Blunders and Super Blunders

After a recent Rapid game where my opponent hung a bishop and I never noticed and went on to lose, I started thinking about how often this sort of thing happens, where an obvious, catastrophic mistake is made, the sort of error that you expect from a beginner. Not all blunders are created equal and I decided to call these mistakes Super Blunders. With a typical blunder you might allow your opponent a tactic, but it's often not easy for the opponent to find and you might get away with it. With a Super Blunder the mistake is obvious and results in a quick checkmate or loss of material (or missing an obvious quick checkmate or gain of material). Regular blunders usually swing the position from winning to losing, but on a more theoretical level where the opponent still has to play accurately to realize the advantage. Super Blunders give the opponent a comfortable position that's easy to convert. When you make a Super Blunder you can lose to almost any opponent, no matter how weak they might normally be, because you make it so easy for them.

I thought about this after my own recent Super Blunder. It seems like I make them way more often than I ought to based on my online rating. I wondered if part of the reason my OTB rating is so much lower than my online ratings predict is because when I'm online I don't play many opponents with ratings lower than mine in slow games whereas in OTB chess a majority of my opponents are lower rated (although if my rating continues to drop this will not be true for much longer). Maybe I'm making Super Blunders that are causing me to lose OTB games that I otherwise wouldn't, whereas in online games I would lose many of those games anyway so it doesn't affect my rating as much.

I play so few OTB games that I could easily check, so I did. I found one game where I lost to a much lower rated player because of a Super Blunder, but that was it. Most of my losses to lower rated players were because I had an equal or superior position but got into time trouble. Severe time trouble often causes this type of error, but I consider that a separate issue. The Super Blunders I'm talking about in this blog entry are the kind where I have enough time, but make the Super Blunder anyway.

So I checked my recent online games at Lichess to see how often I actually do this. I only counted Rapid and Classical games; I make many Super Blunders in blitz games but that's the nature of blitz and I'm not concerned about that. Going back an arbitrary amount of time, several months, I counted 65 total blunders. For each one I jotted down the type of error.

I was somewhat surprised to find that at least in my recent games I don't commit many Super Blunders after all. I never missed mate in one, either for myself or my opponent. I hung a piece once, and I missed a hanging piece twice. That was it. Three Super Blunders.

That's not to say that many of the other blunders weren't severe, and depending on how strict you want to be about your definition of a Super Blunder maybe I made a few more. I missed a two-move tactical sequence seven times, four by my opponents and three by myself, so if you want to count those that's fair enough. My quick blunder review simply reinforced what seems intuitively correct: the more obvious the blunder, the less common it is.

Almost all the really bad blunders are tactical. Among the way I chose to categorize my blunders my most common type was the miscalculation of an exchanging sequence. This happened nine times. Either I misjudged which player would have more material at the end of the trades, got the move order wrong, or missed an important resource by one of the players in the middle of the sequence. These are the critical moments in games that you have to get right, and if you don't you lose.

At my level about the only type of error that I wouldn't categorize as tactical but nevertheless has a huge impact on the outcome of the game is an endgame error, where a mistake often swings the result from winning to drawing or drawing to losing and sometimes directly from winning to losing. But even here the mistake is often subtle enough that the opponent doesn't recognize the error and counter-blunders. Endgame technique is not something players at my level are very good at.
Getting back to the subject of Super Blunders, if they're not actually that common in my games, why does it seem like I'm always making them? I can think of several reasons. First, because they're both so obvious and so devastating they stick in your mind for a long time afterward, and you forget that you played ten other games where you didn't make any Super Blunders. Second, as I mentioned above, Super Blunders are fairly common in blitz games, and even though I don't play a ton of blitz I still rack up a lot more total games of blitz than longer games and therefore make a lot of Super Blunders. Third, I do even more tactics exercises than blitz games and tactics puzzles sometimes feature hanging pieces or mates in one. Most of the time I see them but occasionally I don't, and just because of the sheer volume of puzzles it's inevitable that I will make some Super Blunders. When I do I remember them; rather that seeing the soluion and saying "okay, I missed that," my reaction is usually more like "how could I possibly have missed that? I'm so stupid!"

At least in my slower games I've done a fairly good job avoiding Super Blunders but they still happen, and it's distressing because as I mentioned above a Super Blunder will often cost you the game even against a very weak opponent. Super Blunders occur often enough in my blitz games and in tactics puzzles that I know I have to take my time to avoid them. I'm jealous of people who can blitz out safe move after safe move after safe move without seemingly even thinking about it, using practically no clock time, while I'm plodding along taking a minute or more on every single move (and occasionally a lot more) making sure I'm not blundering. I've become frustrated lately that daily tactics work has not really changed this at all, and in blitz games I still blunder as much as ever, including Super Blunders that pretty much end the game immediately even in blitz. So I take my time, try to avoid blunders and take my chances with possible time trouble later. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.