Year End Ratings

USCF Rating



Timeforchess.com Rating



FICS Rating



Chess Tactics Server Rating

Bloggers Square off

So a couple of you guys decided to take me up on the challenge and play a game with me. So in tribute to them I thought I would post the games, and if you play through the .PGN viewer you can see what crafty had to say about a few of the crucial positions.

In the first game St. Patzer tries to get me with a cheapshot.




black to move



Then Josh plays a pretty strong opening, but goofs up a bit and lets me run his girl ragged while I develop.




White to Move



Big thanks for the games guys, and remember if you want to play me either live on FICS or on timeforchess.com post here.

Personal Chess Trainer

So I recieved my license code for Personal Chess Trainer today and as I have posted before I intend to use it for the circles starting on New Year's Day. The trouble is, how exactly will I work it.

Personal Chess Trainer has 6 Tactics Modules, 51 Units per module and roughly 90 (some have 60) Excercises per unit. Which gives you about 27000 excercises, using roughly 5000 unique problems. MDLM calls for 1000 problems starting with easy, ending at OMG HARD and doing them 7 times.

PCT is set up to begin at mate in 1, and move to hard, but the 27000 excercises include built in repetition. Basically repetition is built into the program but not in the full circle, repeat full circle style. Its more like.. Do 60 problems, do 60 slightly harder problems, repeat 30 of the previous 60. Which supposedly builds the patterns into your memory in time for you to make use of them when you get to the hardest problems that require you to know the patterns in order to solve them.

Anyway I think my "circles" Are going to consist of my working through all 27000 excercises PCT has to offer in its Tactics modules, in order, between now and May 7th. Well at least thats the goal. The good news is, I can do the first 300 or so in an hour as they are mostly mate in 1's that I can spot pretty easy.

Any suggestions on using this particular program? Anyone with experience with it please leave some comments.

------------
So.....
In order to keep pace I would need to do 2.4ish "units" or 225ish "excercises" a day, over the 127 days. However I told my wife that I would only tie up 5 days a week soo that cuts me down to 90 "problem solving days" over the course of 127 calendar days. Which puts me at 4.4 "units" per day, or 405 problems a day.

That seems really bold. In testing the PCT program before and after I licensed it I've found that by Module 1, unit 7 it took me 24 minutes to do a unit. As of Mod 1, unit 7 I'm just starting to have to think about the problems. Most of the problems prior to that are mate in 1's which are mostly trivial.

4.4 units at 24 minutes per unit would be 106 minutes a day. Although we can expect as the units get harder the time per unit will increase.

I had planned on 2hrs a day, 5 days a week. Given what I know right now I would say theres no way I make it through by May 7th. We will see. I will try to keep on schedule. As the difficulty in the excercises increases I will get back to you on my success.

White Xmas

Since I'm fascinated by the hits Sitemeter tells me I get from all over the world, and since I don't know who sees snow often and who doesn't... Here is a white Xmas for all of you who won't get one.














By the way I hope someone enjoys the pics, because now I have to go shovel this stuff up, and thats never fun.

What makes a good online chess service?

DG, over at Boylston Chess Club points out a few recent posts about
cheating. These sorts of posts always get me thinking back to my days as a member of http://www.caissa.com which is a small, relatively old chess site that had a nice product. The trouble at caissa.com was that the admins saw the chess sight as a labor of love but not as their primary business proposition. Long periods of time with no admin interaction would take place and in the mean time the inmates ruled the asylum.

Well as with any place on the web, anonymity leads to some less than stellar behavoir. While the admins are away the mouse will play so to speak.

Cheating.. ahh yes, the reason I made this post. The problem with online chess (i've no experience with OTB tournament cheating to speak of) cheating is that it comes in a couple flavors. You have the cheaters and you have the disconnectors. On top of all that, and what finally pushed me off of Caissa.com was a message board ji'had about who was cheating and who wasn't.

What's worse than cheating in an online chess game, to me? People accusing anyone and everyone they lose to of cheating. That's just as bad sportsmanship as cheating itself. Names getting sullied, reputations spoiled, chess playing friendships destroyed and often with no real evidence. Which brings me to comparison of a persons moves to Fritz or Crafty. The rationale behind this supposed method of outing cheaters makes sense, but I question it in practice. Just because someones moves match a computer's moves does not, in and of itself, prove that person used a computer. It points to the likeliness of computer use. At what point does likeliness become enough evidence to tarnish an online persona? After 1 move? After 1 game with 85% simularity? Or after someone is 203/7 on FICS?

What needs to happen is these decisions need to be made by an abitrary Administrator. Not the players. The decisions need to be made even handedly and regularly, and by a human being not emotionally involved in the outcome of a blitz game. So back to what I was getting at... a good chess service needs live, involved, active admins. The interface and features are nice attractors, but the admins make these services run.

