Compliments

A new chess club started up at a local (rather quiet) mall. Every Monday night, and it seems the focus is on a rated, G/25 tournament each week. $3/week, so that's not a bad deal. 

Though, I have to admit not a huge fan of G/30 or less.

I showed up last night, and was just setting up to go through a game from Formation Attacks when a former state champ and Fide Master asks me if I'm up for a game. (The guy doesn't know me from Adam.)

Well, yeah. Like I'm going to turn down a game from a FM.

We don't use a clock, just casual, and I'm actually hearing a grunt of surprise from him every now and then. Of course, he wins both games, but I make him work for it.

We're in the third game, and a friend of his shows up, and he starts pulling out the bag of tricks. He swindles a piece off me, and we call things as the TD is getting things started.

As we're cleaning up, he asks me what my rating is. "In the 1200s" I reply. He says "You play way better than that. 1700s or so." I thanked him for the kind words. 

If I can only get the results when the clocks are running... I know it's in me, but it's just not coming out when I need it. Naturally, I lost both tourney games after that, with a massive blunder in each game.

Still, it's compliments like that, from players like that, that keep me going. If I was basing my desire off results, I'd probably be back playing wargames by now. 

I can do this, but I've just got to fix the way I think during timed games. What I currently do doesn't work. I've been going through the Igor Smirnov course "The Grandmaster's Secrets." It's good. It teaches you how to find moves, how to approach the game, and how and what to calculate. You just have to get used to his voice.

Disaster

Well, that certainly didn't go the way I wanted it to.

I pretty well botched my way through the US Open. I blew both games in the Wednesday Quad with tricky endgames in time trouble against players I felt like I should beat. I've come to really dislike Game/30 as a time control. I just don't think that fast. Yet.

In the Open proper, I played really well the first two rounds, but lost to players 600+ and 400+ points higher than me. Both say I played much higher than my rating. Felt good. Then I blundered my way into a mate-in-two against a player I should beat, pulled off a draw and a win on the 2^nd day out of four games, then didn't win again until the last round. 2.5/9. NOT what I was looking for. Ended up losing nearly 100 ratings points over the week. Twice, I lost "won" positions. (points in a game where Houdini gave me a +2 advantage or better) I couldn't find the winning move.

So, obviously, what I've been doing for training wasn't working. Or, it was working 85% of a game, and the other 15% were losing it for me.

I seem to play really well in correspondence games, when I don't have the time pressure going. So, I'm thinking there are three things I need to work on in OTB play.

Calculation, a more consistent thought pattern, and my method of move selection. I'm pretty happy with my openings, for the most part.

Most of the time I've spent over the weeks since the Open ended have been in re-evaluating my study method. I could charitably describe it as “scatterbrained” or “oooh! Shiny!” I need to pare things way down.

So, my method will now be this:

• Work, slowly and steadily, through Yasser Seirawan's series. I skimmed through Play Winning Chess at the open, but that's mostly stuff I've grasped. We do have a copy of it checked out from the library, though, for my wife (who keeps saying she should learn how to play beyond the basic moves, but hasn't yet made the leap), so I'll try the tests in it to see how I do.
  
  Right now, I'm 1/3 through Winning Chess Tactics. Going pretty well. After I finish that book, I'm going to go back through Silman's Endgame course up to Class D (or maybe C), and learn that cold. Then on to Winning Chess Strategies.

• Igor Smirnov's course “The Grandmaster's Secrets” I've seen a couple of Smirnov's free videos on YouTube, and there's good information there. This is supposed to be sort of the starting point for his program, so we'll see how it goes. Don't let the affiliate-style, “this looks like an expensive load of crap” website design fool you.
  
  One of the primary skills taught in that course is how to analyze games (both yours, and other players'). I picked up a handful of books at the Open, and among those were a couple books by CJS Purdy. He's pretty well known for his annotation style (Fischer raved about one of his books when he was younger), so I'm going to combine that with the methods Smirnov teaches. The methods happen to be nearly identical, thankfully. (Walk through a game from the winner's perspective, and try to guess the moves while using a typical time control. Try to establish why the winner made the moves he made, using the principles Smirnov describes – which happen to be very similar to what Dan Heisman teaches. Synergy. It's useful.)

• Continue working through the Yusupov series. I've only completed five lessons of the 24 in the first book, but my scores are improving.

• Play more games. I'm simply not playing enough timed chess. I've got 20 or so games going on Red Hot Pawn, but that's like twitter compared to a novel. While I need to revisit how I'm using RHP, I need to play more. My goal will be two 45-45 games per week. Either on ICC, FICS, or Playchess. Haven't decided. Most of the games I'll be playing OTB will be Game/60, so that's a level I need to focus on. Then, analyse the heck out of the game.

I think that's it for now. Plenty to keep me busy. I'm sure I'll wander off into another book or three at some point, but I've at least got a plan in place. I'm happy with my openings - it's the thought process and move selection I need to improve.

