Positional/Technical chess
Hi, I want to reorient my chess towards playing more positionally/technically. I find this type of chess interesting, especially when I watch modern players work magic on the board in shorter time controls (players in mind Yu Yangyi, Lazavik etc...), but also probably very beneficial to me at this stage.
I am wondering, how did you get better at this? Do you have specific advice or resources that helped you? Any psychological advice as well would be beneficial to me. Below I wrote 2 problems that are reoccurring in my chess.
Fairly recently I have crossed well into the 2k fide mark (2050) in a short time span while hovering around mid 1900s and high 1900s for a couple of years and then promptly fell back down and eventually crossed the 2k mark again.
So far I have been playing "control" type of chess with white, mostly catalan, classical KID, fianchetto benoni, e3 benko, russian variation of the grunfeld etc... and I mostly get good positions even without knowing much theory. With black I have been playing KID/Sicilian/French, also without knowing much theory. My results, overall, are decent against 2k-2300 opposition (which is my usual opponent).
I have problems on two fronts: 1.) My style of chess is pretty calculation heavy and initiative driven, this leads me to burn a lot of time on my clock in order to find tricky continuations that are sometimes not even good. Pattern happens: calculate deeply, find out the opponent can answer every problem, lose 15-20 minutes on the clock, play an intuitive candidate move that could've been played in 2 minutes OR calculate deeply, lose 15-20m, play the move, opponent answers with an equally good move that avoids my variation, meaning I missed it in my calculation. Throughout the game this compounds, especially when the position starts to get complex (such as in KID or Sicilian), then I get a worse position and my whole objective is to outplay my opponent in complications which, surprisingly, I manage to do quite frequently. In this way I save a lot of games, but miss winning chances after the dust settles since I have no time. From here I concluded that I have poor time management because I aim to calculate everything and I am actively working to fix this problem. I also switched openings with black to e4 e5 and d4 d5 (here I have decent results a few times I played it OTB).
2.) Especially with white, where I get an almost winning, or outright winning technical position: position where I dominate positionally I struggle to convert it. This was a reoccurring pattern before I switched my playstyle to more aggressive initiative driven chess. At the 2k-2.3k fide mark, players defend those types of positions surprisingly well. They are very resilient and it's hard for me to crack their positions. Before I evaded this problem, now I want to tackle it head on and learn how to convert positions better. This is also connected to me wanting to calculate a concrete win, where there is none at this moment, but if I play correctly it will appear later on. This "playing correctly" it seems to me to be a technical stage of chess which I am lacking to a sufficient degree at my chess level.
Thank you for reading.