good point, I hadnt thought about it that way. I ended up winning the game anyway

I'm going to have to disagree. Strongly. I've done 1-2k of the problems in Polgar's book and they're not very useful. The problem is that MANY of the problems are very obviously compositions. They are somewhat useful for visualizing piece coordination but not useful to drilling standard mating motifs and tactics. Reinfeld (and many others) are much better tactics books.

swingdoc's advice is from experience, whereas mine is from speculation, so its wiser to follow his.

However as a sidenote, I remember Polgar's book not being about tactics (even though it says combinations in the title) but about drilling in mating patterns. Then it has many attacking games (with no annotations) to show those mating patterns coming to fruition in games.

edit: Also many on Amazon criticize it has having many filler, non-instructive, problems.

Drove to Denver from KC to pick up some of my belongings. I forgot about having so many chess books. as for my D4 question, if I look to my book resources that I have. I got one of the dutch, KID, QGA, Benoni Systems, Modern Benoni, Benko, and one on unusual queens gambits.

The win streak dies at 14 at the hands of an FM. It was one of those fun, instructive games where you feel like you are okay but under pressure from a superior opponent all game and he just finally takes you apart.

http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=44077

Some thoughts:

10. f3 is board vision failure, because I was thinking I couldn't allow e4 because it would doom the bishop, but of course that pawn would be pinned.

I honestly don't think I made any huge mistakes other than that, until I was already down a pawn in a rook endgame and probably doomed anyway.

Beware of sneaky openings Kyle! :P

Yes, you were lost after 4...Ne4 ... its all in the sneaky traps! :P

Yeah, I know. I'm blaming that one on a distracting, unusually cranky toddler, because I have no idea why I did what I did

1. d4 d5 2. e4 e6 3. Be3 Nf6 4. e5 Ne4 5. f3 Qh4+
6. g3 Nxg3 7. Bf2 Nc6 8. c3 Nxd4 9. cxd4 Bb4+ 10. Nc3 Qf4
11. hxg3
1-0

Well Ne4 looks tempting superficially ... but just loses a piece ... and gets me lots of cheap points!

I have to admit I don't see d4 e4 too often and it threw me a bit. I'll consider the embarrassment as a down payment on a lesson I apparently needed to learn, so I don't fall into that one again

My personal chess journalblog somehow got an outside hit directed from a google search for "arrogant dan heisman."

Important lesson: You learn far more from blowing the endgame than you do from accepting a middlegame draw offer.

Or at least that's what I tell myself as I pull my patented "Take a huge chunk of time to calculate the complex lines that will come after you move your piece out of en prise, then forget to move it out of en prise and go straight into your calculations" maneuver to blow a game.

I have been working through the chesstactics.org site to improve my game, to mix it up a bit I'm thinking about reading Lev Alburt's tactic book link and was wondering if anyone had any feedback on this book?

Thanks for any info.

Any suggestions for chess tactics on a mobile device? Chess Quest (maybe associated with Yudasin) shows up for the iphone and looks worth trying, but was curious if anyone had any experience or suggestions. (Is there already a thread on this?)

I have Chess Quest and I review it as definitely worth the $1.99. I haven't bothered trying anything past level 1 (of 5) as those already take me several minutes each. They did recently add an easier level 'novice' which merely contains mates in 4-8. 1200 problems, 200 per level.

Heisman's twitter has something I've seen said before, but I find fascinating:

"M2 One problem in studying chess is that you can pick up a book that is far too advanced for you & you will understand it perfectly! #chess"

Reminds me of a post I once saw on a chess forum, where a young man had read a book about Fischer's games and felt like all the moves made sense, so does that mean he's awesome at chess?

+1, I'm especially interested in Android apps and would love to find a decent tactics app.

So I've been thinking a lot about how fascinating it is that chess knowledge != chess skills. There's been countless times where chess ideas that I knew seemed useless or unapplicable in my games. The first time I read the Amateur's Mind, it frustrated me to know end how often it would seem to contradict itself with things like "Pushing pawns gains you space" then later "Pushing pawns leaves weak squares in its wake." Then later I read it again at just a bit higher level, and suddenly it hit me that those aren't contradictions but tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs were pretty much what chess was about.

The idea that has really started to come into focus for me lately is tension. I see a bunch of my own games and others where a weak player has a decent or even better position against a strong player, but finally just mentally succumbs to the lure of simplifications and allows a bunch of trades that wipes out the advantages they had.

Great post and completely agree with all of it. Chess is the ultimate activity in terms of application of knowledge. I guess that's why improvement is typically so slow. You can accumulate lots of book theory, but until your brain soaks it in and decides to apply it, your results won't really improve.

I think the same is true of all logic games. One of the first things I learned when helping out some of my family with poker is to shut up and let them talk. When you explain something logically its incredibly difficult for people to imagine, to say nothing of recreating and correcting, what would have been their own illogical thought processes on the topic.

I also think that's probably why chess can be so difficult to improve at for many people. Its also why I think its funny that some people actually paid thousands for poker e-books, or something like $5000 for some audio tapes. Oddly enough there wasn't an influx of new (or transition of old) players crushing the high stakes games. Go figure!

Still a deal at $2.99. It seems pretty good so far, and better than the other tactics app I downloaded.

Their assessment of the difficulty of the problems (Level 1 = 1100-1300) is a little amusing.

I hate middlegame draw offers so much. This is not a major tournament and we are not saving our energy for a push at a norm in later rounds.

Why would you hate them. Just decline.

Then I don't get to feel morally superior.

lol what a swindle http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1607991

http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game...r.php?id=44635

This is my latest chess.com game.
I came to the conclusion that 31. Rf4 wasn't as winning as i thought (because after 32. Rh4 he just plays Rc1+ and Rxg1) and forced perpetual check. My opponent resigned almost instantly. No idea what he was thinking