my situation (the eval bar showed a steady -6 through this time) and threatened his queen; I thought for a second I had the queen trapped and I guess they thought that too, because they just moved their king, allowing the queen to be captured.

The green arrow shows that they could have moved their queen to safety, but didn't.  A couple of moves later I followed that with this nice little tactic, forking the rook and king while my knight is safely on e6 (it can't be captured because the queen pins that pawn), and my opponent resigned.

I know it's hard to press on with a game where you're badly down in material, but at the level most people play chess at (myself definitely included!) pieces can still be given away for free which could turn the game around.

Amazing! Another "perfect" game!

 After a rough night at the chess club I played a quick 15 minute game this morning and it turned out to be another "perfect" game, where the computer says I made no errors at all. 97% accuracy and only 22 centipawn loss.

A crucial moment - they put their queen in line with their king

My over the board (real-life) game feels really flabby, like I can't see what is happening in the game properly, but I'm doing much better on the computer screen. 

I'm almost through the five "on the attack" chess tactics puzzle courses I'm doing on chessable; when I'm done I will have a mental library of over 1000 puzzles that I've seen at least ten times each. It *should* help me in games; it certainly can't hurt. 

I left a comment on one of the rook puzzles, asking why the last move worked the way it did, and the author kindly replied and altered the text of the puzzle to explain it better. That was very nice of him!

Nice Shortcuts to Practice Against Bots

 I like practicing openings against the computer but you never know what the computer is going to do. Chess.com has a solution for this: you can specify which opening you want to practice.

This feature is under the "Learn - Practice - Openings" menu on chess.com. Don't confuse it for the "Learn - Openings" area, which is a different thing.

I created menu of bookmarks that go straight to the openings I want to practice.

Those are bookmarks to Chess.com's openings practice page - you pick which side you want to play and which strength of bot you want to play against.  

The other great features are

• You can wind the game back as far as you like and play a different move
• You can wind the game back and make THE COMPUTER play a different move!
• You can turn on/off assistance feature at any time, such as engine lines so you can see what the best moves are: turn them off for a challenge or turn them on to help learn.
• You can change the bot strength at any time during the game.

Use the small buttons on the bottom row: the second one lets you change the bot and the third one, the reversing circle arrow, resets the game back to the starting position. Use the "gear" icon to change the settings of the assistance features.

The last two links in my practice menu, playing against 1 e4 and 1 d4, I had to custom-make as those aren't considered "openings" by chess.com, but I think it's valuable to play against them when you don't know what opening is coming.

Practice vs 1. e4

Practice vs 1.d4

The only drawback with the customizing is that the game defaults to the 3200 bot, so be sure to change it before you start playing, unless you are looking to be crushed!

What Opportunity Tactics Did I Miss? Use tactics.bitcrafter to find them

 I found this nice tool at tactics.bitcrafter that examines your games on lichess and finds the tactics you missed from the last 25 games you played there: these are situations where your opponent left the door open for a big hit from you and you didn't take the easy money.

Here's an easy example of one I missed - a simple king-queen fork, with the pieces out in the open! I took five seconds to overlook this golden opportunity but instead I retreated my rook; I faintly remember not noticing that my bishop was covering that square. I went on to, undeservedly, win the game on time.

This one is more subtle - I had a 7 point swing in my favor waiting if I spotted this Nb4. It would allow me to get that knight to c2 and fork the king/rook and white would have a hard time stopping it cleanly.

The site does NOT include errors that you made on your move - it's just positions where you had an opportunity due to your opponents blunder and didn't see it. I think this is a very valuable tool because you can identify gaps in your perception of your opponents moves.

One thing to remember - it only finds tactics in game where you used the "Request A Computer Analysis" button on the analysis board.

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."