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.