Watch out Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlsen! I'm coming for you! This is another day in my quest for a 2000 rating on chess.com. Owen's Defense Join our discord to chat about my journey and see others chat about theirs: / discord #chess
11:05 This is the critical moment of this game. There are a few things to note here. Firstly, this is a complex position. Your queen and rook are skewered, but the black bishop is potentially hanging, only protected by the queen. There is a potential discovered attack on the black queen involving the white knight and rook. The pawn on g6 is hanging, the knight on h6 can be taken, and white can deliver a check on d7 with the knight. Generally, I try to avoid these positions, unless I know they're better for me. Karpov would never invite such complications unless they were very favourable! But you're in that position, so the first thing is that it's good you spent quite a bit of time over this move, as it is critical. However, there is something not quite right with your thinking and processes. In that position, I would have been scanning the whole board, looking for candidate moves with every piece. However, the knight on f6 would definitely have been my primary focus, because the whole advantage of taking on f6 is that you have a potential discovered attack on the queen. You have to look at every knight move in this position because they're all forcing moves that mean the queen is attacked. Also, 19...Nd7+ obviously checks the black king, and so it's a double-forcing move. Instead of reacting to what your opponent is doing, you are forcing them to respond to you. So you must consider that move, your instincts should automatically tell you to assess any checks in tactical positions. When making your initial decision, you calculated a long variation after the move you chose - 19...Qxg6 - but you didn't do the same thing for any other move, and you never even considered the knight check. Your brain just thought: "oh, it can be taken, so I can't do that", I assume. You never even considered the consequences of the move, whereas you went deep into another variation, which is much worse. Not only does checking with the knight work, because the black bishop is then hanging, but it also provides black with the opportunity to blunder. After 19...Nxd7+ 20. Kb7, quite a feasible variation, you can emerge a piece up if you play the correct continuation. It's really important that you train yourself to consider and assess all of the feasible moves first, particularly forcing moves. There are two cardinal sins here - you went deep into one long variation, and also didn't look enough at any of the other variations, whereas you should be doing the complete opposite! Long variations tend to involve errors, or you don't go deep enough and miss a move at the end that completely changes the evaluation, or you miss an intermezzo. Botvinnik once told Kasparov words to the effect of - control the variations, or they will control you! Sometimes you have to attempt the calculation of long variations, but you should definitely assess all of the possible candidate moves first, and your instincts should automatically tell you in this position - knight discovery is dangerous, I need to look at forcing moves, examine checks and captures (there are so many moves in this position that you barely need to consider mere threats!). You must train yourself to continually think - what are my threats, what are my opponent's threats? That should be constant and automatic. Not - oh, I like the look of this move, I'll calculate 12 moves deep and dismiss everything else. Until you correct that flaw, you will continue to make lots of mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but the way to minimise this is to implement the right way of thinking and train your brain to think that way all the time.
Great insights, @chrisjames1905; thanks for the detailed analysis. I think Patrick's thought process on this move was an example of "long think, wrong think." 🙁 Another expression I try to remember during my games is, "Look around before you look deep." It's so hard to do this in-game, especially with a 10|5 time control. I'm with some other commenters who've suggested that Patrick try some 15|10 games -- this should give him enough time to think both broad and deep in complex positions.
Great comment! Strongly agree. One suggestion to you @chesswithpatrick if that sounds fun would be to cast your puzzle training. I personally would love to see you do 10 puzzles "with" us, and seeing you working through a set position. I don't think you should be studying openings at this point. Opening theory is very complicated and often involves very subtle positional and tactical ideas. Certainly trying to remember openings by heart feels like a waste of time at this point. Have you considered to change your casting routine to have some days dedicated to puzzles instead? One of the benefit is that you are not under time pressure. You can take your time to work through identifying candidate moves and evaluating each line. Over time you'll get used to calculating tactics which is really your main weakness at the moment. Just a thought!
you should change the title of the series to "...until I reach 2000 or I lose my mind, whatever happens first" that is definitely a journey i'd closely follow 👍
Win +5, Draw -3, Lost -11 It doesn’t worth it You can set your rating range in settings Set to -50 +300 It’s much better to play when it’s Win +12, Draw +4, Lost -5
Just stop. You are wasting your time. We've all pointed that out to Patrick. Either he can't read, or he's determined to get to 1300 as fast as possible. I guess it doesn't really matter if his true rating is below his current rating.
Hey Patrick!!!!! Ze point of ze game is to checkmate the king so all the opening, middle game and end game stuff is just to pile on the opponents king so maybe easier to just point everything at the king when you develop???
