I've been studying quite a bit of chess. Tactical puzzles, reading a book on calculation and working on better visualizing the board as a whole. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that thinking is my problem. The ability to think positionally and improve my position while keeping my pieces active and coming up with a definite plan is not a strong suit of mine. I have been working on it somewhat, but I think I need to find someone to play some skittles games with in order to get my thought process analyzed and to see what their thought process is during a game. When I do come up with a plan I have a problem executing said plan as well. This means either my plan is faulty or my calculation is faulty. Well, it is probably both. I do seem to miss replies when I try and calculate and this is definitely a vision problem. I either forget a piece is there, miss a piece that is long range that is affecting that area of the board, or miss a reply by the opponent that I did not think he could make. Needless to say I will continue to work on these areas as well as continuing to do tactical puzzles to try and help sharpen my vision.
I haven't worked too terribly much on the endgame. I know I need too, but I am still looking for that book or website that explains it in a way that I can understand. I'm not an idiot mind you, just sometimes it takes a few different ways of explaining something for it to finally sink into my mind. Like opening play. I don't study openings by looking at variation after variation. I look at the first few moves of an opening I think I might want to try and then I try to learn through trial and error and trying to figure out what works best for that opening. Since my memory is terrible why should I try and memorize an obscene amount of variations? Besides, what does memorization really teach you about chess?
On a final note I have played a few bullet and blitz tournaments on www.chesscube.com. My results are terrible of course, but I'm not playing them to really learn about chess, especially not bullet, but merely playing them for fun. I tend to lose on time a lot. I even managed to get a huge material advantage on one opponent only to lose on time since he had a significant clock advantage, but what can you do.
