Faultology

One third of the money I recently spent for chess improvement was a purchase of Deep Shredder 9. Not only 10fold World Champion, but also capable of multi-thread analysis. This is really cool. I set it at 5 threads, and it is very instructive to watch it display the 5 best moves and how they change while thinking. One more point that makes me happy: its position evaluation is gambit-friendly.

After my coaching session with IM Frizz I reviewed some dozens of my old games with Deep Shredder. In order to find out what really happens in my games I feel the need of a sort of fault classification. The seven points I distilled from my coaching session proved not to be very useful. I need something more simple, more general. Now, this is my second attempt to make progress in faultology.

1. Tactics
Missing X-Rays (pins, skewers, discovers), Forks (K, Q, R, B, N, P), Tempo Moves (Zwischenzug) and Removal of the Guard.

2. Passivism, positional
Defense against non-existing threats, overprotection of pieces or squares, moving pieces to bad squares, blocking squares for own pieces, non opening position when better developed, playing for draw in a won position.

3. Activism, positional
Attack with non-sufficient forces, chasing opponent's pieces to better squares, going for fruitless tactics resulting in positional weakness, opening position when less developed, advancing pawn weakening important squares, playing for win in a drawn position.

I guess that this is the order of importance in my games.

Update: I did some preliminary stats and it shows that my guess is true. I lose 72% of my pawn units by tactics, 19% by passivism and 9% by activism. But positional errors are more frequent: every 8th vs. every 12th move.