Stagnance

I haven't written much on here lately, that's for sure.

Things are progressing, slowly, in our little chess world. My kids haven't been interested in playing tournaments, but they have been playing Fritz & Chesster. My daughter's graduated on to disk 2, while my son seems to be stuck at the pawn game. He still hasn't grasped the concept of getting his pieces to work together, and he sends out one or, at most, two pieces at a time, they get captured, then he tries again. He does this in Memoir '44 as well, so I'm not surprised. I need to figure out how to get the point across to him, but hey – he's not even 6. There's time.

I've now played in three OTB tournaments since returning to chess, with 12 total games. I'm at +4 -6 = 2, and I've picked up thirty points on my rating.

The average rating of the six players I've lost to is (post-event) is 1749, the average of those I've beaten is 1043, and my average draw is 1255. This fits, given my current rating is 1275.

Starting on Saturday is the US Open. It's only 25 miles away, so I pretty much have to go. I'm playing in two tourneys: the Wednesday Quads, and the 4-day Open (U1400). That means I'll have three games Wednesday, three on Thursday, four on Friday, and one each Saturday and Sunday. That will double the number of rated games I've played since returning.

I've been kind of spread out in my preparation/study lately, and I definitely need to become more focused.

For tactics, I've switched to ChessTempo over CT-ART. I'm also taking advice I saw elsewhere that doing tactics study for more than 15 minutes at a time is counter-productive. Not that that's stopped me from spending over an hour on there at times. I seem to hit a wall at getting my ChessTempo rating over 1300. I'll get to 129x, then miss one or two. The misses seem to have a bigger rating penalty than the hits, so it's five hits to gain the points back.

I'm through the fifth lesson in the 1^st Yusupov book, and I've barely been scoring above the “pass” level in each lesson. The 1st-level books in the series are supposed to take you to ~1500. So, that fits as well.

I'm pretty set on my repertoire: Grunfeld, Scandinavian, Veresov. Of course, the Veresov frequently morphs into a French, so I've been studying the relevant lines of that as well.

The books I'm currently reading are: A Ferocious Opening Repertoire, Starting Out: The Scandinavian, Play the Grunfeld, and Winning Chess Tactics. I'm also occasionally going through games from the Alekhine autobiographical collection and Chernev's Logical Chess, and occasionally reading Chess Words of Wisdom by Henebry (this latter one needs to be taken in small doses – there's a TON of good information in there, but it's dense.)

I'll try to post reports after each day of games in the Open, but we'll see. It's a pretty brutal schedule.

Opening Categories

Just picked up the new Mastering Opening Strategy by Johan Hellsten. Judging by the first half of the first chapter, it's quite good.

One thing it has, in the back, is a section on building an opening repertoire. In that section are two tables which I will take the liberty of reproducing here. If you like this - go buy the book. It covers what you need to know about the openings - HOW to conduct them, not just memorizing a crapload of variations.

So, first table: Openings with structural similarities.

Openings and defences	Factors in common
Slav, Caro-Kann, Scandinavian, Torre, London	Pawn Structure, queen's bishop outside the chain
Dutch Stonewall, French, Open Spanish	Pawn structure, opposing pawns in the center
Benoni, Pirc, Closed Spanish	Pawn structure, dark square play
Nimzo-Indian, Queen's Indian, Bogo-Indian, Sicilian Scheveningen, Taimanov, and Kan	Pawn structure, queenside fianchetto
King's Indian, Pirc, Modern, Sicilian Dragon	Pawn structure, kingside fianchetto
Queen's Gambit Accepted, Petroff	Pawn structure, open game
Grunfeld, Catalan (some lines)	Pawn structure, kingside fianchetto
Sicilian Dragon Accelerated, English w/ g3, Symmetrical English (as Black)	Pawn structure, kingside fianchetto
Sicilian Rossolimo, English w/ 1...e5 and ...Bb4	Pawn structure
Colle, Semi-Slav	Pawn structure
King's Indian Attack, King's Indian, Pirc, Old Indian	Pawn structure
Tarrasch, Petroff, Sicilian Alapin, Queen's Gambit Accepted, Caro-Kann Panov Attack	Pawn structure

Okay, that groups the openings together by their typical pawn structures. Now, openings with similar "styles."

