PART 1 • Analysis
opponent drop a bomb on you by hitting you with a tactical shot that you never saw coming? When did you first get a bad position – was it the middlegame or maybe the endgame?
Analyze your games by reviewing them yourself, then have another player( human or electronic) look at them. Look at your games closely; try to discover why you won or lost. Find the answers to the kinds of questions posed in the previous two paragraphs. When you find them, you ' re ready for the next step...
STUDY
We analyze our games to try to determine why they turned out the way they did. We search for our strengths but, more importantly, we strive to isolate out weaknesses. Only by finding out what we ' re bad at do we discover what we need to study in order to improve.
The general study tips from Chapter Three are“ road markers” you can use to chart your general course, but at some point you ' ll need to zero in on some specifics. It ' s one thing to say“ Study positional chess”, but if you start to see a tendency in which you leave backward pawns around that your opponents pick off in an endgame, that knowledge provides you with two specific study areas right there: you should study pawn structures, and especially pawn structures as they apply to the endgame.
Instead, if you ' re cooking along with what you think is a decent position and suddenly your opponent hits you with a three-move combination that wins your Rook – and you tend to get blasted off the board in a similar way game after game – that ' s a big ol ' red flag waving in the breeze with the words“ Study your tactics!” emblazoned across it.
The mistakes we uncover in the Analysis part of the cycle will tell us what we should concentrate on in the Study phase. Lots of players love to study and memorize opening variations, but if you ' re getting popped by a tactical shot in middlegame after middlegame, it ' s time to put that opening encyclopedia back on the shelf and break out a tactics training CD instead. Not only will you learn to recognize tactical opportunities when you have them, but you ' ll also be able to spot recurring problems in your own positions which are providing these opportunities to your opponents. If you can spot ' em, you can fix ' em the next time you play, which brings us back to...
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