Current study plans I might or might not regret later.

After a long time doing absolutely everything else besides chess, I find myself back at the only thing left do to: more chess. So I wondered: ‘How does one improve his skills?’ In a rather unfortunate turn of events, nobody appears to have found an efficient way of doing this which involves spending absolutely no time nor effort into some stupid learning process. So I guess there is nothing left to do than, ughh, putting effort into things and, yuk, take time to study things. Life is really unfair to those that embrace a lazy attitude.

Where to start then? Empirical evidence (a.k.a. me a few years ago) suggests that playing blitz each day till 3 a.m. in the morning does not correlate with increased playing strength, strangly enough. Even more shocking might be that passively watching chess grandmasters talking about games doesn’t seem to have changed much either. Then, the unthinkable happened and I opened a chess book. In my best defense, I was forced to accept it when I won some tournament, so it isn’t as if I willingly accept the existence of these devilish objects called books. Anyways, I’m still not sure whether it helped or not.

What does seem to help, is learning openings... My opening knowledge has always been like a footbal-goallie not knowing he’s allowed to use his hands: it’s lowering the overall performance. So, having absolutely no plan whatsoever, I just started playing random openings during blitz games, alternating between 1. c4, 1. d4, 1. e4 and 1. f4, and just analysing afterwards the positions that arose frequently. Amazingly, going out of my (very narrow) comfort zone actually increased my rating, and even more surprisingly, the openings I had the least experience with, 1. e4 and 1. f4, actually scored the most wins according to Lichess’ statistics (N=500 games or so). My guess is that these openings force me to get out of auto-pilot-mode and more thinking leads to better chess.

So, to keep me motivated analysing more positions, I hereby decide to write my findings in openly available blogg-form. It’s not written for any specific audience, in fact, it’s mainly for myself to build up some nice record, but perhaps others like reading it and/or find it useful too. (Although I implicitely expressed my opinions on passive learning earlier here, so be warned...) Besides, I just like writing about pseudo-interesting stuff; it keeps me of the streets. As a proud 2200 fide rated patzer the level of these analyses will be, like, sub-master level I guess, if that means anything. So, Magson Carlnus, if you’re reading this, you might wanna skip this, for your own good.

I considered setting unrealistically high goals, setting strict deadlines and demanding superb writing to enhance burn-out chances. However, on second thought, I decided to go with the boring old-fashioned relaxed approach. I don’t know how frequent I post, I don’t know how deep I will analyse, I don’t have a list with openings I will cover and I won’t bother about writing style and typos and such... I just write whatever springs to mind. Perhaps this will be the only post, who knows?!

An unexpected early success

My initial efforts already paid of actually. I started playing 1. f4 in some over-the-board tournaments, and although this is generally considered an inferior first move (according to ‘the dull people’), it is in fact very playable and avoids deep opening lines. Because most people aren’t prepared, they typically tend to just chose ‘a healthly setup’, see diagram, which evil-me just happened to have analysed at home.

My opponent erred with 7. ...b6, which allows white to quickly execute it’s main plan of pushing the e-pawn and controlling the center. Taking the pawn twice runs into the little tactic of Ng5 in the end, winning the pawn back with a reasonable position for white. My oppenents correctly realised his small oversight, but proceded to find a cure worse than the disease. He played 8. ...e6, after which I could close the center with 9. e5 Nfd7 10. d4, reaching a closed-French-like position. Luckely, I happened to have also, very vaguely, analysed some French positions, and I realised this one was very favourable to me: black has spend 3 tempi on the moves g6, Bg7 and b6, which are all really silly in most of these types of French positions. Moreover, I found blacks play gets really poor if his knight is stuck on d7, and because I firmly control the typical ...f6 break, this position is just really good for white. My opponent continued to play very well from this point on, but the opening disadventage proved to be too severe to overcome.

If the above paragraph leaves the impression that I only included it to test out Lichess’ board editor, then you are absolutely right, spot on. However, it’s also a prove of concept. I find it remarkable that studying helped me so much. Not only did I play these ideas, which I would otherwise never have found probably, I could also see them almost instantly, whilst my opponent was completely in the dark. I knew the e4-Ng5 idea exists if the long diagonal gets weakened. I knew closing the center was very strong for me. I would have known what to do if black would have played the stronger 7. ...Nc6. It was nice being confident during the openingsphase for once.

Next up is selecting a new opening to analyse. The possibilities are endless, hmm...