Ratings
Whether we like it or not, we are affected by ratings- ours, our opponents, and the rest. A normal chessplayer wants to win and improve his game over time. The primary barometer of this would of course be the ratings. The downside is that it can get to a point that it interferes with your games. If you are playing a lower rated player, you may have a tendency to rush things, get it over with and get the points. All of course in the delusion that you are invincible, when as often, the lower rated guy just happened to have a string of bad games which he has already learned a lot from. And then there's the jitters of playing a higher rated player, trying to look for a trap at every possible move, not knowing that he reached that rating with a 2 move ahead horizon and simply by being very very careful before making a move.
Ratings should definitely be a consideration when you assess your opponent. But ratings should work to your advantage, not the other way around. At the most, it should give you a feel of what strength your opponent is, nothing more than that. Caution should always be made when playing: that you don't underestimate and become careless when playing lower-rated players, and that you don't panic when a higher-rated player makes a pounce on your major pieces. This is so much more acute in correspondence chess because an opponent's rating may not accurately reflect his/her true strength. Because unlike on the board games where matches are concluded based solely on the outcome of a match, matches in correspondence chess include those that had been abandoned due to a player's inability to "log-on" to his game for a number of reasons. So, a lower rated player may actually have that rating because he had been busy lately and been defaulting in his games, while a higher rated player may actually be getting points from defaulting opponents.
Ratings are like the proverbial sand in your hand, that you lose if you hold on to too tightly or too loosely, but you keep the most of if you hold on with just enough pressure. I like to think of it this way: my objective in playing chess is to improve in the game, my ratings wil improve as a result of that improvement. That means I give ratings the attention due to it, for behind it is a person who is probably on its way to improving his game. He who fails to recognize these principles not only stand to see his rating suffer, but his performance as well.
Part 4 here
Part 2 here
Start of series here
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