Thursday, February 3, 2011

Back to play, so post something

Well, TL 45 is here and I'll be playing a match Saturday morning at 8 am east coast time, and combined with seeing someone publicly mention my blog, that means I have to make a new post.

I've been trying to plug away at The Amateur's Mind, but my father-in-law being hospitalized a couple weeks ago, me being sick for almost a week and now my mother-in-law in the hospital (and looking at a month or more of rehab and then assisted living) I haven't had terribly much time to focus.

I've been squeezing in game of 5/0 or 15/0 and some Chess Tempo when I can.

I think I need to spend a bit re-reviewing good thought process and go into the match playing fearlessly.

An interesting realization I've had is how useless it is to watch a match while running a chess engine at the same time. The often seemingly arbitrary numbers that the engine scores the game at tell nothing of the story leading up to the position and the PV it comes up is meaningless without knowing why those moves are chosen.

I've learned more running the engine on a position several moves back and have realized that what I thought was a safe position was loaded with losing missteps. I've also learned that many alternate paths aren't very different from each other in terms of concrete advantage.

1 comment:

  1. Good luck with your match tomorrow.

    By the way, I listened to your 'fighter entrance song' and enjoyed it.

    I tend to stay away from 'pump-up' music when it comes to chess ... instead I find music that gets me into a 'flow' state. Anyway, thanks for the music suggestion - cool song.

    take care.

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