Thursday, October 11, 2007

Recklessness On The Board

Yesterday, while I was playing against my brother-in-law, while in the midst of an extremely messy situation, I suddenly found that because of the position of our pieces, tactics were flying all over the board with pins, counter-pins, exchange sacrifices and skewers. No doubt some of the moves were less than optimal, but overall, it was a very fun game and we enjoyed it very much.

It was after this game that I noticed my preference for unbalanced sharp positions are heightened where I can strive for dynamic positions. While I used to worry about losing pawns and all that, I find that if I can create enough headaches, unless my opponent is a better tactician than me, he/she is going to encounter problems. Some players I played with are happy to take the pawn that I sacrificed and then spend the remainder of the game trying to defend an extra pawn - which kind of works for me.

I also noticed one more thing, the players at my club are a real conservative lot. They want to move slowly, positioning pieces, not being aggressive etc. I am more aggressive (and reckless), if something looks good, I go for it rather than miss the window of opportunity. Of course, I would not do this in real competitions (I will be calculating far deeper) but for 5 minutes blitzes, they are just pure fun.

I also noticed that 5 minute blitz games are terrible for my chess and I usually end up in inferior positions (that's because I normally don't play my opening repertoires in 5 minute blitz games as I see no point in them as I could do that by playing on the Net instead to sharpen my opening repertoire).

Hmmm.... my endgame technique is still not much better these days after going through Convekta's training set. One of my games, I failed to see a drawing line for an endgame. Hopefully, this would improve as I'm now working my way through the 2nd training module.

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