David's Chess Journey - Installment 72

Haters Are Going to Hate

After my last blog post, a Lichess user messaged me and told me that I should stop writing blogs and practice more - that I was wasting my time. I just ignored the message and deleted it. I was then playing a player in the 2000s and blundered my Queen. I wanted to play out the game to see if I could find any chances, and this player berated me the entire time. Yes, I should have disabled chat, but I didn't think of it at the time as I was so disappointed about what happened. I'm not sure why this element exists on such a great place like Lichess, but my hope is that it somehow finds another platform to haunt. I know that these are very minor issues compared to what many have experienced on this platform, particularly women, but they are annoyances that make this place, which is a very happy place for me, less awesome. But, as the saying goes, haters are going to hate. The key is to not let the hate negatively impact our experience here (or elsewhere for that matter!)

Unique Insight from Casual Games

I had a lesson this morning with https://lichess.org/coach/Mischuk_D who I believe to be one of the best coaches out there for someone like me. I was on vacation most of the time between our last lesson and this lesson and had just been playing games for pure enjoyment without full focus. As you can imagine, I lost nearly all the games given that I still set the controls at 0-+500. Rather than lecturing me for playing without full focus (which would have been entirely fair if my goal was to improve over enjoy the game), he actually took the time to look through my games and drew out a common mistake that I was making in them. We will get to that in a minute. But, something that he said really struck me. He said something to the effect that sometimes games where we are using intuition more than calculation can produce more helpful lessons because they can sometimes expose a lack of understanding more than games where we are at 100% focus and can calculate our way to the right answer without really understanding why the move we choose is the right move. I had never heard that before, and thought it was an interesting insight worth sharing.

Bishop v. Knight

The big theme that Dmytro unearthed from sorting through my "lack of awesome collection of games" was that I fundamentally didn't understand when a bishop was better than a knight and vice versa. Our lesson was mainly focused on working through several simple positions explaining the basic concepts and then looking at key moments in my games where I misapplied the concepts that we just went through together. It is one thing to read out this imbalance in Silman (which I have done), it is another thing to have an amazing coach like Dmytro teach you the concept through your own games. I think this is the greatest benefit of having a coach.

Petrov Insights

Dmytro also helped me understand why I was losing all my games in the Petrov. In short, I was playing like it was the Caro rather than the Petrov. I've played the Caro so long with black and have become so used to fixed/closed positions, that changing to an open position mindset has proven to be very difficult for me. This plays into the bishop/knight issue that I mentioned previously, but also highlighted the fact that development is even more important in open positions that result from playing the Petrov rather than the Caro and that defensive moves that are my natural inclination are much more costly in the Petrov. I still have a long way to go in learning this new opening, but these were some helpful insights that I hadn't thought of.

I don't anticipate much serious chess for the balance of this month, but I in the games I do play, I'm going to try and apply what I've relearned about the bishop v. knight relationship and continue to explore the Petrov.

Until the next installment!