Another week up

Chessable every day. Italian game lines sticking better, Bishops course added to the Knights tactics. Vision feels better. Very aware intuition still presiding over calculation, but it will balance.

Wheels Turning

Good study session this morning, think I have the Knights on the Attack series fully studied on Chessable, so in a day or two will add the next piece themed book. Lucena and Philidor positions starting to click. Grabbed an  ebook copy of the My First Chess Opening Reportoire for White so I can print it off for reference while studying it on Chessable. My one big knock is that while the text of the book is almost entirely in the Chessable package for the book, it's not really readable in the way a book is. It's PGN chunks, basically.

Quick 3+2 game while watching the Ravens this afternoon. Felt the attack on the White King was strong, but completely missed the idea of clearing the g-file with g4 so the Rooks could play too.

Routine

Dedicated study the last week has settled into a routine via Chessable.

After getting out of bed, I make a coffee, smoke a cigarette (bad habit, I know) and settle in for about an hour. The current lessons include a tactics series (presently knight focused), updating my openings (working on Italian Game) and endgames (R+P).

Today's work was about an hour and a half. Feels good. What I recall of Personal Chess Trainer software I was using years ago feels like Chessable. Repetition to ingrain pattern recognition.

Hopefully it starts to pay off!

Holy wow- it's alive!

I am a little surprised that this blog still exists, and pleased it is linked to my Google account since there is no way I could have ever remembered the password!

And more than a little chagrined that I have not yet gotten through The Amateur's Mind in the intervening ten years... LiChess has been a blessing for my chess itch. Started off using it for 10/0 games and some correspondence, and now mostly 3+2 games.

As happens in my ADHD brain (discovered as such in my late 30's a few years ago) I flit and float hobby to hobby, but chess has always been one to pull me back. I started on LiChess late 2017, and have played often. Aside from watching YouTube and Twitch for chess content, I hadn't really picked up books again until recently. Chessable is a godsend...it hits the way my brain works and re-awakened an eagerness to learn and improve a smidge.

Let's see how long a dedicated itch persists and see if slow games and correspondence games can't get back in the rotation. Maybe in my 40's I am appreciating the persistent hobbies and passions better. I picked up photography about 18 months ago and that has no signs of slowing. Let's kick a little rust off the writing side too :P

Much needed win

I dropped a knight and a pawn, refused to exchange queens to have "chances" and ended up making the next to last mistake. Hadn't won a slow game for a bit, so this was much needed!

Slow Chess, Busy Schedule

Playing in the STC Winter Blues, which is one game per week and had my last round of TL 45 action. 0-2 in STC so far, and pulled a draw in my TL game.

Getting some 5/0 games where time allows (got my bltiz rating over 1000 :p).

Still plugging away at Amatuer's Mind- finding time to just hammer it out is tricky with a family and other hobbies (fishing, Dungeons and Dragons), but I feel like I'm getting close to making a big jump. I have been feeling great when I sit down for my long games, and I enjoy looking over my games win or lose...I just feel potent right now and believe that I will see my patchwork study and practice coalesce into real improvement soon...maybe a steady 1600+ FICS standard rating.

Another lesson

Here is the Watchbot for the game: http://mekk.waw.pl/mk/watchbot/game/2989161

Haven't run it through a computer yet, and haven't looked deeper than my notes above. I don't have a whole lot of time at work (:P) right now to add more comments.

I did my best to stay focused and not post a bunch of comments during the game. I stayed cool and focused, until I lost it zeroing in on the false winning of a pawn.

Tunnel vision killed me here. This week, I will go way back to de la Maza's board vision exercise- Concentric Circles. Wednesday and Friday I'll do those. Thursday will be for some reading from Amateur's Mind. Saturday or Sunday, I'll see if I have time to get a Stoyko (sp?) exercise in. Some practice visualizing and evaluating will be useful now.

Rough loss

Dropped a piece on something like move 7 because I was playing like it was G 15/0.

Thoroughly drove home Heismann's point that intermediate length games hurt more than help.

