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 1st
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.
