Chapter 12: The Greek Gift Sacrifice. Destroying the castled position, the importance of the h-file, incorrect sacrifices, winning material.
I found this surprisingly tough given that I've played this sacrifice before in games and thought I was already familiar with it. The problems were tactically pretty difficult and not all sacrifices were winning. I'm hoping this was pretty helping since this tactical motif is pretty common to the main Zukertort opening I play.
20/24 - good
Chapter 13: Evaluating the Position. Essential factors of the position. The decisive role of the position of the king. Material advantage. Open lines.
I was quite concerned this chapter would be super difficult to me, although I did okay. Strategic problems are tough since often going with a "second best" move, which may even be a similar evaluation from a computer can cause you to miss a full 3 points or something like that.
So I was happy to not have any trouble passing, although I never really had a shot at an excellent. I missed 3/12 problems, with no partial credit since I went with a completely different idea/plan.
17/24 - good
July Tactics Summary
My goal was doing 75 standard problems and I ended up doing a lot more. The days I did tons of problems were ones where I missed the first couple/few and then chased my losses the rest of the day. Lol, who knew chess was exactly like poker.
Overall I feel I had a breakthrough on standard problems, not only getting my rating back over 2000 but solidly over. My biggest issue is time. I have no real idea how long I'm actually spending on problems because I often take breaks in the middle due to work/house stuff/distractions. And I definitely am spending a lot of time on problems even without those distractions.
Anyway, here were my results:
Starting Rating: 1953.7
Current Rating: 2069.5 (all time high)
Problems: 168
Accuracy: 58.3%
Average Problem Rating: 2021
Total Points Gained: 115.8
Performance Rating: 2088.0
I'm not sure what I want to do for training for this month. Maybe stick to only 2 standard problems a day and also try to do maybe 5 blitz a day? Or branch out to endgame problems? It seems like switching it up each month isn't a bad idea. I could also go back to doing ~200 problem sets at lower ratings and doing them over and over until I can do them very quickly. Or maybe I should go retest previous problem sets I've done.