I believe I fought well and vigorously, but my opponent did not make any mistakes and hanging my rook (vs rook and bishop) with ~5 minutes on the clock sealed things up.

In spite of that (or perhaps out of necessity due to a player being wholly unavailable), I will be playing next week.

I will not embarrass myself like that again.

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.

Xmas presents

I got Chess for Zebras and the 4th edition How to Reassess Your Chess.

With the holidays winding down, I hope to get back on the study wagon. Team League starting up again will help- having a purpose to study makes a big difference. Just an intangible "to get better" doesn't work for me. I need a constant prod, an accounting to others.

Hope everyone has had a great holiday :)

Unstoppable

I jested to my teammates before my first TL game that Drive It Like You Stole It by The Glitch Mob was my fighter entrance theme.

I had their album Drink the Sea pumping for my entire second TL game.

Studying The Amateur's Mind this morning with Drink the Sea on headphones, I feel like Optimus Prime, Silver Surfer, Cosmic Spiderman...

I am unstoppable.

The groove on these tracks is amazing. I could hit the gym right now (something I'm a little overdue on) and go forever on cardio and weights!

What an amazing effect music has on the mood and mental state. If I wasn't studying, I'd probably go to Wikipedia for the next couple hours reading on research into how the brain reacts to music.

How much of the effect is due to cultural influences? Are there elements in Drink the Sea such that someone who'd never listened to electronic/dance/glitch would get the same mojo?

You can check the album out at Grooveshark. The Drive It track is duped because of the way they sort and show music (inefficiently, despite providing and otherwise pretty solid free music streaming site).

Birthday presents

33 this past Sunday!

I got The Amateur's Mind and Lev Alburt's Comprehensive Chess Course Vol 2 (Beginner to Tournament Player) from the wife and child :)

Alburt's will be nice to go through with my daughter, and there are some nifty (pretty basic) square visualization exercises I like so far.

Amateur's mind already keyed me in to something I'd felt was a weakness- identifying plans in quiet positions without threats. Looks to be a fun read.

2010 Mid-Atlantic Girls Championship

My daughter took 8th place in the Novice/U400 section today!

78 girls showed up and she went 4-1, losing only to the eventual champ in the 4th round (who told her she was the best she'd faced to the point :P)

We had an awesome time. She won her first tournament game, which was all I had been hoping for.

Here is her first tourney win:

The TSA

I've been following the implementation of the TSA's new, aggressive pat down procedures for the last several days. A sampling for those that haven't:


Fines threatened for refusing to submit to assault and leaving the airport as directed

3-year old gets assaulted by the TSA

A mother with infant gets sexually assaulted

Soldiers at war prohibited from doing to potential enemies what we do to our citizens

I have some calls to make to Congress tomorrow.

The absurdity has to stop.

Image to e4: Surreal and thought provoking

Chess by ~F31dak1n on deviantART

While looking for an image for my woefully irregular Image to e4, this caught my eye.

In the moment I saw it and cocked my head, my daughter (looking over my shoulder) said, "I get it! They're like pieces!"

So something like this:



What do you think?

Second Team Leaue Game

A bit of a swindle, this one:



Never got around to adding more to that last one, so we'll just burn a little midnight oil to add some thoughts:

5. d5

Feel like this was the novice in me- Ooh! My pawn can attack a piece! Probably a little ahead of myself here. The subsequent exchange of light-squared bishops made me miss mine later in the game.

7. ... f5

Yikes! I thought I was playing myself for a minute- this was aggressive and a thorn in my side (as my in-game whispers reflect)

10. O-O

kosu mentions later that he thinks I should have gone O-O-O, and I considered it. Just felt too loose over there.

14. Be3

I need to look at g4. Not sure that was actually stronger or just better in the moment. When I later recapture with the f-pawn, I was looking for the open file, but think the Queen might have been more stable long term.

17. cxd6

I considered c6, but not hard enough. Need to come back and look at why.

