As some of you may know, I haven't been playing chess now for a while and when you look at it, the reasons have been pretty silly.
For a start my old ergonomic mouse stopped working properly with my computer. It kept losing connection and when that happens in a game of rapid or blitz chess, it can be the difference between winning and losing.
So fast forward a little bit, and I now have a new mouse and a new computer to plug it into. Yay!
Learning & Growing In Chess
Before I took my enforced break, I was on a mission to raise my bullet rating to over 1000, that's games of either one minute (1+0) or two minutes with additional one second move increments (2+1).
Next I wanted to raise my blitz rating (5+3) to 1700 and then possibly to International Master (IM) status, which arguably is a much harder task seeing as I was around 1400 when I took on the challenge.
There are basically a couple of routes to playing better chess. First off, you can read books, there are plenty of chess books out there full of handy hints and old games for you to replay and analyse.
Not really for me, whilst I love reading books, and I mean real ones, not Kindle or anything like that. Chess books are a bit dry and even though chess notation isn't that difficult, I just glaze over when I'm looking at a whole page of notation.
The next way to improve in chess is to take some chess courses run by international masters and Grand Masters. People like GM Ben Finegold and IM Levy Rozman both sell courses teaching you how to improve your game.
However I'm not quite sure I'm that dedicated yet, even though the courses are not that expensive. I'd rather be fully committed to something, than to buy it and just let it gather up digital dust in my inbox.
So that left the third way, and that's to watch lots of instructional videos and try to implement what you've learned from them.
This way requires more memory usage, but hey, chess is a game of memory so good to sharpen it up in order to play better games.
Gotham Chess
As I mentioned above, IM Levy Rozman runs several courses helping players to improve their chess. He also runs a Youtube and Twitch channel under the name Gotham Chess.
His videos are funny and informative, Rozman has a wicked sense of humour and it is very rare not to perform at least one belly laugh whilst watching his videos. This in itself is a skill, making chess funny can't be easy!
Position
So as you've guessed by the title of this article and the video, this game was trying to play to get better positions than my opponent, even if that meant sacrificing a piece.
The game was a Blitz 5+3 game and I was pretty pleased with the outcome.
Anyway, watch and enjoy!
Cryptogee