Original post by 1 8 13 20 42Though I looked at it with an engine out of interest and apparently black is holding on after b3 (white has a nagging edge of around 0.7) The most decisive error is a rather funny one: to protect the c pawn black should have played 24. ...Na8, and while he is doomed to passivity, it seems difficult for you to actually collect the pawns you are pressuring. Ree7 of course just loses a pawn and I imagine essentially the game. Yeah I did think castling looked odd, but then I thought that he wants to connect rooks, and it feels uncomfortable to move the king onto a dark square in the centre considering your bishop, so I could sort of understand it, even if it indeed wasn't objectively great.
Good position yields favourable tactics though lol, so if you played better strategically it'd be much harder to make a tactical error. I don't think I'm all that bad at strategy, I'm just dreadfully slow. I mean, I'm quite slow at calculating and hence not a rapid tactician either, but still. Some positions are obvious, for instance it's the main line of an opening you play a lot, you know your plan, or you clearly just want to take control of a file or diagonal, or whatever, but when it isn't obvious, I take ages to figure out something sensible. The correspondence games I've played on chess.com lately are, I believe, strategically very good. Certainly the computer has little bad to say about them. But that's because I have the opportunity to just think. When I played slow games on Thursday, okay, I pretty much won through tactical means, but my strategy was quite good. If I don't have time, I make fairly boring, purposeless moves, either developing or inconsequentially targeting something. But I think ultimately, however nice a strategic crush feels, I can't deny that I am much more excited and engaged by crazy tactics, and the greater interest probably yields greater relative aptitude.
By the way, how are you finding the course? I am peer tutoring tomorrow lol, dunno why I signed up for it but shouldn't be too bad.