How to solve Chess Puzzles: Chessworld.net Puzzle Practice #31

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The Boring System

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When you go out to play a game of chess, what do you hope for? A win would be nice, naturally, and I don't suppose many of us would keep playing unless we won a few. But there's little satisfaction in beating much weaker opponents, so we must want more than that. Being made to think, seeing ideas that we haven't seen before, taking the other guy on in a real struggle... isn't that what it's about? How, then, to explain a game like this? White plays the dullest opening he can think of; Black goes along with it. White offers a draw at move 15. Move 15! The position more than justifies the offer, and if we were two grandmasters playing for prize money, well, maybe it would all be understandable. But this is two club players trying to spend their evening doing something they enjoy. I played on a while in the hope that something would happen, but it never looked likely. Can either of us enjoyed this game? I know that I didn't. Well, people will play the Lo...
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Playing away

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Over at the Streatham & Brixton blog, Tom has been running a series of How To Improve type posts. I'm a bit slow off the mark, but a couple of them caught my eye, for differing reasons. The first was his recommendation to practise with a real board , setting up conditions to be as similar to tournament play as you can manage. I expect it's good advice; if nothing else it sounds like awfully hard work and I've a nasty feeling that this is the main thing that's required if you're serious about improving. What it reminded me of, though, was a match a year or two ago over at Wanstead (I think). I was playing a board or two below fellow-blogger kingscrusher, who had presumably been spending rather too much time playing online. Half an hour or so in he takes me to one side and says something like: "Dave, this over the board stuff, I'm finding it a bit unfamiliar. The thing is, it's very... it's very realistic isn't it?". Well, it mad...
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Seeing ghosts

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Why do I play bad moves? For many different reasons, no doubt, which makes it that much harder to stop doing it. A mistake that I find myself repeating, though, is to misevaluate a perfectly acceptable position as being slightly worse, and consequently play some inferior move to avoid it. In last week's game, for example, 9 ... Be7 was quite unnecessary. I was afraid that my pawns would be doubled and my king exposed after 9 ... Nc6 10 Bxf6; but in fact Black is fine here, and the exchange on f6 doesn't seem to be unfavourable at all. Instead I went into a sequence of exchanges and a very dull position. This week I'm White, and at move 12 I suddenly start to worry that things aren't going well. My opponent, my computer, and the cold light of day have all since convinced me that a normal move such as 12. Rb1 is just fine; but during the game it felt as though I was walking into some sort of disadvantage. So I decided to try and confuse matters, offering a pawn with...
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