Openings and defences	Factors in common
Queen's Gambit Accepted, Petroff, Spanish Berlin, Sicilian Alapin, Spanish Exchange, French Tarrasch	Solidity, piece exchanges, endgame perspective
King's Indian, Sicilian Dragon, Dutch Leningrad, French 3 Nc3, Open Sicilian	Aggressiveness, closed or semi-open positions
Semi-slav, Spanish Marshall, Archangel, and Schliemann, Car-Kann w/ 3f3, Open Sicilian	Aggressiveness, open or semi-open positions
French, King's Indian, Czech Benoni	Closed positions, pawn chain battle
Queen's Gambit Declined, French	Solidity, closed positions
Dutch Stonewall, Sicilian Sveshnikov	Weak points, activity
Sicilian Najdorf, Grunfeld, Sicilian Dragon, Semi-Slav Botvinnik	Theoretical battle, sharp play
Nimzo-Indian, French Winawer, Sicilian Rossolimo, English w/ 1...e5 and ...Bb4	Surrender of the king's bishop, doubled enemy pawns
Catalan, Benko Gambit, other gambits	Pawn sacrifices, activity
Sicilian Scheveningen, Kan and Taimanov, Alekhine, Pirc, English Hedgehog	Space disadvantage, flexibility, few piece exchanges
Trompowsky, Chigorin	Surrender of the queen's bishop, imbalanced play
King's Indian Samisch, Classical Nimzo-Indian	Space advantage, slow

So, if you're looking for a new opening, choosing something within the same group might prove easier to learn and play effectively.

Lessons

Okay, they say you learn the most from your losses. I present to you two games I lost yesterday. Both to players rated 500 points higher than me.

Landes, Eric (1245) - unnamed (1749)

Result: 0-1

Site: ?

Date: 2012.06.09

[...] 1.d4 ¤f6 2.¤f3 e6 3.¥f4 c5 4.c3 ¤c6 5.e3 d5 6.¤bd2 ¥d6 7.¥g3 O-O 8.¥e2 Out of book here. Should have been 8. Bd3.
(8.¥d3 c4 9.¥c2 b5 10.a3) 8...a6 9.O-O b5 He might have been better off here exchanging bishops and messing up my pawns.
10.a3 I really needed to get rid of that c5 pawn. Had plenty of chances, but this is when it should have happened.
10...c4 11.¥xd6 £xd6 12.b4 b3 was probably better. This forces things open, and not necessarily to my advantage.
12...cxb3 13.¤xb3 Taking with the queen might have been better, but I was fixated on getting my knight to c5.
13...¥d7 I really didn't see the point of this. a4-e8 diagonal?
14.¤c5 ¤e7 I expected Ne4 here. 15.¥d3 ¦fb8 Not convinced this was the right file, but it certainly made me think.
16.£c2 g6 17.¤e5 At this point, I liked my position but wasn't entirely sure how to progress.
17...¤c8 I found out later, he was eyeing a4 for this knight.
18.e4 Looking at this now, I think the queen's on the wrong diagonal. She needs to be on d1 or e2. This pawn break is suspect.
18...dxe4 19.¤xe4 a blunder. Should have either taken with the bishop, or taken the d7 bishop instead.
19...¤xe4 20.¥xe4 ¦a7 21.¦fe1 ¤b6 22.¦e3 I had considered throwing the h-pawn into the fray. Now would have been a good time. This rook excursion may have cost me the game.
22...¦c8 23.¦f3 again, kingside pawn rush. All his pieces are on the queen side. All mine are on the king side. This walks right into tactics.
23...¥e8 I had feared f5 here. It was probably the better move on his part.
24.£d2 ¦ac7 25.¤g4 This was me trying for complications. The c-pawn looked lost to me, and with that comes a heavy-piece breakthrough. So, I tried something.
25...f5 26.¤f6+ ¢h8 27.¤xe8 ¦xe8 28.¥c2 e5 29.¦e3 And, the losing move. I was looking at the rook hanging on e8, and simply did not see the knight fork. Hope Chess.
29...¤c4 30.£c1 ¤xe3 31.£xe3 £c6 32.a4 £xc3 33.£xc3 ¦xc3 34.¦a2 Bd1 loses more slowly. 34...exd4 35.f3 d3

And now the second one:

unnamed (1755) - Landes, Eric (1245)

Result: 1-0

Site: ?

Date: 2012.06.09

[...] 1.f4 ¤f6 2.¤f3 g6 3.g3 d5 4.¥g2 ¥g7 5.d3 O-O 6.O-O c5 7.£e1 ¤c6 8.c3 ¥e6 9.e4 dxe4 10.dxe4 ¥c4 11.¦f2 ¤g4 and here's where I started going off the rails. Either Bd3 (aggressive) or e5 (less aggressive) were better moves. I really liked my game up to this point.
12.¦d2 £c7 13.¤a3 ¤a5 14.¤xc4 ¤xc4 15.¦e2 e5 This was not the time for e5. It's way over-protected. I needed to take the open file.
16.h3 And here's where I decided to try something. I thought it might work (as did my opponent) until his 18th move. I didn't see that.
16...exf4 17.hxg4 fxg3 18.e5 The move I didn't see. This pried everything open, as now my two sides of the board can't coordinate.
18...¦fe8 19.¥f4 f6 I needed to either take the open file or get the queen off this skewer.
20.¥xg3 fxe5 21.b3 As Anand just said recently, there are no good moves in bad positions.
21...¤a3 22.¤xe5 ¥xe5 Liquidating at this point is not in my best interests.
23.¥xe5 £b6 I needed to send the queen the other direction. This just accelerates the loss. I was looking at the discovered check, but never had time to pull it off.
24.¥d5+ ¢f8 25.£f2+ ¢e7 26.¥c7+ ¢d7 27.£f7+ ¦e7 28.¦xe7+ ¢c8 29.£e8#

I felt good about how I played both games, but both had (obviously) fatal errors. Slow, steady progress!

