Current Training

Well as we all have discovered there is more to chess than tactical training. I have noticed that when I study tactics only my play gets more wild. Allow a Knight to invade a weak square on the queen side? Who cares, I will just point another piece at his King and I will beat him with a nice tactical combination. Well in the mean time he is taking away squares from my attacking pieces and invading my position. Eventually I cannot hold my position together anymore and it becomes a race to see wether he can eat up my army before I get to his King.

I always though positional chess was BORING. I thought it was a 'style' of play. So and so's a positional player. Well I have come to realize that I will have to be well rounded to improve my play. Some of my biggest gains were after studying positional books. Maybe MDLM was naturally a strong postitional player and needed tactics to round him out. When I study positional chess I play slower, consider my opponents counter play more, make preventative moves and generally play where I have the advantage rather than going on a king hunt.

So I have been studying Weapons of Chess (thanks J'adoube) while finishing up some other books, studying some variations of the Dutch Defense and Practicing my tactics on the chess tactics server.

I have also mostly collected my fics game reports (500) into a database of games. I have been using SCID to review them. I have already learned that several things I believed to be true are false.
Among the misoconceptions are:
1. I mostly win against the Sicilian.
2. I mostly lose against the French.
3. The frequency and effectiveness of Bxf7 sacrifices (or at least with the way I play).

I see that the Chessbase reader comes with some limited tools as well. I guess I need some more tools to do a decent analysis. Right now what I am looking for is a tool that will:

• Annotate games and add ECO codes
• Sort games on opening, postion, (un)rated, blitz/standard, and other criteria
• Blunder check games (Positional and Tactical)
• Provide ratings graphs and graphs of a game as in the MDLM book
  

I would like to get a set of tactical problems from my own games.

More to come later. Better hit publish post before I get dropped from some more blogs........

Scando Declined 2...d4 3. Nd5 opening trap

Here is a game I won at the club recently. I win a lot of knights and games this way. I could have played c6 on move 5 and still won the knight. Here is the game (new window). Oddly enough she had the book opening traps and zaps in her pile of chess stuff. I wonder if it is in there.

Highest Rated Win Ever (I think)...NOT

I believe the person I beat Tuesday night at the club was rated 1841. I play the Halasz gambit Sicilian variation. Since I mostly lose against the Scicilian (SCID tells me so. More on that later.) I figure I might as well have fun while I am at it. Anyway I won and here is the game (new window).

Update:

Bummer. I found out Ram is Ramachandra not Ramesh and is an unrated, unregistered player. This makes at least 2 players in the last couple tournaments that have not registered. How annoying. Now it will take forever to get my ratings.

Still Alive Out Here

I am still alive out here training and dealing with a busy schedule. Work has been killing me and there is lots of family drama going on. I have a couple of posts to make yet that are back logged and will do that this week.