On moving my Queen to the kingside, it was to get my e-pawn up and I was planning on sliding my Queen back to the queenside along e1. I ended up spending a fair amount of time looking for back-rank tactics through the next stretch. kosu was rightly concerned because there were some spots where I think a knight sac would get me in.

Once my knight stole the bishop, I figured two ways to draw, or maybe eek out a win. One was to trade my knight for the b-pawn while not also committing my King. Two was to get my king to the b-pawn and use the knight to trade for the k-side pawns.

Both ended up happening.

Both the king and the knight would need 4 moves to capture on the queening square. Once I had counted that, I was confident I had a draw. On 51. g4, the black king needs 5 moves to get my knight, assuming I don't move it. Like someone observed in game, the knight just pops out to f5 and the king is stymied.

At the end, I was very aware of stalemate possibilities (Hi Pat!) and was very careful, in spite of the appearance of playing quickly here (I think that is where the comment about playing too fast occurred).

A wild game. kosu was very gracious aftewards and we had a great chat. I look forward to crossing swords with him again.

Also- thanks to those who complimented Chess Adventures :) It's been slow around here lately, and the kind words should be helpful in sparking some posting!

Been blitzing

Since my Team League game I haven't gotten any long games in, just a hadnful of 5/0s.

I need to start playing with some kind of increment because I get to some good spots with chances, but can't see fast enough where to go.

I've never won a game of blitz on FICS (that I can recall) and my rating is crazy low at like 722P. Half the games that start have people abort thinking I'm a pushover. My last opponent was kind enough to say I'm clearly much stronger than my rating.

This weekend I'll be warming up my daughter for her second tournament (first in 2 years). It's a 5 round swiss, G/30. I think we'll do 5 games of G/30, starting every hour like at the event, so she can sort of feel how the day will go and I can see at what point her attention will waver and get some ideas on how to help her re-focus.

First Team League Game

Victory!

Here's the Watchbot version commentary by myself at points. Once run through Crafty and more review by me, I'll update this post.

New Babas / FICS tips

So I've learned a couple new things that might be of interest to people new and old to Babas. There are so many options that don't do anything at first, that it can take a fair bit of experimenting.

None of these are earth shattering, but simply useful and convenience oriented.

Timers:

I like to keep FICS up at work and home for long periods of time observing Team League games. At work, I often have to go into busy mode, so I may get logged out after 60 minutes. Babas can cheat this by going into File -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Scripts and then choosing Configure Timer Commands.

You can have 3 different timers; perhaps one to go AFK (like the default example), one to advertise something (like looking to start a Team League team) and a third to keep you logged in.

Check the "Enabled" box, set the interval to the time between running your command and enter the command in the box.

I have "date" set to run every 45 minutes. I like date because I always get confused about the time difference between local and server (I know it's Pacific, but I never remember when I'm looking at a schedule of events).

Clean Console:

I prefer to have my console show none of the crap that it default displays.

I uncheck the following items in Preferences/Console and Chat/Chat Windows:
1. Show Private Tells in console
2. Show Channel Tells also in main console
3. Show Shouts also in main console
4. Show superfluous server responses

Tabbed view:

I don't like having 18 windows overlapping and popping around my screen. Click Window -> Tabbed Documents. Boom.

Channels tab has tabs for each channel (like it normally does). Info Window has its stuff. The console and private chats get tabs. Boards get their own tab.

The one disadvantage is if you like to have multiple boards up at once or a board and private chat. Tabs gives you one thing at a time. If you like it, you will probably want to uncheck the following in Preferences/Console and Chat/Chat Windows:

1. Automatic Tab Switch (this one is in both sets of options)
2. Show chat window when new tell received
3. Show channel window when new shout received

Those 3 options will make sure whatever you are looking at doesn't flip away when those events occur.

For some people, Tabs will be a lifesaver and for others a hated inconvenience.

Chessloser?

Anyone know why he wiped his site? I know he'd lost some content trying to clear out some spam a month or so ago...just moving or gone?

hardcore pawnography was (is?) one of my favorite chess blogs.