I'm bad at chess

[horvack]

I tend to go for the Giuoco Piano as white, and the French as black, but I get "out of preparation" almost immediately.

I think I'm going to go through a list of gambits, starting with the Stafford, and then the fishing pole, and the Urusov. The problem is that the more prepared you are, the less calculation you do, and honestly, out-calculating your opponent is the fun part. “Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” I want to be the magician.

In terms of Youtubers, my favorites are:

• Eric Rosen

• Jonathan Schrantz

• Ben Finegold (Yeah, I'm basically just browsing the St. Louis chess club)

• Agadmator (this is the channel that started me down the chess rabbit hole. Especially the "Tal gets a kiss" video, that queen sacrifice is epic. However, the more I play, the less helpful I find his breakdowns. It might be that I've gained just enough knowledge to pass the Dunning-Kruger zone of thinking I have any idea what is happening in the upper-tier games.)

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

But I enjoy it quite a bit. Who here plays? What learning strategies increased your skill the most?

I'm awful at it, but I do enjoy it. I have gotten a little bit better just by playing it a lot. I suppose I need to study more.

[Utisz]

In high school I came up with this opening which I called "the Atlantic Wall". I thought it was pretty strategic though I didn't think very deeply about it....
chess1.PNG

You have control of the centre, which is good.

But you're lacking in two other important parts of the opening.

Development: You need to get your pieces (knights and bishops in particular) out early as they can cover more ground than your pawns in the early game. Also moving them out helps with your second goal (of castling for defense). In fact, where your pawns are right now, they are blocking the development of your knights. The most natural squares for both of your knights (two up and one towards the centre) are now blocked. If you move them to their next most natural squares (one up and two towards the centre) then they will block your bishops. So you will find it difficult to develop from this position.

Defence: An important goal in the early game is to get castled, which gets your king out of the middle of the board and nestles him in behind pawns that can protect him (central pawns do not offer good protection as you almost always need to push them out to enable development and controlling the centre). In order to castle, you need to develop at least a knight and a bishop, which is complicated to do in a good way for the reasons mentioned before. Another big problem is that if you castle short, your king will be on g1 (where the knight on the right is at the moment), and by moving your pawn on f, you've created a big weakness along the light-squared diagonal (g1, f2, e3 ...). Enemy pieces will be able to pressure that diagonal. If you castle long, you will have a similar weakness on the dark-squared diagonal.

No opening is without flaws, but it seems like there's a lot of problems for development and defence here. I'd be surprised though if there weren't a name for this sort of opening as white. The most similar one I know of is the Stonewall.

I had, and may even still have, a magnetic travel chess set

Oh I definitely need one of those. For the postcard chess I have tried to keep a cheap and cheerful board out on my desk with the current position, but the cats will not indulge me. Looks pretty cat proof that option.

[JohnClay]

You have control of the centre, which is good.

I didn't think of that - my reasoning was that it allowed the bishops and queen to move around - and the pawns kind of offered a defence....

No opening is without flaws, but it seems like there's a lot of problems for development and defence here. I'd be surprised though if there weren't a name for this sort of opening as white. The most similar one I know of is the Stonewall.

That name is also a bit similar to my "Atlantic Wall" name.... anyway I don't find reading about nuanced chess tactics to be very interesting or understandable.... (I mean when talking about books, etc)

[Utisz]

That name is also a bit similar to my "Atlantic Wall" name.... anyway I don't find reading about nuanced chess tactics to be very interesting or understandable.... (I mean when talking about books, etc)

On my side I like learning about overall strategy, general tactics, patterns. There are good explanations out there.

I really dislike openings. You have to just learn the lines, refutations, etc., by heart so that you can regurgitate them. I mean you can justify moves in terms of a general framework, but you will never be able to evaluate them better than someone who just learnt the answers beforehand. (I only know a couple of openings up to around move 2.) It's a big turn off for me. When I play postcard chess with my friend, we play open book in terms of using chess databases for openings.


edit: just getting why you call it the Atlantic Wall now ... because of the A shape?

[Utisz]

In terms of Youtubers, my favorites are:

• Eric Rosen

• Jonathan Schrantz

• Ben Finegold (Yeah, I'm basically just browsing the St. Louis chess club)

• Agadmator (this is the channel that started me down the chess rabbit hole. Especially the "Tal gets a kiss" video, that queen sacrifice is epic. However, the more I play, the less helpful I find his breakdowns. It might be that I've gained just enough knowledge to pass the Dunning-Kruger zone of thinking I have any idea what is happening in the upper-tier games.)

I've seen some videos by Eric and Agadmator (for Eric I watched a couple of videos of him using the Stafford). I've not watched videos by Ben. Jonathan I've not heard of.

I think there's a lot more accessible chess content out there these days due to the growing popularity of streaming. I quite enjoyed the Pogchamps stuff where GMs trained players from complete noobs to those with some experience. There's some good training videos on YouTube as a result, particularly the ones by Daniel Naroditsky (e.g. this one to pick one at random). They're good because I guess I'm around the same level as the streamer and so you can follow along with the exercises and questions and basically get vicarious lessons from a GM.

I 've watched bits and pieces of some of the other videos by GothamChess, ChessBrah, some of the more meme-ish stuff. Have watched some stuff by Hikaru but the guy gives me the creeps; he comes across as super arrogant.

[JohnClay]

edit: just getting why you call it the Atlantic Wall now ... because of the A shape?

It was because it was a pretty much complete wall.... it was a wall along the west side of Europe in WW2....

[ashi]

I had, and may even still have, a magnetic travel chess set

Oh I definitely need one of those. For the postcard chess I have tried to keep a cheap and cheerful board out on my desk with the current position, but the cats will not indulge me. Looks pretty cat proof that option.

My limited relevant experience is that it does well with the occasional cautious, exploratory footfall. No sense of how well it will withstand what I now insist on imagining to be a unrelenting river of rampaging cats ripping through your living apace at all hours.

[Roger Mexico]

I used to play on a somewhat regular basis when I was younger, but not much these days.


I won't claim to have been good at it, but as far as "learning strategies", mine was purely kinesthetic--just playing and learning to avoid repeating each dumb mistake as I went along.


Way back when, I recall one of the first pieces of writing on INTP personality traits I ever read specifically brought up chess as something that (ostensibly) INTJ's consistently excel at but INTP's are more prone to struggling with.

(Or just tend to lose interest in before spending enough time on it to achieve any real mastery.)

[Utisz]

No sense of how well it will withstand what I now insist on imagining to be a unrelenting river of rampaging cats ripping through your living apace at all hours.

Sometimes I am compelled to wonder if I am the one rampaging through their living space at all hours.

Way back when, I recall one of the first pieces of writing on INTP personality traits I ever read specifically brought up chess as something that (ostensibly) INTJ's consistently excel at but INTP's are more prone to struggling with.

(Or just tend to lose interest in before spending enough time on it to achieve any real mastery.)

Yeah, I can definitely jive with that theory. Most chess players give off throaty INTJ vibes, with a few exceptions at the mid-tier GM levels.