"If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles."
In part 1, I showed how to prepare against specific openings, or at least my openings. I covered some common ideas and things to watch out for. Today, for part 2, we will continue preparing against me but in a more general way. Rather than what openings do I like, what kind of player am I?
This takes more work than just looking at a database and recording the statistics, but I think it's more revealing and more fun. The opening is only one aspect of the game, and it's arguably the least important one. Looking at broader tendencies (attacking vs defending, open vs closed, static vs dynamic) will give us a much better understanding of us as a player, which we can then use to inform our training.
Inside, I will explain how to do this and then demonstrate on myself. It should be fun. Let's go.
The Method
I went to lichess and grabbed my 50 most recent games, 25 as White and 25 as Black. I then recorded the following essential information for each game:
- Result: Win, Loss or Draw
- Colour: White or Black
- Ratings: Opponent and Myself (to quantify rating differences)
- Length: The number of moves
This doesn't take too much time or effort... but the next part does. I now open each game and go through it quickly. I am not doing a deep analysis. Rather, I am looking for some general trends. Here's the information I'm looking for:
- In general, am I the ATTACKER or the DEFENDER? Am I the one applying pressure?
- Is the position OPEN, CLOSED or something in between?
- How SHARP is the position? I rate this on a scale: 5 is super wild and dynamic, 0 is even, and -5 is the most positional grind game possible.
- What does the EVALUATION GRAPH look like? A steady rise? A rollercoaster, up and down? Sudden spikes or more gradual?
- When was the DECISIVE ERROR? What move number? What was it: overlooked tactic, time scramble, opening theory, unforced error?
- Did the game end EARLY, or was it an ENDGAME?
Those are the concepts I looked for, and I feel it paints a pretty big picture. You can do less or you can do more, though obviously the more info you try to extract from each game the longer it takes.
I then put everything into a spreadsheet and started filtering. Here are the results.
Smithy's Chess Profile
White vs Black, Open vs Closed
Let's start with the basic stats: in my last 50 games, I have 26 wins, 23 losses and 1 draw. As White, I had 17 wins, whereas Black only had 9. We immediately see the first take-away: a much stronger performance as White, 68% vs 36% in terms of win rates. We might be tempted to conclude my Black openings needs work, but hold on, we can dig in much deeper.
How do I win? 15 of my wins come where I am the attacker (either going for the King or the one applying pressure). Conversely, only 5 wins come when I am defending / absorbing the pressure. This isn't surprising: attacking is easier than defending, especially in blitz. However, 13 of my attacking wins come as WHITE. I only have 2 (!) wins with Black where I was carrying play.
We can then shift to the position type. In Open positions, where pawns have been exchanged and the pieces move, I have 16 wins, 10 as White and 6 as Black. Remember, I only had 9 Black wins, so that's 66% of my Black total coming from open positions. In closed positions, I only had 3 wins total (out of 7 games, so only 14% of my sample). In Semi-Open positions, I lost nine games as Black and only 2 as White.
The difference is starting to come clear: I play open positions very well, especially when I can attack. A full 50% of my sample come in Open positions, and I score 16 wins, 8 losses and 1 draw. That's a rocking 64%. In all other positions, so Closed or Semi-Closed, I have 10 wins and 15 losses, or 40%.
As White, I can dictate play and frequently force an open position. My results are great. As Black, I cannot force those open positions, and my results suffer. Is this an opening problem, or is it a chess problem?
Sharpness
I have long considered myself a positional player. Even my attacking games are typically "positional attacks", if that makes sense. Nonetheless, the data paints an interesing story. It might be easiest to post an image and then explain it. Here is my spreadsheet sorted by "Sharpness", with the most sharp at the top in red and the least sharp at the bottom in blue: (click to enlarge)
This fascinates me. I have more sharp games than positional ones, 26 vs 22. Of those sharp games, 16 are victories, but most importantly, almost all of the sharpest games (4 or 5 on my subjective sharpness scale) were victories. We see no such correlation on the positional side: the wins and losses are spread evenly across -1 to -5.
Endgames
Perhaps this is related to move number? Maybe I am just better at shorter games? Let's sort by move number:
There are 20 games under 25 moves, where I won 11 of them (55%); if look at games under 20 moves, I increase to 9 wins out of 14 games (64%). Let's look at the other end of the spectrum: for games over 35 moves, I have 8 out of 17 games (47%), and for games over 40 moves, I'm 4 out of 9 plus one draw (44%). If we just look at the games I labelled endgames (some middlegames might last until 40 moves, after all), I am 5 out of 11 (45%).
Every way you slice it, my results get worse the longer the game goes on. And this makes sense with the other data: closed games frequently have fewer piece trades and last longer, and I do really poorly in them. We can see that one weakness is tied to another.
Eval Swings
This one is more subjective, but it's still illuminating. Here are the most frequent classifications of the eval graph and my results:
- Steady Rise: the bar just keeps going up in my favour, meaning I'm in control from start to end. 9 of my 26 victories have this characterization (35%).
- Steady Decline: the reverse, where I get steadily outplayed; 6 out of 23 losses (26%).
- Rollercoaster: the graph jumps wildly as blunders get traded; 5 games, 2 wins (40%).
- Sudden Spike: basically an even game and then a blunder or other decisive tactic; 12 games, 4 wins (25%).
Perhaps I am still a positional player after all: I have a decent amount of steady wins, and I do it more often then I get outplayed. The big takeaway, though, are the blunders: in rollercoaster games I do worse (though only 5 games, not a big sample), and in "sudden spike" games, I do terrible. It seems I am either susceptible to unforced errors in equal positions or I am just otherwise bad at calculating. How else to explain such a one-sided display of eval spikes?
Conclusions
What is my chess profile? I strongly prefer open, dynamic positions. When the pieces can move, I score over 60%. When I can carry the attack and apply pressure, those numbers get even higher. The longer the game goes on, though, the worse I get. This is related to the position type: open positions I do well, but closed and semi-closed (or semi-open) positions I do less well ... which is funny, because I subjectively enjoy semi-closed positions.
What are my weaknesses? The endgame is clear; I do less well the longer the game goes on. Because this is a blitz analysis, time handling may also play a part here. It may be that I am just slow. Another weakness is also clear, though: blunders. I am susceptible to blunders, especially in equal positions. What should I thus work on? Endgames, some sort of anti-blunder training (tactics and calculation work probably, maybe visualization), probably some work on closed position, maybe my Black repertoire needs work.
Recall from Part I that the Semi-Slav and mainline QGD were my worst performing openings. Today's analysis offers a hint why: these are frequently closed openings, with fewer pawn trades and longer games. I don't have an opening problem, I have a general chess problem. Indeed, continuing to play the Semi-Slav and get more experience in these positions is likely my main path to improvement. I might even revamp my repertoire to exclusively play slower, closed positions; my results will suffer but my long-term improvement will thrive. That's a question to determine on another day, though,
There you go: I created my chess profile and know exactly what I do well and what I need to improve. This is based on my recent games, so no historical biases should get in the way. The whole took about 90min, and it would have been faster if I weren't rusty with Excel. For a modest investment in time, you can get clarity on what you should focus on to improve... or, if nothing else, you know what to do if we ever meet in a game!
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