What they can do now is just to do a video search with curtains as keyword. It does not pop them all up in order but you get to see the date it is posted and can work yourself from there.

Oh? Actually, I believe that if you eliminate indecisiveness from your game, you will often (decisively) make the wrong decisions. After all, how can you find the correct move without first assuming that all of your moves might not be correct? Curtains has played a game in a very short period of time, and is now very quickly looking at all possibilities to see what the best move might be. Even if you don't enjoy his style of impromptu analysis, which I do, I'm not sure how you can draw from it that somehow he's not a strong player, or that all strong players make the right moves every time without thinking, or that vacillating too much will lead you astray. This is all nonsense. I find it much more instructive to see how a great player looks at moves on the fly than to listen to a lecture that was prepared days in advance. But again, it's not for everyone.

Keep the videos coming! Not enough lately.

Compulsory is right; even in GM Kotov's Think Like a Grandmaster he needs to look at all possible moves, although he insists on doing it in a completely orderly fashion. So in endgames like this one:



Kotov would insist on analyzing only one variation (branch) at a time. Since this position is rife with transpositions, I wonder how long it would take Kotov (or another strong player) to solve this puzzle using Kotov's method.

Even strong players flip-flop during games, although during post-mortem the idea is to deliberately flip-flop a lot and explore every possibility.

One last note to the poster who said that this was just an unimportant blitz game:

To me, these blitz games are very important. Because of the importance I've attached these games, my play has seen pretty solid improvement since I've started doing this. Note that on my curtains account I've won 10 straight games, and am rated like 2475 now!

Congratulations, curtains.

These games are important for me as well. Before I started watching them I was playing 10 0 way too often, and was never analyzing my games afterwards. Now I've changed from the Queen's pawn to the English, and from the King's Indian to the Sicilian, all as a result of watching your vid's.

I've been playing Wednesday nights at a chess club and I can tell that I have improved a lot as a result of your teaching.

Keep it up, how 'bout a video tonight since you'll probably not be posting one on Christmas? : D

Unfortunately I am sick again. It's a shame because I haven't gotten sick in like a year and now its happened twice in such a short time span. Videos might be relatively sparse at this moment due to sickness (although should be better in 48 hours) and because Im going to San Francisco from Dec 31-Jan 7th.

Beu, get well soon man ; )

San Francisco? Sounds nice! I'm stuck in Austin. Happy holidays and happy new year, thanks again for all the video's you've done so far.

I'm with Compulsory. "flip-flopping" is an important part of chess thinking, that's the way a player feels his way through the position.
After watching a couple of these videos (which I enjoyed very much) I did more thinking and less calculation when playing blitz.
Before (in Blitz!) I would just take on the first move that entered my mind and try to make it work tactically. I also started playing
the openings featured in the videos, which went surprisingly well.

Bottom line is : By including more indecisiveness into my blitz games, I reached a new peak rating !

@curtains: Best wishes, thanks for the videos and good recovery

Good news everyone! I am now in possession of magical admin powers and so I will be changing the way the titles of my games look, and will be numbering them in order, so no one will have any problems with that anymore.

I wish I could figure out how to track these threads more efficiently, nevertheless I greatly appreciate all the responses and even though I still do not fully agree with many of the opinions put forward even curtains' as strong as he is, I do respect them all.

I am familiar with Kotov's candidate move method and his ideas of not going back and forth in ones analysis of such moves, however while it is ideal to analyse each canidate move only once and reach a definitive conclusion, Kotov suggests no more than 4 candidate moves if memory serves, this is quite unrealistic in tournament play.

GM John Nunn sharply criticised Kotov's approach and offered refinements, suggesting that the analysis of one candidate move often throws up ideas that were missed in the analysis of a previous one and therefore it is sometimes impossible to avoid returning to previously analysed positions. Nunn's observations to my mind are much more practical than Kotov's inflexible approach which has a number of flaws, but I do not want to get bogged down in what is essentially an intellectual debate. Suffice it to say that a little reflection is ok, but excessive indecisiveness is rarely a good thing and in the end often only leads to unneccesary time trouble and spoilt positions. Yes I know that there are quite a few strong players who exhibit indecisiveness at the board, one extreme case that comes to mind is the american GM Alexander Ivanov who I once saw lose a game with Queen and King vs Rook and King precisely due to this failing.

Moving on, Carlin with the cute avatar says, many people learn differently, some favor an informal approach others a more structured one and yet others benefit from a bit of both and I totally agree with that. Nevertheless, I would caution against aspiring to indecisiveness as some here have expressed, a sentiment which I frankly find incredibly absurd. Excessive indecisiveness is not an asset in chess, and although there are some strong players who exhibit this trait, I submit to you that they became strong not because of indecisiveness at the board, but rather inspite of it. Perhaps one form of the game where constant vacillation may not cause undue harm is in correspondence play where players often have days to come up with a move.

