Common Blunders I Made

Everybody has been there, even the greats of chess. We often make mistakes, sometimes subtle and other times, quite blatant but that is a fact of life. We can sulk and grumble when we make mistakes or blame others for them, or we can learn and improve ourselves from the mistakes we have made. Here, I look at the common mistakes and blunders I have made throughout my chess experience and I would like to share them with you so that you may also gain insight from them.

1. Giving pieces away
As you can see from this first example, there are times when you get double vision or forget that one of your opponent's pieces was not really hanging but you take it anyway and you're left with a massive blunder. And believe me, this can happen a lot online and even over-the-board because when you get tired and you sometimes can't process the position and you freeze so you make the move that seems most appealing to you without assessing the consequences.

This actually happened to me recently in this game:


Not realizing that my opponent had control over that square, I blundered my queen yet again. Although given that this game was a bullet match, it does add pressure especially when you're getting into a time scramble. You're basically playing on adrenaline and instinct and tactics as opposed to strategy and positional advantages.

2. Walking into mate
There have been moments when I did not see that I was walking into mate or I was falling into a mating net. Sometimes, it's subtle but there are times when the threat of mate is staring right at me but I still did not respond to it properly. Here is another recent game wherein I thought I was already in control over the position so I got arrogant and I forgot to see the threats my opponent had against me:



Of course, the best response was to simplify the position by exchanging a pair of rooks so that the threat of mate would be quelled.

3. Miscalculating trades
The last common blunder I make is miscalculation especially when there is tension in the middle of the board, and there are so many trades that can happen on a single square and you miscount how many pieces are attacking that square. Here is one game that exemplifies that:


In the above game, I only lost a pawn but there are games when I lost a piece because I did not calculate properly the trades that would be executed and whether there are zwischenzugs or intermediate moves that my opponent could make that would give him the extra piece.

In summary, I hope this has been helpful and instructive at the least. Some pieces of advice I can probably give based on experience would be to stay calm no matter how chaotic the position may get and depending on your style, you can either simplify the position so that there would be less lines to calculate or you can make it as complex as possible so that you could have an unclear, double-edged position that could lead to exciting outcomes. Whatever the case may be, remember that we all make mistakes and it's okay. Chess is just a game, and even in life when we make mistakes, we get up and move on from them, and we learn from them. As one of the Youtube chess stars that I follow, John Bartholomew has said many times, "In chess, you need to have short-term memory." We need to learn from and then forget about the mistakes we made in the past.