Patience

In this quick fix, Internet-paced world, the hardest thing to remember is patience.

Chess is good for teaching patience, though _learning_ chess maybe not so much. I know the hardest thing I'm dealing with right now is resisting the impulse to move on to the next shiny thing. For a game that essentially hasn't changed in a couple hundred years, it's amazing how much you can spend on new things for and about it.

I do feel like I'm playing better, but the consistency still hasn't come. Considering I've only started this journey back into the game two months ago, I really shouldn't expect anything else.

Tonight, get three more standard-rated games on ICC, tomorrow, start the STTourney for June. Or, that's today's plan. It hasn't yet met the family, and we all know what happens to personal plans when families get involved...

Checked out a couple more books at the library: Pandolfini's Winning Way, and Alekhine's Best Games 1908 - 1937. I'll futz with them for a while.

Shiny!

I'm feeling spread way too thin right now. I keep falling into that "oh, great new shiny stuff to study" trap. And I'm not playing enough.

I certainly need to balance that out. That said, I feel like I'm retaining more, so the brain is getting rewired back onto the chessboard the way it needs to be. I just need to translate it to the board.

Current activities:

Openings: Reviewing my repertoire lines with Chess Position Trainer. Understanding my openings through four books: The Modern Scandinavian, The Kaufman Repertoire, The Safest Gruenfeld, and Play the London. I also refer to FCO when needed.

Middlegame: continuing the tactics training with Chess King and CT-ART. Working through Chernev's Logical Chess Move by Move. Also reading occasional annotated games from various sources, mostly Chessbase Magazine.

Endgame: Working through the first few sections of Silman's Endgame Course, and Karsten Mueller's first endgame Fritz Trainer.

Thinking: reading Novice Nook articles periodically, and I occasionally refer back to Dan Heisman's Novice Nook compilation and two Soltis books (The Wisest Things Ever Said about Chess, and Studying Chess Made Easy).

That just feels like a lot. Maybe it is. Maybe I should hire a coach.

Success!

Great news from last weekend's scholastic tournament. My daughter won her first game!

When she came out into the hallway after that, she lit up like a Christmas tree. It was a great thing to see. Now, we just need to build on it so she can feel that way more often.

She's still got a provisional 400 rating in the northwest scholastic lists, as the boy she beat was also rated 400, but it's a start. It'll be a month before she gets back to the board, as her end-of-year softball tournament has a conflict with the next chess tourney, but she'll be ready.

She's also just about worked all the way through the first Fritz & Chesster game. She's completed all the training sections, and just has to win the final three duels (or, I think that's what she has to do). That will be a little bit of a challenge, so we'll see how it goes. Both kids have been wanting to play that game a lot, so it's a good thing to see. Game #2 is waiting for her when she's ready. She's also gotten through the first test in the Chess Steps workbook. She got 20 out of 24 correct, including some discovered defense moves I didn't expect her to see. She's definitely learning, so now it's just getting it translated to her play.

On my side, I didn't get to play in the tourney last weekend as we just had too many things going on. No matter - I'm feeling a bit spread out right now, anyway. I did play in a G/17+5 tourney on ICC, but lost all four of my games. (I was also the lowest-rated player in the tourney with a starting rating of 1438.) I need to get four more standard games in before I can get into the June Tuesday night slow tourney. So, over the next month or so, my regimen will look something like:

• Tactics work in CT-ART 3.0 (I'm now through all the level 20 puzzles)
• One lesson from the Yusupov series each week
• Walk through games from Chernev's Logical Chess Move by Move as time allows
• Keep drilling my opening repertoire in Chess Position Trainer
• Endgame work from Silman's Endgame Course (which I just snagged from the library), and Mueller's first endgame ChessBase trainer
• Play more games

Minor progress

Things have mellowed out a bit on the chess front after the last frantic couple of months.

The kids are still eager to play, but not as eager to learn. As long as they're still interested, I'm fine with that. My daughter's probably going to get into her third tournament this Friday, but I don't know about my boy. He likes to play, but is adamantly fighting against being taught anything. Yet he still hates being checkmated. If he keeps the interest up, it'll come.

My daughter beat my wife straight up a couple days ago, and it wasn't even close. She's officially the 2nd best player in the house, now.

