The Blunder I Could See Coming
I lost a game in July to a move I had seen coming for about four minutes and could not stop seeing, because I had already decided what I wanted.
The position was this: my king was still out in the middle of the board, which I allow in the middlegame and never in the endgame, and my opponent had a bishop on the long diagonal that was awkward to meet properly. I had won a pawn. There was a square of mine where a piece should have been standing. And there was a capture available, a capture that was simply free, which would have taken the bishop and everything with it.
I did not take it. I made a different move, the one my plan asked for, the one that felt like the continuation of a story I had been telling myself since move twelve. Twenty seconds later the bishop was still on the diagonal, my king was still where it should not have been, and my opponent's move came down with a weight I felt in my shoulders.
Here is the part I keep returning to. The capture was not difficult. There was no calculation in it, no sacrifice, no subtlety. It was the only move in the position that did not lose on the spot; a beginner would have found it. What defeated me was not blindness. It was a plan.
That is what a plan is for, and it is also what it is against. A plan tells you what you are doing, which is a service, until the position stops agreeing with it. At that moment it keeps working like a needle stuck in a groove, and you can no longer see the board, only the line you drew an hour ago.
So I went back through the game afterwards with a notebook and found that the mistake was already there three moves earlier, and again five moves earlier. Not in the moves but in the tempo I spent: the half-measure here, the unnecessary move there, the one turn where I chose the safe option in a position where the safe option was not safe. A blunder is not a moment. It is a mood that lasts nine moves and then produces a moment, which is harder to fix but is at least a description of the problem.