The pieces I keep leaving hanging

I have been playing chess for a while now and I am still hovering around the beginner range.

This annoys me more than it should.

The annoying part is not that I lose. It is that when I look back at the games, I am almost never losing to something clever. I am losing because I left a piece somewhere it could be taken and did not notice. Not a deep positional error. Not a plan that got outmanoeuvred. I put a knight somewhere and then thought about something else.

At this level, improvement is apparently not about finding brilliant moves. It is about noticing the obvious thing three seconds earlier.

That was not what I expected. I assumed getting better meant learning more: openings, theory, names of positions. There is some of that. But the actual gap between me and someone slightly better is mostly that they check and I assume.

The one-move-further problem

What I want is to see one move further than I currently do. Not ten. One.

It sounds achievable and it is much harder than it sounds, because the limit is not calculation. It is attention. By the time I have worked out what I want to do, I have stopped looking at what my opponent is allowed to do about it. The plan crowds out the board.

I notice the same failure elsewhere, which is probably why I keep playing. Getting absorbed in your own intention until you stop checking the obvious thing is not a chess problem. It is just very easy to measure in chess, because there is a record and the record is not sympathetic.

Why I keep going

I like that it is unambiguous. You either saw it or you did not. There is no way to reframe a hanging queen as a learning opportunity while it is being taken.

I am not going to pretend I am on some long journey to mastery. I would like to stop giving away pieces I had already decided to protect. That is the entire ambition at the moment, and it is going slower than I would like.