I've been doing a couple different things. Settling down my opening repertoire (it's Scandinavian/Grunfeld as Black, London as White, for now), keeping up the tactics practice, though at a slower pace (I've now made it through all the 2nd-level problems in CT-ART 3.0, getting pretty consistently a 65-70% score every session. I've also been reading a couple different books: "The Wisest Things Ever Said About Chess" by Andrew Soltis, and "The Modern Scandinavian (2nd ed)" By Wahls, Mueller, and Langrock, and working on endgame stuff with the first Mueller endgame Fritz Trainer. I'm going to dig into Pandolfini's Endgame Course here shortly.l

I've also started playing around with Chess Position Trainer. It's a great tool for learning your openings. You get your variations entered (it imports PGN for this, and it seems to handle backtracking for entering variations on my DGT board a lot better than Chessbase does) and it lets you train against them to get the patterns locked in your head. It stores things by position and next moves, so transpositions are handled automatically.

I'm back over the board on Saturday, but due to a reschedule for one of my boy's t-ball games, I'll have to take a bye in the first round - only three games for me this weekend. I'll be warming up these next couple nights playing games on ICC.

I've been following the World and US Championships (though with the time and length of the WCC games, I'm only getting the last 30 minutes or so after I wake up) and I'm addicted to the Bennifer commentary for the US tourneys. They're very enjoyable to watch, but it's painful trying to get the streaming to function at work.

Anyway, more updates later, and hopefully with some wins to report!

DGT Electronic Chess board Unboxing

Finally getting around to posting pictures of my new DGT electronic chess board. It arrived in great shape after a two-week journey from Germany.

Inside the shipping box is the product box:

The components are neatly compartmentalized inside. I'm saving the boxes, obviously, as there's a 2-year warranty, and this isn't exactly a standard box size.

The board is wrapped in a plastic wrap underneath the components. It's well packed.

Finally, all set up and ready to go.

This is the Rosewood board with the Classic piece set. My only nit is that one of the white knights doesn't quite sit flat. I might contact DGT or my vendor (Doska Chess in the UK - I heartily recommend them. Even after the massive shipping costs, it was cheaper than buying from anywhere in the US) to see if that piece can be replaced.

Very happy with it!

DGT board has arrived

Last Thursday my DGT electronic chessboard finally arrived. (I was starting to get a bit worried, as the DHL tracking hadn't been updated since the package arrived in the states 10 days before). It's gorgeous. I'll post a picture or three tonight. 

This is a board that makes you want to make good moves. Anything else would be a shame. 

Tomorrow night, I'm joining the Tuesday night STTourney on ICC - time control is G/60. About as slow as it gets on ICC. Another thing I want to do tonight is get one of my games from the PCC tourney a week ago annotated and posted. So, things could be busy on here in a few hours.

I've been a bit lax in my tactics training, but I've at least been studying. What I need to be doing more, though, is playing. And playing against my kids doesn't count.

Maybe tonight I'll forego the blog posting, and get some blitz games in for opening training. I'm still lacking a little confidence in my openings.

Recent book acquisitions include Build up your Chess with Artur Yusupov: The Fundamentals, and an old, beat-up copy of Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games. That's a really big book. Probably something to use when starting to help my daughter with tactics. Right now, she's about 2/3 through the first Fritz and Chesster volume. Her play is improving, but she still doesn't pay much attention to what her opponent does. That'll come.

(I just finished reading a copy of Dan Heisman's Everyone's Second Chess Book that I got from the Central Library in Portland. My daughter's firmly in step 4 of chess vision. She gets what she can do with her pieces, but doesn't take her time to see what can be done to her. Frequently, while we play, she'll say "Dad! You ruined my plan!" The fact she even has a plan is encouraging. That's beyond where I was even back in college.)

So, my training plan now consists of the following:

Opening: periodically working through my current repertoire lines. (I've shifted to London as White, Scandinavian/Gruenfeld as Black. Goal is to eventually shift to The Kaufman Repertoire for Black and White as I have time to study it.)

Middlegame: Tactics, tactics, tactics... Keep working through the CT-ART problems, begin weekly lessons with the Yusupov book. (24 lessons per book, 9 books in the series... yeah, that'll last me a while.)

Endgame: I didn't put any attention on the endgame before my first tournament, because I figured I'd be lucky to get there. However, three of my four games hit the endgame, and I turned a draw into a loss in one because I didn't grok the position. I'm looking at the Karsten Mueller endgame ChessBase trainers for this. I need to start with the basics. (I know the rule of the square, how to mate with a lone Queen or Rook, and that's about it. I'd be a bit hard-pressed mating with two bishops.)

And play. I've got an OTB tourney per month planned out through the summer (about all I can really get away with given family commitments), culminating with the US Open in my back yard. I'd LOVE to see my rating over 1400 by that point (it's currently 1253). That's the goal. To get there, I need to play more, and play better. But I'll need to play a lot more than just a handful of games per month. So, I'll be on ICC and Playchess more frequently.

That's the plan. 1400 by the end of the US Open is the goal.

More results!

