Beginner lesson: avoid loss of power

Oh, it's a lot of fun working with beginners. The main lesson from today's game (see replay link below) is LOSS OF POWER. Beginners have a tendency to give up material (pawns and pieces) without any compensation (material gain, positional advantage or a direct attack) which leads to power loss.

In the training game below White got a lot of "donations" from Black without any built-in dangers. And eventually Black got mated on f7.

So, remember this: hold on to your material UNLESS there is some compensation. Otherwise you're just losing power. Chess masters just need one extra pawn to beat you. Trust me. I know. Later I will show you examples of this where one extra pawn is decisive in the endgame.

Click here to replay the game. Leave comments if you have questions. Message me if you want to play online training games with coach NCM Vas for ONLY $15/hour.