I, on the other hand, think that making small improvements and inducing small weaknesses in my opponent's camp is one of the things that I'm very best at.  I'm very good at building.  There's a difference between doing that and "doing nothing," though, and I think that the "doing nothing" idea is overblown in chess.  I find that the great players very rarely do nothing, but are waiting for the right moment to pounce while making small improvements or making their own position more flexible; something like that.  Often Petrosian or Karpov played moves that looked like nothing, but strong annotators like Dvoretsky can (usually) explain the concrete reasons for their moves.  And even Petrosian was excellent at switching to attack when the time was right. 

Dvoretsky helped me to see that you normally only have a limited window of opportunity to convert your advantage, so that you cannot keep improving your position forever (unless your position is truly already winning).  Noticing the moment to strike, and actually prosecuting the attack correctly, takes a different sort of skill.

Monocle wrote on 05/20/18 at 09:09:28:

Yes, in most cases you have a choice and need to decide. But I was thinking of the somewhat rare cases where one side can't really improve his/her position (attempts to do so would backfire), while the other side can. A very unpleasant situation if you've got the short end of the stick. So it would be better to realize in advance which positions are like that in order to avoid ending up on the wrong side of them. But that's very difficult to do, at least for me.

Monocle wrote on 05/20/18 at 09:09:28:

Quite often the difference depends on concrete calculation, and the author/annotator just made up a story with hindsight that the player broke some abstract principle and that was somehow the real mistake.

If you notice an opportunity to strike and you calculate that it's good for you, of course you should play it no matter what some abstract principle like "don't start an attack without sufficient preparation" would dictate. That principle should make you a bit skeptical and maybe make you check the lines an extra time looking for countersacrifices and counterattacks. But even if your calculations turn out to be less than perfect, you have only yourself to trust at the board. In the worst case, at least you will have learnt something that you can later use to improve.

CanadianClub wrote on 05/19/18 at 11:58:21:

This is a skill I struggle with myself, sensing the "elasticity" or "improvability" of a position. It's not even enough to realize once you get there that your position has clearly lower or higher potential for manouvering than your opponent's; you need to see it in advance to be able to prevent or plan it!

Dorfman has written a bit on this that I've only briefly looked at. But I know people are widely divided on whether his books are great or bad.

ReneDescartes wrote on 05/18/18 at 14:09:49:

Glad you liked it. Now if I could only follow my own advice...

Your added skills of keeping both players' style as well as physical energy in mind are very important. I sometimes catch myself stuck in some uncomfortable physical position while playing, likely so intesely focused I've forgotten to move now and then. But concentration is usually a good thing, so there's no easy solution to that one.

The relation between style and move choice happens largely intuitively, i.e. certain moves look appealing to me not just due to objective factors, but also because those kinds of moves and positions have led to good results for me in the past. But both when selecting an opening and at major decision points (possible exchanges, whether to go in for a sacrifice or other complications, offering or accepting a draw etc.) it should be possible to pause and consciously take into account both the opponent's style and your own form on the day.

P.S.: Style also raises the debate on whether we're playing to maximize results short-term or long-term. In the latter case it may be good to consciously go against your own style now and then to expand your horizions/comfort zone, even if short-term your results will likely suffer that way.

This is not simple. As IsaVulpes, my games are always :

- be better, much better usually, out of the opening
- fail to convert

my GM coach says chess is a basically a  practical game. And it is true. The exercises he gives to me are lately concrete positions where some key idea has to be found, to finish the game right now, or to choose the winning way (liquidate to a +/- endgame, put the opponent against a not-easy-to-find defence, etc.). He thinks my knowledge of the game is beyond my opposition knowledge, but practically they are better. The art of doing nothing, patiently micro-improving my position while my opponent has no space to improve is another key I tend to forget OTB. Practicality.

My 5 cents.

Stigma wrote on 05/18/18 at 01:57:03:

I think this is really excellent.

Insofar as they are important and vary, such things simply must lead to discrepancies between rating in play and rating in front of a book: they would be difficult to train with exercises in a book and impossible to test that way, either because they're about finding harmony with yourself, where there can be no answer key, or because they're about social reactions, phenomena in your thinking that only appear in a competition with a living human being.

Under the harmony-with-yourself category, I would add balancing the  strength of a move against its tendency to create a certain sort of game (as Chernev said, "don't simplify against Capablanca, I keep telling them at the office"). Another such skill is husbanding your physical energy during a game--what to eat, how to sit, etc. For example, I try to sit upright with my arms relaxed and with the spine, rather than the muscles, taking a lot of the weight, so as to save energy for later.

Have to remember "lost a lot of eval." Forget money, forget fame--I'm gonna get me some serious eval.

@IsaVulpes:
Your posts raise many interesting questions. Unfortunately I'm pressed for time now, so I will have to be a bit brief: [Edit: Yeah right, as if I'm able to write briefly on a topic of interest! Now I'm logging out for the day though  ]

I took a look back at my own notes from the Chess Exam, and I also scored 200 points above my actual FIDE rating. One thing I noted was that three of my known weaknessess at the time were hardly tested at all in the book: Time trouble, taking it too easy against lower-rated opponents, and strategic endgames.

It's very hard to say why you scored better on the test than your actual rating without more information. If you're not doing it already, try combining the Lichess analysis with writing down your thoughts and the lines you looked at during a game. Ideally you should get this down in a database or on paper before you touch an analysis engine. Then you can look at your thinking process in all the positions where you lose significant eval and compare it with engine suggestions (or suggestions from other players if possible). Look for systematic patterns. Are you missing the same kinds of themes or moves over and over? Is there something in the thinking process that goes wrong more than once?

Neither "practical skills" nor "failing to convert won positions" are simple problems; you need to break them down into more specific issues you can work on. And the only guide to that is what you were actually doing and thinking at the board, especially at those points where you lost a lot of eval.

I know when I fail to win a won position, it's often because of relaxing a bit and getting careless; the very thought "now I must be winning" is simply very dangerous to my focus at the board. But it could also be about not seizing tactical chances, making wrong exchanging decisions, especially into endgames, misplaying strategic or technical endgames, not being good enough at attacking play or calculation, etc. With your test score in mind, probably calculation has a lot to do with it? There comes a decisive point in most games where you have to go in for some concrete lines or else your advantage disappears.

Similarly, "practical skills" include time management, balancing your reliance on intuition vs calculation, being awake and rested for the game, balancing setting problems for the opponent with how much risk you're taking (a very individual balance), staying alert and looking for chances even in bad positions, lots of sports psychology, etc. I find Jacob Aagaard has useful things to say about sports psychology in chess, i.e. in Excelling at Chess. I haven't read his recent Thinking Inside the Box though. Jonathan Rowson too, but I liked Chess for Zebras a lot better than The Seven Deadly Chess Sins.

If you really get stuck trying to figure this out, a coach could probably help.

Edit 2: A final thought: From personal experience the difference between different levels quite often comes down to how good people are at prophylactic thinking, including how deeply and consistently they do it at the board. Would recommend reading up on that if you haven't already. Dvoretsky had a great, classical chapter on it in Secrets of Positional Play and now also an entire book I believe. Aagaard, Rowson and many others also discuss it. The experience of being "out-prophylactized" can involve the frustrating feeling that "I foresaw what he was going to do, but just too late to stop it without negative consequences". I notice you did alright on "Recognizing threats", "Defense" and Counterattack" on the test, but there are many levels to prophylaxis.