Quote:
Originally Posted by ejames209
The biggest barrier to entry for me is the fact that this game has been studied by people much smarter than I, not to mention thousands of years of strategy development.
I move my pawn forward two spaces and all of a sudden my opponent says ah, I see you are playing the Belarusian PIT maneuver and then they play the Sicilian Deep Dive and in 20 moves I get checkmated.
Any advice?
I got it, I mean, I got significantly better results compared to my own performance before, when I just decided to attack my main weakness, which was blundering away pieces at key parts of the game: tactics, tactics, tactics before anything else. I don´t remember anymore the name or have the link to the pdf, this was 15 years ago, but there was this american OTB master (I think) who devised a plan to improve his own tactics in just a matter of weeks. It was pretty much a few dumb "vision" exercises, followed by solving tactical puzzles over and over again for hours every day. I did it with no expectations, and it worked: got from LOL to pretty good online ratings in the server I used to play, freechess.
Pattern recognition is the name of the game.
I´m saying that because from your post your main problem doesn´t look like knowing or not knowing opening x or y, if you´re always getting checkmated in 20 moves over and over again, you´re making basic blunders in key moments of the game.