Mistakes
"All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes." - Winston Churchill
I learned a lesson today, but I'm not entirely sure what it was. Maybe it will come to me tomorrow.
I was playing chess against the computer. Chessmaster, like Fritz, will adjust it's playing strength to round about your level if you ask it nicely, and so I started a game as white using my usual opening. After a couple of moves I thought I was in trouble, but swiftly got the better of it.
The endgame was fun. Once I knew I'd won I went round the board, captured anything that looked mildly dangerous and delivered a fairly basic checkmate using the queen and a rook.
I clearly wasn't as rusty as I thought.
I decided to analyse the game.
This involves the chess engine going through each move with a fine-toothed comb, and delivering a critique of your playing. This is one of the most useful features of Chessmaster: the analysis you get from Fritz can be a bit heavy-going I find, and tbh my playing isn't that great and so won't stand up to any serious inspection, but the Chessmaster analysis is quite helpful.
As it turned out I had missed eight opportunities for Mate! Eight! Looking back over the game it had been obvious where they were as well. The analysis agreed with 67% of my moves. I guess that's a 2:1, but...
Feedback, as my old manager Slayer used to say, is the breakfast of champions. When faced with mistakes, we have a choice, a bit like we have in a Fighting Fantasy novel, or a video game:
Hm. My brain's just stopped working. Must be bedtime.
I learned a lesson today, but I'm not entirely sure what it was. Maybe it will come to me tomorrow.
I was playing chess against the computer. Chessmaster, like Fritz, will adjust it's playing strength to round about your level if you ask it nicely, and so I started a game as white using my usual opening. After a couple of moves I thought I was in trouble, but swiftly got the better of it.
The endgame was fun. Once I knew I'd won I went round the board, captured anything that looked mildly dangerous and delivered a fairly basic checkmate using the queen and a rook.
I clearly wasn't as rusty as I thought.
I decided to analyse the game.
This involves the chess engine going through each move with a fine-toothed comb, and delivering a critique of your playing. This is one of the most useful features of Chessmaster: the analysis you get from Fritz can be a bit heavy-going I find, and tbh my playing isn't that great and so won't stand up to any serious inspection, but the Chessmaster analysis is quite helpful.
As it turned out I had missed eight opportunities for Mate! Eight! Looking back over the game it had been obvious where they were as well. The analysis agreed with 67% of my moves. I guess that's a 2:1, but...
Feedback, as my old manager Slayer used to say, is the breakfast of champions. When faced with mistakes, we have a choice, a bit like we have in a Fighting Fantasy novel, or a video game:
- Let Ego have its way, get upset and run away, blaming something else (tired, the weather, distracted by the sound of neighbours having sex etc) and generally make a knob of yourself in the process
- Try and forget about it, sweep it under the carpet and pretend it never happened, in order to protect the Ego
- Accept that you made a mistake, and just move on
- Accept that you made a mistake, and examine it from a number of angles so that you know the causes, and develop a strategy for avoiding making it again
- Dwell on it, call yourself names and gradually erode any semblance of confidence you have in the matter at hand because you are Stupid and Must Publicly Self-Flagellate over something that, frankly, nobody else gives a monkey's ball about
- Constantly and persistently dwell on it until it consumes you and leaves you a dead husk, rocking gently backwards and forwards in a padded cell in Hellesdon
Hm. My brain's just stopped working. Must be bedtime.