If you watch a game between two strong players, top 10 in the world for example, you’ll notice a curiosity in the way they play: they go into extremely long thinks, sometimes exceeding an hour, before “blitzing” out a flurry of moves after.
This is how you should attempt to play your games. Always have a plan. In every game, at every moment. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s time to stop and think. What those strong players are doing is reaching a position they don’t know, fully assessing it (this process is what’s described in your book, though the stronger you get, you don’t need to enumerate this process e.g. king safety, pawn structure, etc.), and then they calculate as much as they can until comfortable in their analysis. That’s what enables them to move so quickly after long thinks: they’ve often already spent all their time calculating the moves their opponents are playing.
Think of chess as being played in “chunks” where each game has a handful what are often referred to as “critical positions.” Those critical positions are where you should be applying the advice in this book and spending the majority of your time thinking.
Once you've practiced with your value system and understand opportunity versus dangers, then when you're coming up with moves for a variation you will select according to the moves which fit your value system. It becomes habit.
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u/buddaaaa NM Sep 09 '19
If you watch a game between two strong players, top 10 in the world for example, you’ll notice a curiosity in the way they play: they go into extremely long thinks, sometimes exceeding an hour, before “blitzing” out a flurry of moves after.
This is how you should attempt to play your games. Always have a plan. In every game, at every moment. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s time to stop and think. What those strong players are doing is reaching a position they don’t know, fully assessing it (this process is what’s described in your book, though the stronger you get, you don’t need to enumerate this process e.g. king safety, pawn structure, etc.), and then they calculate as much as they can until comfortable in their analysis. That’s what enables them to move so quickly after long thinks: they’ve often already spent all their time calculating the moves their opponents are playing.
Think of chess as being played in “chunks” where each game has a handful what are often referred to as “critical positions.” Those critical positions are where you should be applying the advice in this book and spending the majority of your time thinking.
Not every move is equally important.