Managed to arrange my day such that I could play in the Daily Standard tourney on ICC. Today's time control was G/20 + 10sec/move. 4 round swiss.

I started out fantastic, then fizzled off hard. I came in with an ICC rating of 1295. I beat a 1700 player, drew a nearly 1800 player, lost to a 2100, and lost (badly - I dropped pieces right and left) to a 1700. Yeah, those are ICC ratings, but still. That was probably the best start to a tourney I've had. Ever. My ICC rating went up something like 160 points after all was said and done.

Yay me.

Results

Back home from my tournament, and I am wiped out.

Four games, G/60. Coming in, my rating (based on 20+ yr old results) was 11245. My results were:

1: loss as white vs. a 1900+ player. Blundered a piece for a pawn in an opening trap, and succumbed to a withering attack down the center.

2: loss as white vs. a 1300+ player. This should have been a draw, but for one minor mistake I made in the ending that ended up costing me the game. It was a knight vs. bishop ending with a couple pawns left. If I had sac'ed my knight for his last pawn, it would have been a draw. Instead, I exchanged the knight for the bishop and he ended up queening his pawn and winning.

3: draw as black vs. a 1500 player. Tight rook + pawn endgame. I think he missed a win - still need to analyze it. I feel the best about this particular game out of the four.

4: win as white vs. an unrated player. I had a win, then turned it into a loss, then salvaged a win as he ran out of time. It was a nasty opposite-colored bishop endgame with the queens on the board for a long, long time.

So, 1.5/4. And, given the opposing ratings, the performance estimator on USCF's website says I pretty much did exactly as expected given my rating. I'll take that for the first time out.

Games will be posted as I have time. I'm "anno-fritz"-ing them right now. I feel pretty good about my thought process - I didn't blunder away a piece (except for that opening trap), though I'm sure I played a lot of sub-standard moves. And I NEED endgame practice...

Nervous

Okay, so my tournament's tomorrow. No, I don't feel adequately prepared, but we'll see how it goes. I'm feeling a tad nervous. I know that'll go away after the first couple moves, but it's been a LONG time since I've done this...

I do feel, however, like I understand how to think my way through a game much better than before. Tonight, I'll do some more tactics exercises, go through my openings one more time, and try to get a good night's sleep.

It's a four-round Swiss, G/60, so the games are dual-rated normal and quick. The Portland Chess Club does this once a month, and they seem to have between 20-26 players every month that's not around the holidays. Ratings are all over the map (2100+ to below 700, most in the 1300-1700 range.) 

I'll post all my games here in a couple days once I get a chance to go through them with some annotations.

Fascination

This morning, I watched a good chunk of the 3^rd game in the Kramnik/Aronian match.

Absolutely fascinating. I believe the net effect was Aronian sacrificed a queen and two pawns for a rook and two minor pieces. (I'd have to go back and look up the game to be sure.) In any case, the tactics were so deep and involved, both players came close to running out of time. Aronian had the worse of it, and blundered during severe time pressure (6 moves left in 15 seconds or something close to that) giving the game to Kramnik (who, admittedly, was winning from about the 15^th move on or so) and tying up their “friendly” at 1.5 each. One can only hope tomorrow's game is anything close to that. Many have called it the best game of 2012 to date, and it's probably close.

I had the live commentary running on my computer this morning before the kids went off to school, and my daughter watched for quite a bit. I have no idea how much of it stuck in her head, but just the fact that she was interested in watching it go on was fine by me. Kids just seem to absorb information by osmosis.

Right now, I'm feeling a bit frazzled before my first OTB tourney in forever. I feel like there's just so much I need to study, but I'm trying to stay calm, and focus on two things: tactics practice (260 CT-ART problems solved in 8 days) and general familiarity with my openings. That, and working on my thinking process. Dan Heisman's material is fantastic for this. If it was feasible for me to hire him as a coach, I would.

Anyway, that's today's thought. More later as my tourney draws closer.

Weekend activities

It was a gorgeous weekend here in the greater Portland area, so there wasn't much time over the board. The kids played another G/30 tournament Friday night, and still lost all their games (which wasn't a surprise.) However, Megan had managed to get herself into a winning endgame (Knight + 5 pawns vs. 5 pawns, no passed pawns for either side) but let her opponent queen, and ended up losing. She's tasting it, and really wants to win her first game, so she's pretty motivated to study more. I told her that endgame combined both of the fun games we've played, but I don't think she was able to translate those fun games to the board. Yet.

Meanwhile, Jack has stated he's tired of being checkmated. Now, he needs to learn a few basics to keep his pieces around. We'll get those sorted out straight away. He asked early Sunday morning to play a game (I now give them time odds of 30-minutes to 5) and then do the pawn game afterwards. I really need to work on the latter myself, as they keep beating me.

It's a few weeks until their next tournament - they won't start back up until they open up qualification for next year's scholastic championships, so we've got time to learn a few things before heading back into the fray.

