Chess Improvement Blog | Week 14

90% of my chess work this week was analyzing my games from the recent tournament and today I finally got to study a bit. Looking at your losses for a whole week is really though, but I got through it :) . Spending a whole session on something instead of splitting my time up every day really seems to work out for me at the moment, although let's see how the calculation days will go.

The conclusions I drew from my I analysis

First of all: I need some sort of thinking process. At the moment I kind of think and calculate based on vibes, and the vibes don't include a blunder check. And that was showing a lot, especially this tournament:
I proceeded to lose the endgame ...
So I'm intending to at least do conscious blunder checks in my next few games.

Another problem were positional missevaluations:
... c5 is a terrible move, because white gets their gambited pawn back and black gets basically nothing in return, but to me it looked like I was liberating myself with it. By clearing the center I soon allowed Qa4-g4 and got obliterated, while I was still suffering in a cramped position and lacking development. I'm hoping that by continuing my studies I'll eventually be able to evaluate positions better.

Another big issue were the endgames:
Easy position, nothing to lose right? White can grind a bit but in no world is white losing this ... except I did. I played bad move after bad move and somehow got myself in trouble. This is an extremly painful one, but I realized that the move I gravitate to in endgames are really bad. I don't have a feel for where my pieces are placed best and I have an especially hard time defending worse endgames. So I have to work on my (practical) endgames, and ideally rather soon. But I hope with the time I'm dedicating to studying I can finish Hellstens positional book and move on to his endgame book (or Silman's, we'll see).

Those we're the biggest problems. There were a few more but if I fix or atleast improve on these three I should improve big time.

I have a though classical game next week, that I'm hoping to win and by extension bounce back from this bad performance. It's a monthly knock out tournament, so if I win I can look foreward to another classical game. Thanks for reading, see you next week :)