Lately I've just been blogging when I analyze one of my own games with interesting results, so posts are fairly sporadic.
As a 1. d4 player, it's important to have some idea of what's going on in the King's Indian. This means knowing what the pawn structure will look like, where the pieces go, and a general plan for what we're playing for. In the vari... Read more »
I recently completed a wildly tactical game against the French, including a sacrifice of a whole rook to generate an attack on the king. By all rights I could have lost this game on a few different occasions, but it's easy to slip up when your... Read more »
The previous examples of King and Pawn endings (K&P I, K&P II) have featured fairly straightforward winning positions. In this entry, I'll show some games with a little more subtlety. As a result, there are more mistakes in the game pl... Read more »
A friend of mine is well known to play the king's gambit and loves open tactical games. I play 1. d4 and do better in a positional game. I typically meet his 1. e4 with the French or Sicilian, but in this game decided to let him play his... Read more »
One of the small pleasures in chess is creating puzzles from our own games. In a way we try to immortalize those moments where our hard work in chess study meets up with the good fortune of fortuitously placed pieces. Before I get to exampl... Read more »
In a previous blog post (K&P Endings I) I looked at trading to a King and Pawn ending where the winning side had an extra pawn and bringing it home to promotion didn't pose a big challenge. Sometimes we can trade pieces into a materially e... Read more »
Certain positional features should set off tactical buzzers in your mind. One of these is a king with few or no defensive pieces around him. The king doesn't like to be left alone and can often be dethroned rapidly if none of his friends are h... Read more »
If you make a mistake in the opening, you have a chance to outplay your opponent in the middle game to make up for it. Mistakes in the middle game can sometimes be overcome in the endgame. But mistakes in the endgame are most often followed by a h... Read more »
The Knight's unique movement makes it an ideal piece for double attacks. New players are often introduced to this idea quite rudely when they get their rooks forked with a monarch or perhaps a fork of the king and queen. The simple forks fade ... Read more »
Pretty much all chess players learn early on that rooks are more valuable than minor pieces (knights and bishops). Winning a rook for a minor piece is called winning "the exchange". We learn how to use our knights to fork and we grow to ... Read more »
Welcome to my blog! In the USCF I am rated 1921.
The content posted here is from my real chess experience, either games I've played or observed. I'll try to put an instructive twist on it. So if you're looking for a glimpse into how a B player thinks about the game, check in and see what I've got. Well, recently my rating has gone over 1800, so perhaps I should list myself as class A instead of class B, but it's not a huge difference.
LoomisUnited States
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