4/1 – 4/5 log
Was sick (now better) and also hit hard about my cousin's death. Service is Thursday and I'll be going but I'm out of state and so the logistics were really stressful to set up.
Didn't make as much progress on chess training as I had planned but pretty happy overall:
Tractics:
Purchased gold chesstempo.com account (probably should've gotten silver but w/e). Thanks for the recommendation BBJ!
Set up a custom tactics set per Dan Heisman's "bain" recommendation: 900-1250 (standard rating). The idea is to solve problems on average in under 15 seconds @ 85%+ accuracy. Went 70/77 at 91% accuracy in an average time of 16.6 seconds before realizing I had mates in the set and doing non-mate tactics is more recommended.
So created another set that excludes mates. I also think I have only 2-3 move tactics or some move setting like that. Went 56/60 on this new problem set with 93% accuracy but average time is 20.7 seconds.
Opening:
Also went through Maroczy Bind variation of Accelerated Dragon. Still left:
Rossolimo
Closed
Alapin
Grand Prix
Odd lines
The good news is I think I'm retaining *some* of this. At least I'm not as likely to get completely different lines confused. But I've never been very good at memorizing openings, :/.
Play:
Played some Blitz with meh results although I still may have been a bit sick. I still seem to not do very well in the opening and then am playing catchup too much.
Played a 30/5 game yesterday and felt it went really well. My opponent took almost no time to think on moves but I used almost my entire clock. At the end I had ~2:30 left and he had ~20 left. I spent most of my time getting and adding pressure to a pinned piece in the middle of the board. Then as my time got somewhat down I didn't continue super precisely but he eventually chose to trade his rooks for my queen to get out of it but his minor pieces were pretty far away from his king and my rooks + bishops sliced and diced him up pretty easily.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rei Ayanami
If you want to work with ChessTempo standard a lot, you should probably learn various important calculation techniques. I thought this book was great. Disregard the reviews.
I added that to my Amazon wishlist so at some point I may end up getting it. Definitely a great recommendation but at this point I have plenty of things I think are more practical to work through.