Challenge the Blogger

Comment to this thread if your interested in setting up a match/game with me on Time for Chess. If you already have an account on that site then you should be able to click here to instantly challengeme.

Or we can work out the details in via email or in the comments.

DreadPirateJosh Adds:
"timeforchess.com ... redhotpawn.com, chessatwork.com, redhotchess.com... are one and the same." Thanks Josh, but I notice you didn't challenge me to a game!

New Version of BabasChess client for FICS available

Go download this now if you play chess on FICS. It is simply the best chess client out there plus its free. How great is that. Here's a screeny of my play environment on FICS...

Aggravating PGN issues

Well I was going to post the PGN from a game I played at the club last night. Well technically I still am, but at this point I am beyond frustrated. Because this was a club game I had to come home and create the PGN by hand and for some reason it doesn't want to work properly in my PGN viewer unless I put another game in the file with it first. So in this PGN link you will see both last nights club game and the last game I posted as well.

The club game is the second game in the viewer, John E vs. Qxh7, the game resulted in a draw when I blundered into stalemating him. I really should have won. The last 15 moves or so went unrecorded due to time pressure. I continue to struggle with the pace of g/30. One week I play too fast and make blitz style errors, the next week I play too slowly and end up in a time crunch for endgames that deserve better treatment. Unfortunatly g/30 is the preferred time control at the Waterville Club, so I better adapt to it if I want to be successful.

ARGHHH.

Beyond that I'm also a bit dissappointed with HIARCS for Palm. I got my Xmas present a bit early and I've had a few problems doing Hot Synch's with HIARCS installed. Also you can't just copy a PGN file with multiple games to the Palm, you have to split up the multi game PGN's into several single game PGN files. Luckily there is a PERL utility to do it for you, but you need to have a pretty good geek tolerance to use it. Good thing I'm all set there.

Day 14 of Chess Vision in the books.

So its been 2 full weeks of Chess vision exercises and I have to say I'm glad that its time for the next step. On to "Knight Sight". To be perfectly honest with the MDLM crew out there, I didn't do the exercises all 14 nights, I think I did it 11 of the 14 days, and only 8 of those times did I do the exercise with Queen, Rook, Bishop and Knight. The other three days I only did Queen because I found it much more difficult. It did get dull after a while. I really liked fussylizard's chessvision trainer though.

So two weeks of Knight sight excercises and its on to the circles. As for the Knight sight stuff, I plan to follow the knight sight recommendations laid out in the original MDLM article. I did use an actual, physical, board for the chess vision exercises and I plan to again for the knight sight stuff.

In other news, I still suck at Blitz as anyone on FICS who has ever played me can attest. Apparently my corres game isn't much better, just take a look at (My games) for evidence.

Santa loves Chess

This , this , this and this combine to make my Christmas wish list very chess-centric. It just so happens that I was let in on Santa's shopping list and I know that I musta been a very good boy this year because I'm going to get everything on my list. I'm brimming with excitement.

Tough night at the Club

After winning my first game easily I got a bit cocky tonight. I moved fast in furious and managed to drop 3 games in a row before drawing another and taking off for the night. I should have known I was in for a long night when I over looked a mate in 1 two moves in a row in the first game that I won.

Chess Vision Day 6

At this point I'm becoming exceptionally bored with doing Concentric Square excercises. Thats not to say however that I'm not finding them valuable. One more week and I move onto "Knight Vision" stuff.

I've also been playing a few games on FICS as usual. I lost a heartbreaker yesterday to a 1900 player. On move 84 in a clearly won endgame I played the 84. ... g4? instead of the correct 84. ... Ke6!.

Sure I get to queen first but I allow white to queen as well. Time pressure did play a roll in the misplay but thats not a good excuse. Clearly I could use some endgame work so that the correct moves come more naturally. The final result after 112 moves was a win for white, I had 8 seconds left on my clock, he had over 6 minutes of a g/30.

Exploit Black's Mistake

White to Move and Win

Click to Replay Actual Game

Pardon my self congratulating post, but its not often you get to mate in 13. My blitz rating is still hurting though so I'm just as liable to make this kind of mistake as the next guy.

Day 2 Chess Vision

To be honest, after playing chess for almost 25 years doing these chess vision excercises feels kind of silly. However, as MDLM talks about in his articles, doing micro drills is what keeps athletes in shape. Even the pro's throw the ball around the infield before each inning. I'm going to give it the fair shot it deserves, I just feel a bit foolish doing it.

So after doing the concentric circle last night, I spent some time identifying the color of squares without looking at the board. I also tried some problems like naming the square a Knight has to be on to fork two peices on forkable squares, again without a board.

Finally I spent about 30 minutes working on the knight tour I posted yesterday. Sadly I couldn't solve it. I always got stuck with 1 square untouched.

