This week to strengthen my sense of strategy and understanding I familiarized myself in a field that I excel in, math. I did some research into the concept of material counting in chess, which in short relates to each piece of the chess board having a value and being able to see who is leading. Knowing these values leads to understanding better trades and either playing passively or aggressively as the game moves forward.
rustic-chess.org had a great article on values, they valued each piece as follows: Queen: 9 points, Rook: 5 points, Bishop/Knights: 3 points, Pawns: 1 point. It seemed without some sort of system to base trades off of set me up for failure in the long run since I didn’t have any sense of value of the pieces. Integrating this idea with the openings idea I used from my second blog post I can go into a game with a sense of strategy and planning moves down the road.
I first utilized the puzzles section of chess.com to practice some exchange sacrifices, their website does a great job to give feedback and reasoning to puzzle answers then simply saying if you are right or wrong.
I played a couple games against higher ranked computers to try to make better trading moves in the middle and late parts of the game. After a couple practice matches I moved back into playing against real people and got back to trying to improve my rank. After about an hour of playing I felt more comfortable actually making trades and decisions which factored into my overall confidence level.
I think confidence is going to be my biggest goal moving forward, I look forward to what my next step will be while becoming the one of the world’s best. (Definitely not one of the worlds best)
Total Rank Growth: 400 -> 590