1. e4 d5 2. Nc3 c6 3. d4 e6 4. Nf3 Na6 5. Bg5 f6 6. Bf4 Bd6 7. e5 fxe5 8. dxe5 Bc7 9. Bg5
This is a great example of why opening principles matter, not openings. You did great in this one. You developed pieces reasonable quickly, didn’t hang any pieces, and you’re one move away from castling into a safe and intact corner. Now, does this opening make any sense in any way in higher-level play? Absolutely not. Almost every move is bananas at a higher level. But they’re fine right now because… tactics decide your games. Diving into the subtleties of why each move could have been this or that isn’t useful and takes attention away from where the rapid improvement opportunities really lie for you at present.
Nf6 10. exf6
Excellent! Black played a rote move – …Nf6 is almost always a fine way to block that bishop – and you punished it.
10...gxf6 11. Bh6 Be5 12. Nxe5!
A nice move. Taking the bishop further opens the king up and frees your queen to enter the attack.
12...fxe5 13. Qh5+ Kd7 14. O-O-O e4 15. Qf7+ Qe7 16. Qg7 Qxg7 17. Bxg7 Rf8 18. Bxf8
Another hung piece by black that you immediately snap up.
Very well played. In this game, you made no outright blunders, and black made two which you punished. And that’s all that mattered.
The syllabus above remains unchanged. Adding to it some practical pointers for in-game focus: (1) Prioritize developing your pieces and castling quickly and safely – make it a race if it helps you. Don’t try to do anything else until that’s complete, even if it might be good. (2) Do a blunder check after you’ve decided your more but before you pull the trigger. (3) Do a blunder check and threat check when your opponent moves. Did they just hang a piece, or are they newly attacking something of yours?
Pasta, thanks for doing the helpful work analysing HeyHomies games!
I completely agree with you that spotting tactics is important (and using a computer will help a lot with that.)
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However I suggest that just playing random moves and hoping a tactic will occur is not enough.
It’s important to learn how to think ahead - which is why I recommended also studying basic checkmates.
Since the defender only has a King, it’s relatively easy to plan how you’re going to push the King back to the edge and give checkmate there.
Ha! To be fair, it’s your opponent’s opening moves in that particular game that are mostly bananas. Your game was pretty tight. For your first handful of moves, 2. Nc3 is your only sorta scary one. Since you didn’t take the pawn with 2. exd5 (the most common reply after 1. e4 d5, the Scandinavian defense), black could just push the pawn again and get white tangled up in its own camp right out of the gate. For instance, 1. e4 d5 2. Nc3 d4! 3. Nce2 e5, and black is very happy.
Certainly not, and I don’t suggest playing random moves. Tactical improvement will help make moves/plans less and less random.
Modern online tactics trainers are rated (skill-calibrated) and include plenty of checkmate patterns in the training set. Of those, there is an appropriate balance of checkmates in middle game positions and checkmates in the endgame, which is to say that at HeyHomie’s current level they will be mostly middle game checkmates like Q+B batteries and back rank mates. If you glance at HeyHomie’s lichess(dot)org history, his games do not make it to the endgame ever. This is common at his current rating. Every game ends with a tactical blow from one player leading to massive material loss or checkmate, with tons of pawns and pieces still on the board.
Chess.com actually has a very nice curriculum for study with instruction on openings, endings and tactics as appropriate for each level. I’ve linked directly to it because they don’t make it easy to locate from the home page.
I was following it for a while and then fell off. However, in the last couple years I’ve gotten into the habit of doing their tactical problems on my phone when I have a few minutes to kill, and just from doing that regularly my game has pretty dramatically improved.
We agree that learning tactics is jolly useful.
However my point is what do improvers do when there are no tactics?
Yes, that’s to be expected (I’ve seen it with my students.)
My point about playing endings (starting with basic checkmates) is that players learn to think ahead and make plans (like driving the enemy King to the edge of the board.)
It’s my understanding that, even at high levels, endgames are fairly uncommon, since usually the losing side will recognize that they’re losing before a game actually gets to the endgame.
Which is not, of course, to say that endgames shouldn’t be studied. They do come up sometimes, and even when they don’t, they’re good for learning general principles that are also applicable elsewhen in the game.
That rating gap sounds about right, or perhaps a little narrow - my puzzle rating is around 2850 on chess.com, my rapid rating (I only play 3|0 and 1|0 there) is about 1850 (both with +/-).
One thing I’d suggest, if the OP is considering doing website tactics, is doing some of them on Chess Tempo instead of chess.com. Chess Tempo has a comments section for each problem (with interactive boards), curated by upvotes/downvotes, and it’s very helpful (even for problems you get right) to go through the comments to better understand a problem, or hear about things you might not have even noticed.
Well nobody wants to play on loads of material down - you probably won’t change the result and it’s pretty depressing.
(Mind you I once had a Grandmaster play on against me a whole bishop down in a simple King + pawn ending.
Honestly, any player rated 2000+ could beat Kasparov from that position. After I won, I quietly asked why he had played on. “I was waiting for my friend to finish, so we could go for a meal!”)
But that isn’t why endgames come about, nor is it the only possibility. Here’s some examples.
Sometimes a player has an edge (not a clearly winning position) and is best able to exploit it by exchanging into a favourable ending.
Sometimes a player has a dire position (e.g. facing a winning attack) and the best plan is to exchange into an unfavourable ending.
Occasionally the pawn structure lends itself to exchanges, resulting in an ending.
Sometimes a jolly interesting middle-game turns into a jolly interesting endgame.
An example of this last one was a British Chapmionship game I played where we reached an ending of King, Rook and 4 pawns v King, Bishop and 4 pawns. 5 of the 7 pawns were passed!
At high level, endgames decide most games. It is true that many times those endgames do not appear on the board, but that’s because both players can see the inevitable evolution into the endgame and its eventual conclusion before it has physically manifested. But to have made that extrapolation, they need a deep understanding of endgames. Or in other words, it isn’t fair to say that the endgame “didn’t happen”. They just played it out in their head.
But even ignoring cases like that (which are many), most high level games still get to a physical endgame.
In cases where high-level players draw in the middle game by three-fold repetition, this too is often due to a deep endgame understanding. One player has a middle game position that they can see will lead to (ultimately) a worse endgame, and they manage force the other player into a choice of (1) repeat the position or (2) make the alternative forced continuing move that switches which side had the advantage moving ahead.
High level play really is about achieving potentially only slight advantages and figuring out (or just recognizing from experience) how to convert that into a won position through the endgame. And thus endgames really define the entire game at high level.
For games at a level where one player is likely to lose lots of material before move 20, endgames aren’t the defining thing.
(I do agree that basic endgame positions are one way to exercise chess thinking for starting players. The intended learning outcomes are calculation and thinking, not endgame improvement, of course.)
Adding to it some practical pointers for in-game focus: (1) Prioritize developing your pieces and castling quickly and safely – make it a race if it helps you. Don’t try to do anything else until that’s complete, even if it might be good. (2) Do a blunder check after you’ve decided your more but before you pull the trigger. (3) Do a blunder check and threat check when your opponent moves. Did they just hang a piece, or are they newly attacking something of yours?