Working out of the office today so no mid-day posts :P

Day 1 complete

So yesterday I did my first official day of MDLM by doing the concentric circles excercise on a real board, with real peices. I went through the whole excercise with all four peices. I think the first thing I realized after doing this is just how much stronger the queen is than the other peices, and how the bishop and rook seem to be more on par with each other than the bishop and knight do. The bishop and rook patterns are really similar.

I played a few more FICS games and continued to win. This time without blunders. Provisional rating after 12 standard time control games is now 1806.

Tonight is Club Night, and I will do the concentric circles excercises again when I get home.

This is interesting: http://enchantedmind.com/puzzles/knights/knight.html

Four rated standards on FICS

Click to Replay

Its a cold day in Maine and perfect for sitting inside and playing some Chess on FICS. So thats just what I did, when I wasn't doing chores. So I got 3 games in, 2 wins and 2 draws and I improved my FICS provisional rating for standard games to 1773. Now I know thats not right so I'm just going to enjoy this lucky streak while I'm on it. If you replay the games you will notice in 2 of the games I blunder badly but still manage to win. Oh well take the points when you can right?

Starting down the MDLM (Primrose) Path

OK so if I'm going to do this I ought to do it pretty much the way MDLM laid it out. So here is my plan.

Starting Dec 4th I will begin 14 days of doing the Concentric Squares Excercises.
Dec 18th I will begin the knight movement excercises and continue for 14 days.

This will bring me to New Years Day. What a great round date to start the 7 Circles of Tactical Problem Solving Hell. Which works out pretty perfect as it can be 1. A New Years resolution, 2. I don't need to have the software until after Xmas... which is important to my wife since apparently that's all I'm getting for Xmas.

The First Circle will run from
Jan 1 - March 5th

2nd Circle
March 6th - April 7th

3rd Circle
Apr 8th - Apr 24th

4th Circle
Apr 25th - May 3rd

5th Circle
May 4th - May 7th

6th Circle
May 8th - 9th

7th Circle
May 10th

Of course the last few circles will probable need to be spaced out so they fall on weekends but we will get to that. In any case I should be done right around my 33rd birthday. For what its worth I'm going to call my initial rating 1550. I do this because I have ratings all over the place... from USCF, FICS, Timeforchess.com, ICC, Playchess, Caissa.com and even a club membership.

I normally say I'm a 1600 player but I'm taking off 50pts because I took such a long break before making a return this time and that seems to be about the average of my various ratings. Plus a number of my ratings are provisional since I'm playing at different sites this time than the last time I was serious submerged into the chess world.

So thats the plan. I'm not overly known for sticking to work regimens like this so wish me luck.

Thought Process Per Move

I've noticed many of my fellow bloggers have tried to describe/refine their fundamental thought process on a per move basis. Before I begin to describe my thought process I want to point out a fundamental difference I know exists between those that I've read and the thought process I use. I don't claim to know which way has the right of it.

The difference

All of the thought processes I've read start with step 1: check threats, ascertain what my opponent is trying to do.

And immediately this is where I differ with most people's process. My process is usually centered around "a plan"(tm). Perhaps because, having a plan has been drilled into me for so long. The first thing I do after my opponent moves is step 1: Check whether opponents move hinders/restricts/stops my plan. I guess its a different mindset, but I'm primarily concerned with what *I* can do to win the game.

My Thought Process

Check whether opponents move hinders/restricts/stops my plan.If it does hinder my plan, see how my plan must change or develop new plan.

Check for any threats that MUST be dealt with before continuing with my plan.

If necessary look for a move that deals with opponents threat.

Otherwise look for a move that furthers my plan.

Check any available checks, and hanging peices for available tactics to win material.

As I work more on the tactical part of my game I'm sure my thought process will change. This is that thought process that has developed over the course of training mostly with Silman and Keres/Kotov books.

Does Black have a Winning Resource?

In tonight's game I failed to convert a 2 Pawns up, opposite bishops + rooks ending. Tough game I guess a draw was the expected result when both players have the exact same 1595 rating on FICS.

I will post a link to the pgn later. Black to move in the pictured position. I need to develop a schedule for my training. If not I will end up playing g/10's on FICS too much and not getting any stronger.

CT Art 3.0 Demo

So tonight I found the CT Art 3.0 Demo and I got 1 step closer to purchasing the Personal Chess Trainer. I found the CT Art program clunky and almost physically painful to use. Waiting for the peice to slide around wasn't much fun, the board was pretty ugly and the interface wasn't really intuitive. Bravo to those of you that managed to do 7 cycles with it. I know your very patient men and women now for sure.

Anyway I will be experimenting more over the next week or so before I buy the software I decide on and start making a serious stab at the Cycles.