Both kids have progressed on the Fritz & Chesster program as well. Megan's made it into the "Heavyweights" on disk 1, and Jack's one trophy away from getting into the "Middleweights." I like the frequent reward system in that app.

On my side, I'm still working through tactical problems (about 30-35/day in CT-ART 3.0) and playing the occasional game against the chess engine. I'll play a few more games this week, though, as I'm back over the board all day Saturday.

My goals for the weekend: not drop any pieces, and win at least one game. Afterwards, I'll certainly be going over those games for educational purposes. You'll see the results right here. I'm really curious where my skill actually lies right now: I feel like I know more about how to play the game than I did 20 years ago, but how that translates into a rating/performance result is anybody's guess.

Meanwhile, my DGT board is en route across the Atlantic (I think it's already here, but DHL tracking seems to stop after it reaches the states) and my wife keeps shaking her head at the sudden obsession with chess in the house. Who knows... maybe someday she'll try to play.

Studing Chess Made Easy (brief review)

I just finished devouring Andy Soltis' Studying Chess Made Easy. It arrived yesterday, I finished it this morning. Here's my capsule review as posted on Goodreads:


A stellar guide to using the information that's out there in a coherent way. The biggest problem with trying to improve your chess game is, after the fundamental basics, there's a whole lot of "now what?" Soltis' book answers that question.

Chapter 1 ("Chess isn't school") introduces and reinforces the idea that how you go about learning chess is rather different than other subjects.

Chapter 2 ("Cultivating your chess sense") gives a methodology on how to make your chess understanding more innate than rote.

Chapter 3 ("The biggest study myth") presents the idea that succeeding at chess isn't determined by how well you think, it's how much you know without thinking. Pattern recognition is key here.

Chapter 4 ("The right way to study an opening") explains how to familiarize yourself with an opening, investigate it deeper, and choose the right books once you've decided on the one you want to learn. Without having to know all the variations to move ten right up front.

Chapter 5 ("Two-and-a-half move chess") explains, and demonstrates how you rarely have to think further ahead than the chapter title indicates. It's evaluating what you see when you think ahead that's the key.

Chapter 6 ("Overcoming endgame phobia") explains how to go about learning endgames. There's a lot fewer of them you need to know cold than you'd think. The rest can be managed by guiding principles.

Chapter 7 ("Learning to live with TMI") confronts the issues involved in selecting moves. So often, all the guiding principles you've learned in the fundamentals come to odd here, with no real set of priorities. This chapter simplifies that thinking process. (Coupling this chapter, alone, with chunks of Heisman's "Guide to Chess Improvement" is probably going to increase your rating 200-300 points, assuming you're sub-1400 right now.)

Chapter 8 ("How to learn more from a master game") explains how to actually benefit from the advice everyone receives: "play through the games of the masters!" A list of good compendiums is offered, and how to use those books is thoroughly covered.

I expect this book will have diminishing returns the higher your rating is above 1700 or so, but for those of us in the lower eschelons, it's a must for cutting through and understanding the great heaping mounds of chess information that's available these days.

ICC Daily Standard G/20 Game 4

In this one, a win is blundered to me (why didn't he take the bishop with his rook on move 28?) and I managed to not blunder it back.

ICC Daily Standard G/20 Game 3

I completely botched this game. Totally.

ICC Daily Standard G/20 Game 2

So, this is my draw. once I get my queen to the 8th rank (around move 28) I get lost in the analysis and can't figure a good way out. Around move 15 is where I saw the bishop check on the king, so I knew that avenue was there, but when the black queen got in the way, well, that was gravy.

ICC Daily Standard G/20 Game 1

Here's my first game in the Apr 18 G/20 tournament on ICC:

Rust, removed

Well, I finally got off my butt and played a competitive game. Tournament, actually.

I played in the Daily Standard (G/20) on ICC yesterday. I came into the game the lowest rated player out of 30 and scored 1.5/4. Not too bad, if I do say so myself, particularly since I had black three times. I finished off with a rating in the mid-1300s.

I can already see where the tactics training is helping. Both my non-losses involved pinning the opposing queen in non-obvious ways. In my draw, I subsequently couldn't figure out a convoluted attack with my queen alone on his back rank, ended up surviving a counter-attack and forced a draw by repetition with 13 seconds left on my clock.

I'm noticing my thought patterns slowly moving towards what Heisman recommends in A Guide to Chess Improvement. Though, I'm still not doing the full scan for checks/captures/threats like I should be. At least I'm sporadically doing the “what are all the things his move does” exercise.

How I played was having a tournament set in front of me, and I duplicated what was going on with the set. Yes, this slowed me down a bit (and I was consistently using more time than my opponents), but I do think it helped a lot. I don't see the game as well on the computer as in person.