Nice opening. Each move developed until EVERYTHING was developed. Now just after that process was complete: 1) you had castled Queenside which puts a Rook on e1. A great square. Why then move it to d1? Wouldn't it make more sense to move your OTHER Rook to d1? Then BOTH Rooks would be helping to control the centre. 2) Your opponent moved his Knight to the side of the board on h6. THIS is a good point in the game to highlight what you should have been thinking as opposed to what you actually thought. Where does he want to move his Knight to next? This is what I mean when I keep saying to you look at what your opponents NEXT move will be. THIS is how you save time and don't have to let the clock tick down whilst you go on this journey of "If I go here and IF he does x then I can do y BUT IF he does a then I can do b...." SO "knights on the rim are grim". He only had one square to go from h6 and that was g4 to attack your Bishop. SO h3 should be a no brainer when you are simply looking for your opponent's next move. Instead you moved your own Knight to the rim as well because you saw that you could give a fork IF your opponent didn't see it. But that is hope chess. ALWAYS assume that they will see what you are planning. So if the tactic can be stopped does moving your knight to h4 help your position? The answer is NO, so don't do it! There is no point focusing on developing in the opening if you're just going to put your pieces on worse squares during the middle game. Hope this clarifies for you what I have been saying about how to think about your opponent's next move and how to avoid all of the "if this, then this" that you tend to do that eats away at your time and then fails to help you make a good move at the end of it.
I don't see you getting 2000 in the following six to seven years, probably 10. But if it's not something bad, you have to enjoy the journey as long as it takes
Thank you. Now my wife thinks I’m a lunatic. Don’t blame her. If I saw a grown man yelling at his phone incoherent things about knights mixed with profanities I’d think the same thing.
Step one Patrick. Lower your journey to 1600. And try go again from there. 2.000 ELO hanging as your target, is not doing you any favour right now. 1600 i think thats reachable for you , then make a new target when you get to 1600. Enjoy.
I am on the same path to 2000. Currently 1808 which is my best result. From 1700 to 1800 was really painful. It was nightmare :) I took a break currently, as I am not in my mental state to break 1900 and I also drink a lot which is also not useful :) Step by step is the way to do it. I got stuck around 1500 at some point. Then from 1500-1700 was relatively easy. I was even surprised how easy it was. So yes, good advice to take a break. Or just play on litchess without thinking about the rating :) that's what I do sometimes.
Knights on the rim are dim. If you assume your fork can be easily spotted, no need to even consider that knight move. I think you'll fare better if you focus on neutralizing the fianchetto bishop by exchange or some other means. Good effort.
Hi Patrick, love your channel 🙂. I might just repeat what I said a coupl of days ago since you might not have seen it. It might be beneficial to set the elo of your opponents to be +- 25 of your own elo to avoid playing a 1300 while being a 1400 and loosing 11 points with the upside of only gaining 5. This can be done in the general setting of the game.
Hello Patrick I enjoy your content. I am going to echo some other comments, I think if you make tactics/puzzles a part of your routine you will start to develop the ability to calculate 2/3/4 moves combinations quickly accurately and it will take the blunders out of your game and get you to 1600
As someone OTB 2000+ USCF I struggled to quickly assess that position where you screwed up, so don’t fret too much. But the issue again was board vision was an issue. You didn’t even look at calculating the rook/queen pin with the knight. Isn’t that why you put the knight there in the first place? You need to drill tactics again and maybe start watching great players, like Danya or even someone at the NM or Expert level, play on RU-vid and listen to how they think and go through positions?
Starting to wonder about the impetus for this series.. getting better at chess while sharing your journey or trying to create a youtube presence with your witty repartee? 😅 Seriously, you seem like a nice guy.. but, there are some well intentioned people - who really appear to understand the game, that repeatedly take the time to outline specific instruction (with examples from your games) only to be ignored or worse dismissed with slightly passive aggressive retort. Consider that you may be wasting their time when you express interest in receiving feedback. Maybe time to just hire a coach, focus on getting better at your chess and sharing the results, minus the feedback solicitation. Heck, you could even turn off the comments
Also, you said you didn't understand why your opponent moved his King to b8. Whereas I was wondering why you didn't move your King to b1!!!. If you don't understand why moving your King to protect the a pawn is done on queenside casting then you shouldn't castle queenside!!! The POINT of casting Queenside is it gets your Rook to the centre one move quicker than casting Kingside, but the downside of that is that your King is not as safe. So once a player has put pressure on the centre by Queenside casting it is VERY common for him to move his King to the b file to make the a file safer.
Close call Patrick, keep up the good work! I really enjoy your videos, and my wife thinks your voice is ASMR worthy:) Please ignore the insecure people in the comments:)
I'm no expert, so please forgive - but, when I watch you, you don't seem to want to attack. You play slow, thoughtful exchanges but I think you would win more if you looked for ways to attack your opponent's position. For example, at 1:40 you played QD2. If you'd played QE2, you threaten BA6, which will knock a hole in his defence, and he might not see it coming. After the bishop exchange you have NB5 coming, threatening a fork. Maybe he could defend it, but at least he'd use up his time trying to figure it out. Stick with it though. 👍
It’s why his opponents have high accuracy %. He puts almost no pressure on people. The best advice I got when I first started was to play gambits and try to open the board up. Those sharp games (as opposed to closed, positional chess) improve board vision and tactic skills faster.
Castling queenside all the time is something weak players do. Strong players castle kings side 9/10 times. I don’t know why you insist on doing it. It’s terrible. It makes no sense.
+1 Even after specifically preparing it by moving the queen instead of Nf6, castling queenside wasn't a particularly good move according to the analysis.
Your post game analysis needs improvement. When reviewing you still aren’t seeing why certain moves are best. You make a lot of incorrect statements when stepping through the moves.
