by pablonite » Fri 29 Jan 2010, 13:56:35
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Narz', 'Y')eah, I do enjoy street chess, I just like the seriousness of tournament chess. Just you & your opponent (hopefully) and pure quiet & no excuses (noise, environment, etc.). It's hard to get the same level of focus in a park or coffee shop (for me anyway, some are not so distractable & I envy them!)
When you throw a bit of cash on the line it makes it even more interesting. I'm not a gambling man on games of chance but love playing chess for pocket change. Whenever I'm in a big city I try and hunt down a street player and see what they got.
When I took my game to the next level I specialized. When playing black I would play the Sicilian defense with the dragon variation (g6) where you fianchetto your bishop and castle your in King in there. Statistically speaking, you have the best chance of winning with black this way and you spend much less time in the opening when you get comfortable with some of the variations.
When playing white I would work on counters to the sicilian that usually involve castling to the queen side but forget the names of those lines, it's been awhile.
Just a thought for you if you plan on taking your game up a notch or two because when you get to expert level there won't be many mistakes in the opening anymore. Likewise with the endgame, certain material combinations and positions are book draws or wins which is why you get so many resignations at the highest level, it would be like going through the motions and waiting for a blunder that just ain't gonna happen.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD ', 't')hanks but pls post the solution for the last one too
Heh, the more I look at that one the more I think I've seen it or something similiar. I think you're right about herding the King right into the black pieces because you can see forcing the King out of the hole but to do much more in your head is hard. It would be hard to take that chance in a real game though. I would still stick with Ng5 g6...and then look at sacraficing a Knight for a pawn if I was playing for cash
The best players in the world don't have a special ability to look at more iterations than the average player, they just know the best current move that leads in the general direction of a win. I've seen a few documentaries on chess, great players can be manufactured now, like Tiger Woods is to golf. They learn how to recognize certain formations and positions easily - I believe one was on a Russian girl and her sister who were trained and are now ranked as masters.
I don't enjoy looking at Kasparov games, they are almost clinical and robot like with few notable exceptions. It's like watching Tiger Woods play golf, predicatable and boring really. The grand age of great and exciting chess was in the 1800's IMO.