Thank goodness my DGT electronic chess board is on the way. Oh, didn't I mention that? I'm getting one for Father's Day, and I had the money early from a couple large boardgame and book sales, so I went and placed the order. It hasn't left Germany yet, but I'll be watching its progress like a kid watches the calendar near Christmas.

BTW, I recommend Doska Chess if you want to order a board. After shipping, it was well over 10% lower than anywhere else I could find before shipping.

As I would really rather play the game over a real board, the ability to link the DGT up to ICC is perfect. I get to play any time I can on a real board. Now, to just make the time for slower games – I hate blitz chess. G/15 is as fast as I want to go.

Getting the rust off felt good. Getting a win felt even better. I only really botched one of the games (3rd round), and fought a 1700+ rated player to a long loss that Fritz felt was within a pawn of even for most of the game.

What I found most interesting was, as Black, neither opponent who led 1.e4 followed the standard Scandinavian line beyond the 2nd move. Neither player played the “obvious” 3.Nc3 designed to chase the queen away. I'll certainly have to pay attention to the early deviation lines.

My first tournament is just over a week away. I'm going to try getting in two or three more ICC games before then, to be sure. Last month, the Portland Chess Club had 26 players in their monthly G/60 tournament, with an average 1544 rating, and 11 players under 1400. So, there's certainly opportunity there to score a win or two.

So, lots of practice between now and then. Oh, and the kids have their second tournament tomorrow night. I have a hunch Megan might just get her first win.

Survival

Okay, the kids survived their first tournament.

Were they ready? Megan, probably. Jack – no. But he's so damn eager, there was no way he was staying home.

Both kids lost all their games, but it hasn't seemed to phase them. And that was what I was hoping for. I was fully expecting them to lose all their games, but I was watching for the attitude afterwards. Megan seemed a little down that night, but she perked up the next morning and wanted to play (and even more encouraging – headed right to her workbook when our game was over.)

Talking to the director, he mentioned he had Megan play up a quad from where she should have been as he didn't want to pair her and Jack together their first time out – a nice touch, even though it pretty much guaranteed Megan finishing last. (Megan beats Jack every time they play, so had he lined things straight up, given the numbers, Megan would probably have finished 2nd in the bottom quad.;)

Megan can suffer from a lack of confidence, so her even making this step was big. On the way there, she was saying how she was less shy than the week before when we headed over there for a drop-in visit.

We'll have another lesson tonight, and we'll see how she feels about things during the week. As of right now, they're both wanting to head back on Friday.

As far as my progress is going, I picked up a copy of Rapid Chess Improvement by Michael de la Maza from the library over the weekend and quickly churned through it. Most of the book reads like an infomercial, so there's about 40 pages of real content in there. And it's quite eye-opening. It has certainly changed my intended curriculum.

Right now, I'm reading Heisman's Guide to Chess Improvement and will be summarizing the book into a bunch of maxims after I've gone through it. I'm really liking the way Heisman approaches improvement – I'll be digging up copies of his other books whenever possible. I've also downloaded the entire Novice Nook archive (from which the above book was derived) off ChessCafe, and I'll be organizing that material over time. I'm also starting round one of the Seven Circles mentioned in the de la Maza book, doing 45 tactical problems a day this week using the CT-ART program.

My first tournament in 21 years is looking to be the Portland Chess Club G/60 the last Saturday of the month. 12 days from now. If I can just focus on safe play, I should do better than I used to – I've found my old score books, and the number of blunders in my games is staggering. I've signed up for the 4-day version of the US Open, and the Wednesday G/30 quads. I figure I'll get maybe four small tournaments in before that, plus some online and club play, so I'll have most of the rust shaken off by early August. I expect I'll still be Class D at that point, but one can always hope, right?

I've sort of picked the openings I'll try to play, and they're the standard “don't have a lot of time to study, but want something mostly safe that can still be tactical” type. Colle (or London) with the occasional Trompowsky as white, Scandinavian and Main Line Slav as black. I'm trying to spend less time on opening prep than I used to, but those books are so damn addicting.

So, as of right now, my toolset looks like this:

• ChessBase 11 Starter Package, Chess Database Management Software
• Fritz 13 - Chess Playing and Analysis Program in stock and shipping!
• CT-ART 3.0 (Get 3.0. Reports are 4.0 doesn't allow you to sort the problems by difficulty.)
• Rapid Chess Improvement (Everyman Chess) – de la Maza
• A Guide to Chess Improvement: The Best of Novice Nook – Heisman
• How to Build Your Chess Opening Repertoire - Giddins
• FCO: Fundamental Chess Openings – Van Der Sterren
• The Slav: Move by Move (Everyman Chess) - Lakdawala
• The Modern Scandinavian: Themes, Structures & Plans in an Increasingly Popular Chess Opening
  – Wahls, Mueller, and Langrock
• Zuke 'Em - The Colle-Zukertort Revolutionized: A chess opening for everyone. Phoenix Attack Edition – Rudel
• Starting Out: The Trompowsky Attack – Palliser