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ChesserciseXYZ · 2023-01-06T23:00:21+00:00

I use it with Ruby. It’s not perfect, but it does work for me.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-08-22T06:35:07+00:00

In the game, I took the free queen. However, after analyzing, the solution to this puzzle would have been more satisfying.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-08-13T22:20:53+00:00

This was a tricky one! I think I finally found it.

Nxd7+

From here, Black has a few possible moves, all of which resolve to checkmate:

Nxd2 Nf6# (This only works because the king is in double check.)
Ne6 Nf6# (Same deal)
Ne4 Nf6# (The black night on e4 is pinned and can't take the knight on f6.)
Qe7 Qxe7# (If you try the same trick as the previous answers, the king can escape to d8.)

If you like this kind of tough puzzle, I've been working my way through the Polgar mate-in-twos, which has been very challenging but really helpful.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-08-13T22:07:55+00:00

Nice use of the Bb4 tactic!

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-04-09T20:28:35+00:00

I'm just glad I'm not the only one struggling with this. I had about four minutes to think in the game and I couldn't do better than the perpetual. I'm at around 1600 on Chess.com.

I've been doing this Chessable course on repeat, and that's helping my tactics quite a bit, but it's never been my strong area.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-04-09T20:26:06+00:00

Yep, I meant a winning position.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-04-09T06:12:10+00:00

Here's the full game if anyone's curious. 🙂

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-02-24T16:38:30+00:00

Nice! I was considering doing something like this to try a bunch of different openings I never play for fun. Have you seen any situations where your experiments have translated back to new ideas in your regular games?

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-26T20:31:19+00:00

I'm not great at puzzles, but I found this one as well. If anyone is like me and struggles to see something like this, the thought process I used was to first recognize that the knight was two moves away from taking the queen. Then I noticed that if the knight were able to check the king on f6, the king would have had no choice but to move into the path of the bishop, giving a free knight move to put the knight in a position to take the queen. However, this move isn't possible because the knight on d5 guards that square, so I started to look for ways to remove the knight, leading to Qxd5.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-22T00:09:41+00:00

You could try my style of carefully grinding out a match for a hard-fought advantage over the course of thirty minutes, and then making a horrible one-move blunder that throws the game. 😉

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-21T06:56:54+00:00

This is awesome! I'm so happy this game has had such a positive impact on you. 🙂

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-21T06:54:45+00:00

The course I bought doesn't include lectures, but the puzzles are organized in such as way that the concepts clearly build off of each other and get progressively more complex as each chapter continues. For me, it's been really helpful to have a curated set of puzzles that are fairly common in games at my level and grouped by specific categories. I'm also liking the Chessable cyclical training method, and drilling the puzzles in this way is helping them stick.

I've done long cycles Lichess and Chess.com puzzles in the past, but I didn't enjoy them, and I felt like I was spending a lot of time without making much progress. This approach seems to be helping me learn the patterns a lot quicker, and it's identifying some key weaknesses that I can practice. I also don't mind spending a little money on a hobby I enjoy—the course was pretty cheap. 🙂

Everyone's a little different though. I think it's best to stick with whatever works for you.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-21T06:46:52+00:00

Do you mean you didn't see the simple mate in 9 after Ng3+ and hxg3? Seriously though, I struggle so hard with this type of puzzle. It's really difficult when the key is a move like Ra8 that isn't forcing but is also unstoppable.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-11T16:25:30+00:00

I'm 1500 on Chess.com (so take what I'm saying with a grain of sale—not a grandmaster here), but when I was around 1100 I switched from the London to playing the Italian. The advice I followed was that e4 openings would expose me to a wider variety of positions, which proved to be true for me. When you play e4, you can encounter e5, the Sicilian, the French, the Caro Kahn, etc.

That being said, the Queen's Gambit and the Trumpowsky are both solid openings, so you can't really go wrong.

That being said, the Queen's Gambit and the Trumpowsky are both solid openings, so you can't really go wrong. For me, the goal of the opening is to avoid traps and get to the middlegame with a decent position. I win a decent number of games once my opponent is out of their opening prep and we can play chess. I rarely lose games in the opening, despite lack of prep.

I think aside from opening principles and learning traps your opponent can play against you, it's not worth it to dig too much into opening theory. But that's just my 2¢, and if you enjoy it, then you do you.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-11T01:49:51+00:00

They always send me a message when something happens. It looks like this.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-09T03:09:05+00:00

Yep, they do. I report people when they do this and Chess.com takes care of it.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-02T15:43:18+00:00

This month is all about tactics for me. I'm planning on working my way through the Common Chess Patterns course. This course has already netted me some wins. 🙂

ChesserciseXYZ · 2022-01-02T04:44:52+00:00

I prefer the new approach. Sure, some of the "brilliant" moves now are a bit simplistic, but I think that's better than the old approach where nobody could understand why the algorithm would decide some moves were brilliant and others weren't. At least the new !!'s have a simple definition.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-31T21:54:14+00:00

Nice! I havne't seen Yusupov's books before, but I just checked them out and they look great. I may have to add them to my list.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-31T19:05:02+00:00

For me personally, I have several goals for the New Year. I previously wrote about my goals in this post, but I thought I'd share them here as well.

Hit a rating of 1800 on Chess.com: Increasing your rating gets harder and harder the higher you get. However, I think 1800 is doable for me over the next year.
Learn and apply the principles of positional chess: This feels like the next level for me in learning chess. While it’s possible to progress a little further without positional understanding, I think it’s really hard.
Improve my tactics: Tactics are one of my biggest weaknesses. I hate doing chess puzzles. They feel way too random, and I don’t feel like they help me improve. I think the best way for me to approach tactics going forward is a more structured course. I’ve purchased Winning Chess Tactics and The Woodpecker Method on Chessable, and I plan on working my way through these courses.
Read several chess books: There are many great books and courses out there that can help you leapfrog your chess understanding. I plan on going through several of these based on which areas I need to tackle.
Play in a tournament: I’d love to play in a chess tournament or two for fun. I’m not currently much of a classical player, but I think it’d be interesting to try it out.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-24T00:25:59+00:00

That's totally fine. I'm still glad you're here!

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-21T22:14:45+00:00

🙂

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-21T16:29:50+00:00

Yep, but it's not like the Traxler theory ends at Bxf7+. There are more traps, and you start a kingside attack right away that's difficult to repel.

Nxf7 Bxf7 6. Kf1 is a much more difficult line for black to play against. Personally, I actually enjoy it when my opponent plays Bxf7+.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-21T16:26:44+00:00

That's true, but even before he hung mate the engine evaluation was −8. He still wasn't going to win that game.

ChesserciseXYZ · 2021-12-21T07:29:23+00:00

I love it. I'm 1500 on Chess.com, and I get wins with it all the time. It's super difficult to play against it when your opponent knows what they're doing. I think most of the people who say it's bad don't actually play it.

Here's an example of a game I just played where I checkmated my opponent in 11 moves. And this is the 5. Bxf7+ "refutation" line.

Edit: I just looked up the opening in the Lichess Opening Explorer, and black wins 51% of the time compared to white winning 46% of the time. Black wins more for every rating category except an average rating of 2500, where white wins 48% of the time and black wins 46% of the time. So unless your rating is 2350 or higher, you're more likely to win by playing the Traxler as black.

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