In general titled players tend to have the added burden that the rank and file chess community tend to uncritically swallow whole anything they do or say related to chess so one has to be particularly careful what information is dissemination and the implications of it.

For me, I use blitz games to reinforce themes and ideas of an opening I'm currently using or interested in using, in this way I can determine how well I understand the typical plans and tactics of the chosen variations and how comfortable I feel playing them. Blitz is also useful for building and intuitive feel for the game especially short term tactics, which is about all the human mind is capable of in blitz as far as calculation goes.

Despite all of the positives mentioned above, inexperienced players need to understand there is a danger in taking Blitz too seriously and attaching too much importance to it. For one thing Blitz in many cases tends to promote and reward superficial thinking, a danger that many inexperienced players fail to appreciate and consequently their over the board play in long games usually suffers. I could fill pages on this topic alone but in fear of boring you to death, or maybe further boring you to death I will close by saying that most strong/titled players primarily use Blitz mainly as a way of relieving stress and tension in between tournaments.

Hearty congratulations to Curtains on his recent success and I wish him a full and speedy recovery. On reflection as I said before, perhaps I judged this one video too harshly, and will take his advice and view some of his other efforts before running my mouth off so freely.

In case I'm not heard from before then, have a merry christmas everybody!

Toppy

Yes Carlin you are quite right and I agree with you totally there. Most masters thinking happens on a subconcious level, with analysis merely used to confirm this subconcious intuition.

Ironically, less experienced players depend a lot more on analysis to come up with candidate moves than masters do. Many strong players know almost immediately and instinctively what move they should make, but the problem is that the positionally desirable move often may fail for tactical reasons and that's when analysis becomes neccessary. Another skill linked to intuition that defrentiates masters from other players is a keen sense of danger, that is, masters tend to anticipate danger in advance while lesser players often see the potential threats when its too late. Anyway that's a whole other discussion.

Thanks for your reply and interest in this thread, it is very welcome.

Buh bye for now and have a merry christmas.

Toppy

Postscript: Tobby??

Toppy, in order to stalk a thread more efficiently,, you can click "Watch this topic for replies" and receive an email after every post to the thread.

***

I am not strong enough chesswise to opine on the proper role of in/decisiveness. However, i appreciate that curtains' vids give a window to the intuition of a much stronger player.

Hi there Katar,

Thanks for the feedback, I like your avatar as well by the way, even though I can't claim to be a big Parris 'Omigod' Hilton fan.

I did try that 'watch this thread' button but never got any email notifications, maybe my junk mail filter is to blame I will have to check that out.

Take care and thanks again.

Toppy

LOL....Very insightful post, knowing what you must do to get better is half the battle.

Intuition in chess is really nothing more than pattern recognition.

A strong player through studying and playing many games will typically memorise many re-occurring patterns that crop up time and again in practical play. These patterns after awhile become so ingrained in one's subconcious memory that during a game a master does not have to consciously think about them, that in a nutshell is what is referred to as chess intuition.

One such simple intuitive pattern is Smothered Mate, a master will instantly spot such a possibility in almost any setting because he has probably seen such patterns hundreds of times before, for a master this instant recall is triggered in part by the opposing King being severely restricted by its own pawns and or pieces. A less experienced player hardly has built up such an arsenal of stored patterns in thier memory and consequently everything has to be achieved by analysis.

The thing is, without prior knowledge of the concept of smothered mate, chances are no matter how good an analyst you are, you may never find it in an actual game. I had a student once, a very promising talent, in one particular game where he was up against a strong player he allowed the 'Greek Bishop Sacrifice' to be played against him, interestingly the guy could have played the sacrifice a move or two earlier with a very strong position, but wanted to be sure it was winning so he strengthened his position further before making the sac. Now my student could have easily prevented this sacrifice on a number of occasions during the game, but despite his keen analytical ability he completely missed it, simply because he was unaware of this well known pattern and how deadly it can be, so it never triggered his sense of danger.

Understanding the importance of pattern recognition in chess and other little things like that will help one develop in leaps and bounds. Before everyone starts accusing me of being a lousy chess teacher for allowing my former student to be floored by a 'Greek bishop sac', just remember that Rome was not built in a day and it takes time to teach and to assimilate everything being taught.

One need not be unduly daunted by the above story, just know that the longest journey begins with the first step.

Toppy

What exactly is a 'Greek Bishop Sacrifice' ? I never heard of this term before.
Can you perhaps post a FEN ?

EDIT: I have found out myself Google is your friend