Coach Chesswick
Coaching Feedback for Bojan Radulovic
Hi Bojan! I've gone through your recent games and here are some constructive points to help you improve your performance even further:
Strengths
- Opening knowledge: You have a solid grasp of a variety of openings, including English Opening, Dutch Defense, Benoni, and Slav Defense. Your understanding of key moves and typical plans in these openings helps you reach playable middlegame positions consistently.
- Tactical sharpness: Your games show good tactical awareness, especially in capitalizing on opponent inaccuracies. The final conversion of material advantage in multiple wins shows strong technique.
- Endgame technique: You demonstrate good endgame skills, efficiently converting positions with material advantage and creating passed pawns, as seen in your recent wins.
- Positional play: Managing pawn structure and piece activity is evident, particularly your handling of openings and pawn breaks.
Areas to Improve
- Miscalculations under pressure: In some losses, suboptimal responses in complex positions led to losing key material (e.g., in the Old Indian Defense game vs doublexclam). Focus on improving calculation depth and confirming candidate moves before committing.
- King safety: On a few occasions, such as in the opening and early middlegame stages, activating the king prematurely or neglecting timely castling impacted your safety. Aim for prompt and safe king placement.
- Time management: While generally solid, sharpening your ability to maintain steady time usage in critical moments will help avoid rushed decisions, especially approaching time trouble.
- Positional understanding in unbalanced structures: Some games showed challenges navigating highly dynamic positions with tension in pawn structure (e.g., when facing ...b5 or ...c5 breaks). Reviewing thematic positional trades and pawn breaks can help clarity in these cases.
Recommendations
- Continue deepening your opening repertoire and understanding related plans. Studying model games in your favorite openings will reinforce ideas.
- Practice calculation training regularly with puzzles and analyze your own games to identify recurring tactical oversights.
- Work on endgame fundamentals, especially king activity, pawn races, and piece coordination in simplified positions.
- Review games focusing specifically on timing the king's safety moves and practicing safe castling habits.
- Consider varied time controls — slower games can help with thinking through critical moments.
You're on a strong path with your current level of precision and consistency. Keep analyzing your games carefully, learning from both wins and losses, and steadily build on the areas mentioned here.
Keep up the great work, Bojan, and enjoy your chess journey!