Pledge to Self....
I swear to continue playing gambits, despite setbacks and losses due to my lack of knowledge or my opponents' superior knowledge, when possible, until I achieve the rank of Expert.
"Possessed
I feel a conquering will down inside me
Strength
The strength of many to crush
Who might stop me
My strength is in number
And my soul lies in every one
The releasing of anger can better any medicine under the sun" - Mouth For War, Vulgar Display of Power by Pantera (1992)
"Possessed
I feel a conquering will down inside me
Strength
The strength of many to crush
Who might stop me
My strength is in number
And my soul lies in every one
The releasing of anger can better any medicine under the sun" - Mouth For War, Vulgar Display of Power by Pantera (1992)
posted by CelticDeath at 10:20 AM
8 Comments:
As I near the end and consider a gambit repertoire, are there any particular openings you think would suit a Class D/Cish player?
Also, do you ever train with computers at all to work on your game?
I would say any gambit starting with e4 would be good. At our level most players can't convert a positional advantage from the opening to a guaranteed win. So even if it is "better for black" or vice versa, if we get out of the opening with most of our pieces intact then it should be a 50/50 chance. Myself I play a known inferior opening but I still win half of my games and my losses aren't due to my opening. I chose my opening because it is one of the oldest and is supposed to be great for learning opening principles.
PS
PMD, I typically play the King's Gambit, Danish Gambit, Goring Gambit, and Smith-Morra Gambit as White. I play the Icelandic and Scandinavian Gambits (when my opponent gives me the opportunity) and Benoni (which is more like a positional gambit as opposed to a material gambit) as Black. I would suggest trying these out against opponents over the Internet, though, first to get your feet wet. Then (and this is something I do fairly religiously) go over the games with computer software, like Fritz to see where you could improve. After you're comfortable playing it against opps on the Net, then I would try them out at chess club or OTB tournaments.
Pawn Sensei, I played a 1500 rated opponent at chess club on Tuesday. I used the Smith-Morra against his Sicilian. I wouldn't say, from my play, that I misplayed the opening, per se, but I did play it in such a way as to hamper my opportunities to get compensation for the gambited pawn. I made a few evaluational errors after that that actually cost me the game. However, it boils down to the fact that I misunderstood the ideas behind the particular line of the opening system that resulted in a difficult and then an untenable game.
That's quite a pledge.
I am collecting courage for a pledge myself. When I start with serious endgame training I want to pledge to myself to never accept or offer a draw anymore. At least during the time I train endgames. But at this time I don't know when I will start with this training. What I do know however that I haven't collected courage enough at this moment. . .
I see everyone says they 'analyze their games with Fritz'. I would like to start doing this. Is there a good article online that describes how to do this productively? Also, it seems like people really believe the results of the Fritz analysis. It must use a sweet algorithm!
Here is Dan Heisman's take on it, but I think www.chessbase.com also has some info somewhere on their site. There are lots of ways to do it, though. I typically don't spend much time analyzing my wins. It's my losses that concern me the most. I will enter or copy/pasted the moves into Fritz and try to analyze and annotate the game by myself, first. Then, I will do one of two things. If I have a reasonable idea of where I went wrong, I will put Fritz on Infinite Analysis mode and play through the game move by move and note the changes in Fritz's evaluation of the game as it evolves. If I am completely clueless as to what went wrong, I set Fritz loose to do a Full Analysis. This can take time, so I usually don't do this until I turn in for the night, allowing Fritz to work it's magic while I sleep.
As for Fritz's evaluation quality, I think that tactically, it's a monster. Positionally, it is suspect.
CD,
1500? That's at least 200 points above me. I think I have some time before I get there. In fact isn't that a whole other class from where I am at?
PS
Thanks for the info CD. I have two books on gambit repertoire's for white and black. For black it goes over the Portughese and Icelandic gambits including refusals of the d4 pawn by white.
I'm going to mess around with these on ICC, maybe play some shorter games with them, get an idea about how to carry out attacks etc.
It's difficult for me, because much of the chess I've played has been positional, and introducing tactics and playing "tactical" openings is pretty new for me.
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