This sort of question depends on the site you're playing on. I don't play on chess.com, but I'm sure this information is on the site itself somewhere.

Actually, yeah, it's in the FAQ: http://support.chess.com/Knowledgeba...es-for-playing

The progression:

1) Learn a key new positional idea.

2) Attempt to apply this to games, throw away games with bad misapplication.

3) Begin to apply them properly, gain superior position, have no idea how to convert superior position to win consistently because books didn't really cover that part.

???

5) Profit

I don't think it's possible to understand a positional nuance in chess without having it come up in your games and having to analyse all the tactics that are/are not possible because of it. Especially if you're on the worse side of the position.

Learning about it formally just prepares your brain to recognise it in the wild. It makes it easier for you to snap during a game and say "aha! now I understand just how bad it is to have bad bishop against good knight in this kind of ending", or whatever concept you had previously taken on trust.

I think playing over games as you learn helps. You don't just read the books, you get out a board and study the position move-by-move.

I'm just cranky because I blew a game yesterday where I had an amazing good bishop vs. bad bishop dynamic going, and then I blew one today where I ripped open a guy's king when he waited too long to castle.

Well, really I'm just cranky because I want to be great at chess now and not in the future after I've had to work for it.

Recapture with the queen, dropping the pawn but maintaining your position better, or take with the knight and maintain material equality but get put into an awkward position?

That is one nasty position. Just looking at something like Nxe1 Ng4 Nf3 Be4 makes me want to sac the pawn and hope he takes it instead of playing something like Ne4. Black is getting way too much activity in all lines except where he takes the pawn!

Spoiler on what happened in the game:

If you give up the pawn, what do you get for it?
Is there anything wrong with g3 after Ng4, with the idea of putting the b5 bishop on g2 (via f1)?
I basically want to have my bishops on g2 & f4, pawns on a4, b2, c3, d4, f2, g3 & h2, Knight on d3, Queen on d2 & Rook on e1. Anything wrong with this plan?

Activity. g3 just creates more holes which black can then use to continue attacking. Black has a quite coordinated position and by the time you plug one hole you'll be faced with another. Another way of looking at things like this is this: If you try to do all you can to hold onto your material, and black manages to eventually force the win of even a single pawn with his growing initiative - you are dead. By that point you'll be material equal but have a completely hopeless position. If you give up a pawn now then you still have very good chances of drawing. You'll be able to get your position more coordinated and in the worst case scenario you should be able to obtain an opposite bishop ending pretty easily.

I mean just look at 'reasonable' possibilities like 1. Qxe1 Bxc2 2. Qc1 Bg6?? 3. Bf4 +-

Actually considering the position more carefully it seems like black doesn't really have any good response after 2. Qc1. So far as I can see it looks like his best is to just immediately give the pawn right back with 2. .. c6!? So: 1. Qxe1 Bxc2 2. Qc1 c6 3. Qxc2 cxb5 4. Bxf6 Qxf6 5. axb5 and I don't think white will have any major problems drawing. And I think its worth mentioning again I hadn't calculated this line (or any real line) prior to suggesting giving up the pawn. Its just the nature of the game - when you have activity good things happen, when you're passive/defensive bad things happen.

I was playing around with that game on the computer earlier today and Qc1 looks pretty mighty for white.

Lesson: Trust your instincts. If they say you are better off booting the pawn, boot the pawn.

I'll get right on that, after "Stop dropping material for nothing" and "Quit pooping all over yourself in the endgame."

I have actually designed the following training program:

1001 Reinfeld combinations.
20/0 games to work on my concentration.
Correspondence games to work on my planning.
5/0 games. I review every one of them so thats my openings study, but every time I review a game I increase my opening knowledge.

However I dont know a (cheap) way to work on endings. Any suggestions?

http://staff.imsa.edu/~dporzio/EndG1.htm

http://staff.imsa.edu/~dporzio/EndG2.htm

Timely, because I'm trying to rehabilitate my ICC standard rating against the Betho computer, and I completely failed to win a QvR endgame against it.

This page is absolute garbage.

Queen against 2 bishops is an easy draw? Queen against two knights is a win for the queen, but easy for the defender to play? Both of these are totally wrong - there is only one fortress with the bishop pair, and the knight pair endgame is very tricky for both sides, it's often drawable but even some good looking positions for the defender are lost.

The first opposite colour bishops endgame is also laughable. Be1-g3-c7 is wrong because White can force through e5? Yet in the guy's main line text White also forces through e5 and we reach the same position starting with Be1-a5!! (sic) followed by Bc7.

