[Part of the Chess Campaign]
After that thrashing I decided to play Martin (250), the lowest AI on chess.com (at least the lowest for free to play members) and proceeded to LOSE FOUR MORE TIMES. Sigh. And these were not close games. He won decisively. Clearly I have to learn more but since I don't really want to read books or memorize grand master matches (really? people do that? wtf?) I decided to see what googling would get me.
Two main points are:
1 - Don't rush. Yeah, that's a big part of why I suck at this - I have little patience.
2 - Don't eat pieces just because you can / "Tension" is good.
3 - "Count". Count? Count what? Points! Turns out each piece has an arbitrary point value that is meaningless in the game, but helps decide if an exchange or set of exchanges is worth it.
Pawns are worth 1, Bishops and Knights 3, Rooks 5 and the Queen is 9.
And just like that they added fricking maths to something I already dislike! This really helps in decision making though as my next game against Martin was a long one, filled with tension, and no pieces were eaten for a long time! Then my queen died (first piece to die too)! Haha... still, I managed to get another queen (pawn promotion) and eventually slew all his pieces apart from the king, but somehow - even with a queen, rook, (dark) bishop, four pawns and a knight I couldn't get a checkmate against a single king: the match ending in a draw/stalemate. LOL :D
That's ok, its an improvement and I'll take it!
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