TL;DR: (1) do puzzles (slowly and carefully) to learn tactical patterns — doing more easy ones and getting them all right is more important than doing any faster or harder puzzles; (2) on each turn, look all round the board for checks and captures (this move and next) that might add up to a tactic; (3) get into the habit of checking your move before playing it; (4) get these good thinking habits bedded in by playing slow games (speed up later)
STL; ADR: practice not blundering.
The good news is that you can reduce the blunder rate in your games, and you do it by:
- SOLVING. Making sure you are sharp tactically — that you know all the tactical patterns and can work out the mechanism — by doing regular tactical puzzles. Try and do puzzles that don’t have a time limit and commit to a move only once you’re sure you have seen all that there is to see. (Concentrate on ‘how many can I get completely right in a row’ not ‘how many puzzles can I guess the right move for 5 minutes’. In the days of books, I used to say, write down all the variations before looking up the answer.)
- Knowing enough tactical patterns is not the whole story. The puzzles you are offered online are perfect for developing your tactical ceiling (what’s the hardest you can ever do when studying) but not so good for raising your tactical floor (what’s the simplest you still miss in a game), for which you need to look at easier puzzles but repeat them. A good book for such drills is something like Hays’ Winning Chess Tactics, or the endgame exercises from Thomas Willemze, or the Woodpecker Method.
- LOOKING. In a game, you also have to check for blunders — yours and your opponents’, before you decide on a move. Always look for both sides.
- Look twice: once after your opponent moves (what are they up to?) and once after you move (what am I about to let them do?). I often hear: I saw what was wrong with the move, the moment after I played it! Your task is to bring that moment of realisation a second or two earlier, before you commit to the move!
- Always look at forcing moves – checks and captures — which are the easiest sort of moves to analyse and often contain tactical treasure. As Purdy says, “Examine moves that smite!“
- And look all around the board — not just at the bit that was most recently busy.
- SLOWING. I wonder if another reason you miss things is because you sometimes move too fast. (Again, that is a very familiar finding.) Some blunders happen with a move that a player had thought about for a few seconds, and I’d be surprised if a few more moments’ thought wouldn’t save you some embarrassments in your games. You have to practice not blundering — by playing slowly and carefully, and getting into the habit of checking your moves before playing them — you will become more careful and can then speed up.
- This sort of care cannot be practised when playing blitz and it is not easy to do in rapidplay games — so I suggest you start playing some ‘classical’ time control games or at least slower rapid games, or even correspondence games and using as much time as you need. It’s easier to add speed to your game once you are careful, then you can still be careful while still playing quickly. (Think about how we learn to play music, or drive a car — slowly and carefully first!) Playing slowly also gives you the chance to look for hidden threats and to find the most accurate move.
- Use all your time — or, aim to use most of your time in most of your games. Some games I see that go on for 30-40 moves, but the players still had more than half their time left. That’s OK for games you win, but if you lose…There are no extra points for having time left at the end of the game!
- A useful habit to get into is to make yourself choose between two moves. Rather than think of a move then ask yourself if it’s OK, think about two or more moves, and try and work out which one might be the best, and why. I hope this will open your eyes to more opportunities as well as threats against you. It does take more time!
Coaches often quote Emanuel Lasker:
“When you see a good move — look for a better one!”
[I’m not sure Lasker ever said that, but Ponziani did.]
You don’t get rid of blunders overnight, but you should aim to get the rate down from one in every 10 moves to one in 20, one in 30 and so on. If you have access to a computer opponent (e.g. online bot), play games where all you are trying to do is not blunder — aim for 15 moves without a blunder, then 25, 35… — and stop the game the moment you miss something and start another.
And once you get rid of one-move blunders, you can work to eliminate two-movers and calculation errors.