How to avoid making blunders

Tip: for beginners/improvers ~ How to avoid making blunders

You’ve prepared your opening. You’ve studied some strategy: learned about how to make the most of your minor pieces, how to deal with various pawn structures, etc. You go into the game confident that with all this newly acquired chess knowledge, you can plan and execute a brilliant victory. It all seems to be going well. 15 moves in and you’ve just repositioned your knight to a nice outpost. You sit back pleased with yourself. Then you look at the board again and your satisfaction turns to horror. Your opponent can win a piece with a simple tactic. Or even worse, you’ve just left a piece en prise. What’s gone wrong?

After this happened to me a few times – okay many times – I realised that games at my level are often decided by mistakes and blunders. Unless I did something to reduce these, all the chess knowledge I was working so hard to acquire would keep going to waste. So, I looked for advice on how to avoid blunders. There is lot out there. GM Igor Smirnov has a brilliant two-part video on ‘how to prevent blunders’ that I found especially useful. Here are the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmCukNEs7lc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xASlcNhMXwg

My main conclusion, though, was that the most important thing was to have a move procedure. This needs to be simple enough that I can memorise it and put it into practice - every move/every game. I’ve put this nine-step procedure together from various sources, but its adapted mainly from chapter 22 of Tim Harding’s book Better Chess for Average Players (published by Dover). This has improved my game. I blunder less, and when I do make a gaffe its usually because, in the heat of the battle, I’ve forgotten to use my procedure. Hopefully, other ‘improvers’ might find this useful:

1. Assess your opponent’s last move: what was its purpose? what has changed? (this is a crucial first step and one which beginners/improvers often miss)

2. Am I facing any immediate threats? In particular, does my opponents have any checks, captures, or tactical threats? If so, what defences are available to me?

3. Do I have any tactical threats?

4. If I have no threats available, what can I do to improve my position?

5. Based on the above, what are my candidate moves?

6. Calculate variations based on these.

7. Decide on my move.

8. Now a crucial step: do a blunder-check. In particular, ask yourself whether – if you make your move - your opponent has any:

a. checks (and if so, what are the implications?)

b. captures

c. mate threats

d. threats to queens/rooks

e. threats to pieces – especially by pawns

f. advances of passed pawns

9. If still satisfied with your choice – make the move.

Gerry Johnstone, member of Beverley Chess Club