In blunderchecking as in tactics....

I got Fritz in the mail today! I am excited about the potential it has to help me improve, and I have barely scratched the surface of its helpful tools! So far, I have played around with the 'Threatened Squares' tool while working through a game between Kasparov and Nunn (one of many in the cool database provided). Unlike Chessmaster, Fritz doesn't just show which squares are under direct attack, but color codes them: green if the piece is well protected, yellow if the piece is evenly defended, and red if the piece is piled upon. It is a great way to exercise my counting muscles when evaluating position strengths.

Not coincidentally, I finally feel like I have hit on the right method for my Thinking Drills. As mentioned in my previous post, the first Stage of my Thinking Drills, avoid en prise blunders (blundercheck, for short), was not going real well. This is because I was trying to do it much too quickly during actual games, scanning the board for just a few seconds. I have now slowed down and am doing the Thinking Drills using other people's games from Fritz's database. I take my sweet time, serially looking at each piece of my opponent, even pieces I "know" can't be a direct threat because they are outside the main action of play. To go through 10 moves in a game, writing down each threatened piece right after black moves and right before white moves, took me over 30 minutes! Then, afterwards, using Fritz's sweet Threatened Squares detector, I checked my answers. In my first game, I neglected that a pushed pawn was under threat from capture en passant. In my Second Thinking Drill game I got zero errors, and more importantly started to feel like I was building up a blunderchecking muscle that will come in handy in real games.

So, blunderchecking, as with tactics, is a skill that can be built up by slowly studying very simple scenarios until the skill has become automated and fast. Or so it appears to this beginner...Stay tuned for my inevitable humiliation.