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.