I ran in my first marathon a couple of weeks ago. I came in 3rd from last in my age category but hey, I finished!
I'm analyzing one of my games where I make a blunder and something has occurred to me. When I am considering a “candidate move” I should not be thinking primarily of the move but of the position that would result from the move. It's a subtle but useful difference. Let me see if I can explain. Why is it that when I make a blunder I almost immediately recognize the blunder after the move (when it's too late)? It is because after the move I am looking at the position resulting from the move not the move itself. When the move was considered I throughly visualized moving the piece but not so much the resulting position. How a certain position is reached doesn't affect what the best move from that position would be (except in the case of en passant of course). So the focus should be on the resulting position not the move. Chess is not a moving sport in the way say soccer or tennis is. If you look at a picture of a moving sport you won't necessarily be able to properly judge what the next move should be because you may not know the speed or direction the ball or the participants are traveling. But in chess you go from one static position to the next. So after visualizing the candidate move I must pause and visualize the resulting position even more throughly than the move itself.
One symptom I've noticed of visualizing the move but not the position is the tendency to think of the moving piece as still being at the old position. In other words thinking that whatever function it performing there would still be performed after the move. I would know what I want the piece to do at the new position but since I am looking at the board in front of me (the current position) and not really visualizing the new position I fail to fully realize the piece will no longer be at that old position and hence not performing it's old function. I could could go on and on here but I think I've made my point. Bye for now.
This entry really has nothing to do with chess. But I figure since this is my blog I can write anything I want. I've started training for a marathon. That 26 mile 385 yard race. This will be my first one. I'm not sure why I'm doing this. I guess because I want to prove to my self that I can or perhaps for fitness reasons. In any case I've been using Hal Higdon's Novice 1 Marathon Training Schedule. I'm on my 2nd week of the 18 week schedule. Today I ran 3 miles on the treadmill. I prefer running outdoors but it was raining and I didn't feel like getting wet. I'll try to keep you posted on how the training is going. And who knows I may even post an occasional progress report on my upcoming book Chess Puzzles for the Casual Player Volume 2.
Here are the links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBsIV7bz8SY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzULjZT18TM
I also placed links to the videos on my sample puzzles page here http://www.chesspuzzlebook.com/samplepuzzles.html