The rook and bishop against rook example, maybe he just put in the wrong diagram, because even this moron probably didn't intend to hang the rook on move 1.

I'm not qualified to assess all the examples, but there are probably many more mistakes. Didn't even take a look at page two.

Seriously, I can't believe this was written by a GM, unless it is some kind of bizarre April Fool's joke. Do yourself a favour and don't even think of clicking the link unless you already know the endgames and want to lol at how bad it is.

Mueller and Lamprecht's Fundamental Chess Endings is an excellent endgame resource imo. There's also a Silman book which I don't own but looks good, it has a lot of overlap with M&L and is maybe targeted at slightly weaker players. I'm sure there is something useful online too, just not the page Tim linked.

thanks for the tip.

I've really enjoyed Silman's Complete Endgames, though I've been a little lax in studying it in favor of RYC lately (and it's shown in my games). I like how it's separated into ratings categories so that you get progressively more complex.

I mainly posted it because the "Lazy Person's" theme of the article matches what Valenzuela was asking for...

I don't know much about these endings. I won't argue either way because I've never even come close to having to play or even knowing someone who had to play either side of these.

You can't get to c7 via g3 with the king on d6. And if you move it, white gets to play e5 and leave the bishop stuck on the wrong side of the pawns. This is a well known way to screw up the draw. Here it doesn't look fatal yet, as Black has one more chance to save it after 1...Bg3 2.Ke2 Kd7 3.e5 with 3...Bh4!, getting to c7 via d8. Why do this when Black can just run straight for the Bc7/Ke7 setup, after which there is no hope of progress for white.

Yeah, this confused me too, but from the text it looks like the black K+B should be closer. Put the Black K on d3 and the B on d4 and it makes sense.

I actually got RT suggestion for free....

looks like this is right, Bh4 is an only move. I thought Black had a bit more leeway and could waste some moves with the bishop since it takes White so long to make progress with the king. Still, 2 exclamation marks is a ridiculous annotation when almost any legal move is equally good.

his opinons on queen against two minor pieces one aren't subjective, just wrong. You can look it up in the tablebases, e.g. here or check any endgame authority. Even wikipedia refutes what he says pretty straightforwardly.

another one I notice now is the case of queen and pawn against queen. He gives one standard drawing method - block the pawn with your king (duh) - and says that the rest are generally lost unless there is some immediate tactic to win the pawn. This is true for the example he gives, which has an f-pawn, but it's pretty misleading in general since with a rook's pawn or knight's pawn the position is actually usually drawn.

and his Example 2 for opposite colour bishops is, he claims, "an exception to 2a which is worth knowing". Actually, it confirms his 2a (that White's passed a-pawn doesn't give enough counterplay), and he even shows the correct moves that lead to a pretty Black win. I'm not even sure if his 2a is a worthwhile guideline in any case, but I can give him the benefit of the doubt there.

The idea of the article is good -- some "lazy" rules of thumb to help you play endgames automatically -- but that's not much use if half the rules are trivial and the other half are wrong. Unfortunately the real lazy player (and amazingly clueless, if it really was written by a GM as claimed) here is the author.

Plus Im not lazy just cheap.

So I've been going over some games with my opponents lately, and I've noticed that they seem to be much more "line-centric" than I am.

They'll say something like: "I was thinking about 15. X Y 16. Z Q 17. A B 18. F G 19. X +=" where none of those are all that forced. My thinking tends to run through all the very forced lines that I see, and then be much more vague. "Okay, there's no tactics here and he has a lot of options. I want to play on the kingside because of the pawn structure, and here's a good square for my bishop that will cause him some uncomfortable problems. What are his responses? Anything I have to deal with immediately? Okay, good."

Thoughts?

Holy crap at this game. I skimmed through it pretty quickly (1-2 seconds per move) -- games are somewhat coherent, to me, even at that pace. But viewing this game at that pace made me feel like I felt watching chess before I knew the rules.

you probably have to be stronger than your opponents before you can assess whether they are mistakenly ignoring perfectly good alternatives or whether they really are considering the only natural moves.

For some positions, even quite quiet ones, it is logical to think about them in terms of concrete lines, because both players have a clear plan and there are only a limited number of ways to implement it. For others, not so much.

Im solving Reinfeld book, but I have to use crafty as well because sometimes there are more than one solutions and I need to see if what I did was right or wrong. For instance in one problem I come up with a move that leaves me 1.6+ while Reinfeld solution is 2.6+. OTOH sometimes Cfafty thinks my line is stronger than the one proposed by Reinfeld.

Can you give an instance? Been a while since I've done the book but I don't recall any busted problems.