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!