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

Links: https://rustic-chess.org/evaluation/material.html

chess.com

The tool I decided to utilize for this weeks post is called OBS. OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software and is something I’ve heard of before in the field of video game streaming. Watching a YouTube break down linked at the bottom, shows the uses of OBS beyond just to livestream. It is a really easy recording software to use where you can overlay things such as text, images or webcams on top of a recording. I can see software like this great for prerecorded lectures for example to improve them beyond just a shared screen of lecture notes.

To tie into my learning project I found OBS as a great tool for documenting a game recording as well as to look back at the moves I made to reflect for improvement after the fact. Here I included a recording of a game I played to show off how easy it is to record a game with OBS. During this game I tried opening with the King’s Indian setup which was discussed in the last learning post. Here with OBS I can really analyze what decisions I made post setup and critique my moves as the game progresses.

I would recommend OBS to anyone wanting to record a video with numerous customization options to improve the video while recording rather then in the editing process.

Video Link: https://youtu.be/XtKUnw2bRdM

Links:

https://obsproject.com/

chess.com