Melika Mohammadi WFM

Feedback for Melika Mohammadi

Dear Melika,

After reviewing your recent games, I’ve identified several strengths and areas where you can focus to improve your chess even further.

Strengths:

• Opening Knowledge: You consistently use solid opening principles, such as timely development and castling. Your understanding of classical moves like Bg2, Nf3, and d4 is clear, and you manage to reach comfortable middlegame positions.
• Tactical Alertness: You successfully executed tactical shots in critical moments, especially with piece exchanges and attacking opportunities on the opponent’s king. Your timely use of pins, forks, and tempo-gaining moves helped convert some games in your favor.
• Active Piece Play: You demonstrate good activity with your rooks and knights, often positioning them to maximize their potential. Your ability to place pressure on opponent weaknesses, such as isolated or backward pawns, is a valuable strength to build on.

Areas for Improvement:

• Opening Precision: While your opening moves follow good general principles, there were some inaccuracies that allowed your opponents to equalize or gain small but lasting advantages. Consider deepening your study of key opening lines you frequently play and try to memorize critical ideas and plans.
• Pawn Structure & Planning: In a few games, pawn moves like ...d5 or ...c5 from your opponents created tension you struggled to resolve optimally. Try to work on evaluating pawn structures early and formulate plans for both attack and defense accordingly, avoiding weaknesses and aiming for space control.
• Endgame Technique: Some endings showed opportunities where precise calculation or knowledge of theoretical positions could have secured a better outcome. Studying common endgame themes — king and pawn endings, rook endings, and minor piece endgames — will increase your confidence during this phase.
• Time Management: Time usage was often balanced, but be mindful in complex positions to spend enough quality time calculating critical moves while avoiding time trouble in general. Efficient time management is crucial to maintain accuracy under pressure.

Next Steps for Improvement:

• Analyze your games with a strong chess engine focusing on critical turning points, but always try to understand why a move is better or worse rather than just memorizing moves.
• Practice solving tactical puzzles regularly to sharpen your calculation and pattern recognition skills.
• Study a few core openings more deeply to build a reliable repertoire, focusing on typical middlegame plans arising from them.
• Review fundamental endgames to improve your technique and ability to convert slight advantages.
• Try to keep calm and practical thinking especially in time-managed games, balancing speed and accuracy.

Keep up your dedication and continuous learning! With consistent practice and study on these areas, your games will become steadily stronger.

Looking forward to your next set of games and progress! If you want, we can analyze one of your recent wins or losses in detail together.