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Comment by FPGAhacker | Hacker News Reader

So I don’t mean this is to be snarky , but aren’t all chess games decided by mistakes?

Sure, but in chess blundering is more specific in that it means a mistake that is obviously awful. It's the difference between making a poor tactical decision that you might not realize was the reason for your defeat without analysis, and making a move that is so terrible that if you had noticed the issue with it in advance even a low ELO player never would have made it. A hanging piece being given up for no positional advantage is the classical low ELO blunder.

It is thought that if chess was played perfectly then it is probably a draw, but nobody knows. So if by "mistake" you mean "not exactly the best move to force a draw from move 1 to the final move", then yes. But in chess "mistake" usually means "large inaccuracy" rather than "not the best move". I just mean games at a higher elo are usually decided by pressing a smaller advantage, rather than someone hanging a queen by mistake, so basically just avoiding massive blunders gets the most elo benefit, rather than worrying too much about tactics or opening theory.

Perhaps it's fair to say that a "mistake" in chess is a move that you realise is bad as soon as your opponent makes their replying move (or, in some cases, as soon as you take your hand off the piece you just moved).

So if you just realize that move was bad after 3 turns it was not a mistake by your standards.

Inaccuracy, mistake, and blunder are in a sense technical terms related to the gravity of the screw up.

Depending on your definition of a mistake.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_ches...

failure to see disaster 3 moves ahead is a mistake, failure to see it 10 or more moves ahead is just the limits of human reasoning. In between is squishy

I've managed to progress (over the course of several months) from making dumb blunders like hanging a queen or a rook to blunders 3 moves ahead that are instantly losing according to the engine but completely innocuous to my eye, even when reviewing the game. "Just don't make blunders" is the standard advice but it is not very actionable. Do you have any advice on how to go about this?

For one move blunders, it is things like:

- Look for checks.

- Look for hanging pieces.

- Be extra careful with knight forks.

- Be careful with pawn forks.

- Look for zwischenzug when doing exchanges.

- Look for what a piece is currently doing before you move it (is it defending something?).

- Apply above reasoning to what your opponent might do in the next move after yours.

2-3 moves ahead is mostly the same, just in a bit more depth where some common tactics come in, e.g. the bishop sacrifice on A2 if the white king is castled and stuff like that.

By the time the bishop comes in to A2 it is usually too late XD. Zwischenzugs in exchanges still get me sometimes, otherwise I've mostly fixed these. Thanks for the time spent answering though, I think the main thing is to remember to take the time to think things through. So obvious and yet so difficult :)

The reason everyone says drill tactics is because the tactical motifs become a building block of several moves that you can see as one object; so if you can see that motif arise two moves away and the motif is three-move combination its the same as seeing five moves ahead but you didn't have to brute-force calculate every line five moves deep to find it, you recognized the pattern at a depth of two.

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