PART 1 • A chess engine is your trusty sherpa guide
will not only help you to see the coming explosion, but hopefully teach
you how to drop a bomb on him before he does it to you.
And in both cases, you should definitely study chess defense; those techniques will help you limit your opponents' opportunities to do you harm.
Conversely, you might start seeing a tendency you have to make moves
which are just okay, that preserve the status quo, but the your chess engine is showing you variations where you could win your opponents' material if you'd played differently (like White did in the above game when he
missed the fact that he could win the exchange). In this case, you should
definitely study chess tactics and study attacking chess (which are not
necessarily exactly the same thing, as “attacking chess” refers to how to
break down an opponent's position and ultimately attack his King).
You see the idea? When the evaluation numbers show that your opponents are gaining an advantage, the size of the numbers tells you whether the advantages are coming strategically or tactically, and that tells you
on which area you should concentrate your chess study time.
That explains the “how”; the “when” is really easy.
Try to spot which part of the game you're in when the numbers start to
go south in your opponents' favor. Does the slow decline or tactical shot
tend to happen in the opening, the middlegame, or the endgame? That
tells you which phase of the game you ought to be studying.
For example, let's say that you usually have a really good game going until the Queens come off the board. Then bad things start to happen and
you wind up losing. That's a really good indicator that you need to get
your nose out of that Winning with the Accelerated Dragon book and start
studying (and practicing!) endgames; your Accelerated Dragon is fine –
it's your endgame that needs work. (You might even be able to “fine tune”
this, too – you might find that your Rook and pawn endings are fine, but
you're messing up your minor piece play in the endgame. Don't be afraid
to get specific if those are the kind of tendencies you spot in your games.)
Conversely, you might find that you get a great position right out of the
opening; in fact, you often play variations from Modern Chess Openings
perfectly to reach positions evaluated as “slightly ahead” for you, but
within a half-dozen more moves your opponent usually has an advantage. You need to start studying the middlegame (and, more specifically, strategy or tactics depending on how your opponents are getting that
advantage, as we learned above).
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