Things have taken an interesting turn since we have started this thing.Primarily, it has worked better than expected, we have both gotten much stronger. He mostly through doing exercises through PCT. For now I am going to assume that it is the actual exercise that is helping. But I suspect that there is something to be said for just actual chess brain engagement that is helping.
I have also improved, and since I am not doing nearly as many tactical exercises, it pretty much has to be by dramatically increased chess engagement. We are both seeing the board better, we can see many more combinations, but mostly just the overall strength of play has improved. But we have both taken on a very common sort of adult problem.
Now this could merely be a matter of being able to see it. Sort of a contrast issue. When we weren't playing as well, this just seemed like part of not playing as well. But it doesn't feel like it. It feels new. It feels like a symptom of comfortableness. We are blundering more often. It is sort of like, now that we can do a behind the back-360 jam, we are tripping over our own shoelaces. And a point is a point is a point.
Surely, we should be able to correct this. That we can stop being quite so comfortable at the board. When we were each a bit scared, we may have played weaker, but we made fewer blunders. It was easier to play real-chess each and every move. Now, the games look much better, and if our opponents blunder first, the games look a bit dominating. But now we are blundering first. We are not trying to blunder, our vision is being obscured by our own plans, and we just play before looking.
We have a tournament this weekend that we are playing at. I may even get to play as well, we shall see. I have talked this over with my best friend. We have seen it. He has the plasticity and coachability of youth, so we will see if he can over come the problem. If not, I think that he will need to actually take some time off, as it is sometimes really hard to break bad habits in the middle of them being developed. We shall see.
More Later...
5 comments:
Can you backup the claim that you are blundering more by Fritz?
I used to collect those great stickers. Are they Mad or Cracked or what? I can't remember, but I used to love them.
BDK... I think they are Wacky... And believe it or not, there is a new series out this year...
http://www.wackypackages.org/
Tempo,
Maybe, but probably not. It is sort of that one datapoint makes a trend kind of thing. Like our economy.
But you know it anyways. And just in playing him OTB I can sort of tell the quality of the game and the errors. I could be totally off, but I don't think so.
Have you been analyzing your games? I just posted about something similar in my blog. Try to do it as soon after the game as possible, that way you can remember what you were thinking/feeling when you blundered. Basically what was going through your head when said blunder was committed.
This is wang by the way, having trouble logging in...
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