Blogging Faux Pas

OMG I soo didnt realize that comments where in moderated mode. Sorry that your comments weren't showing up. And sorry that I didn't reply to them. I think I have the feature corrected right now.

The really cool news is, I've had visitors from all over the world! Kaula Lampur? Very interesting. Just need someone from Australia and Africa to stop by and we can really call this a world wide website.

Tonight on FICS

I played a pretty slow game on FICS tonight and came out with a win. I'm not much of an opening specialist and when he declined the b-pawn in my Benko Gambit I wasn't sure what to do. A full on queen side rush was the plan I decided on.

Click to Replay

In other news I downloaded the trial for Personal Chess Trainer today and did about 200 tactics problems. I liked the program so far. I think I'm going to continue using the free trial for a while before I decide to buy the software though. 20 minutes till my Wednesday night TV programs start think I will hit up CTS for a bit.

About the Knights

So there's this group I told you about yesterday.. the Knights Errant.. well I'm not one to be much of a joiner but I do like to be on the fringe of a community like that. A lurker so to speak. Anyway I added links to their blogs because if your interested in what I have to say, you will be them too. I've actually visited all of these blogs and found what they have to say about chess and their stuggles to improve both interesting and inspiring. So clicky away and go visit other Chess Players too.

First 250 Problems on CTS

So I started working with CTS yesterday. I thought I would post my results so that I could track my progress a bit.


Blackajah ( my FICS and CTS handle)
Rating 1395
Highest Rating 1402
Current RD 24.4
Date 2005 Nov, 30 - 03:22
Tries 253
Success 79.1 %

I'm not exactly sure what the Current RD is. I will check into that though.

PGN Viewer - www.mychess.com

Click to Replay

This PGN viewer requires java, and I think I will have to link to it outside the blog but it will work for now. Click the pic of this position (from a previous post) to go to the game.

Just a note.. the inquisitive reader might discover the websight I was building to commemorate my Scholastic Chess Team when you follow the link to the PGN viewer. Please disregard the site there as its horribly unfinished. It was a grandoise idea but contacting people and finding materials from 10-15 years ago is a difficult task.

Michael de la Maza - Tactics 4tw

So after really getting a good taste of the chess blog circuit over the past couple of days this one name keeps popping up, Michael de la Maza. Apparently he created his own program of chess study, used it to great effect, then published it in some articles on the web (http://www.chesscafe.com/text/skittles148.pdf) and(http://www.chesscafe.com/text/skittles150.pdf). Now half the chess blogs I've read are Class players like myself taking his advice. They even have their own group called "The Knights Errant".

Well I have to say, "sorry I'm late to the party." I feel kinda foolish, having been a slave to Kotov's "Art of the Middlegame" and Silman's "Reassess Your Chess" after reading Mr. de la Maza's articles. I've often talked to my long time chess friends about the 1600 plateau I've felt like I've been on since about 14 yrs ago when I was a senoir in high school. I "know" alot more about chess now than I did then (thanks Mr. Silman) ... but I have virtually zero rating increase to show for all that knowledge.

I've historically blamed my lack of rating progress on Real Life (tm). I seem to play chess in cycles. I play alot for 6-12 months, then get caught up in something else (Read: Everquest, World of Warcraft, Shadowbane) for a year or two, then come back to chess. Now I think it may have more to do with how I've studied. Mr. la Maza's own performance increase and his articles have me convinced that I am going to stray a bit from the Strategy side of study and concentrate on the Tactical side of chess for the next year. I want to thank him for laying out a pretty clear study plan.

Any suggestions on where to find 10,000 problems that are laid out in order from simplest to most difficult?

Update
So I found Silman's Review of Mr. La Maza's book online. Not surprising that Mr. Silman gets a little foul with this book, since Mr. La Maza is non too flattering of Reassess Your Chess. Both make valid points. In the long run I think Mr. Silman is probably right, in the short run I think in order for me personally to improve I need to focus on improving my Tactical skill.

1 lunch hour spent on the Tactical Chess Server has already taught me that I'm much weaker than I thought tactically.

Wide Wide World of Blogs

In an effort to become part of the Chess Blogging community I have been travelling around mostly links from Susan Polgar's Blog and I came across the blog of CelticDeath who seems to be about the same strength as me and seriously trying to improve.

Bad Bishops Redux
My opponent in the Bad Bishops game resigned. The final position looked like:

Tonight is club night. The Waterville Chess Club only meets once a week, but it gives me a good opportunity to play OTB chess which is frankly lacking here in Maine. I'll probably post about a club game tomorrow, or maybe tonight while I watch CSI:Miami.

Bad Bishops part deux!

The same game, a few moves later. I had both pics posted in one entry before but the formatting was all whacked out and I couldn't get it to look right. Anyway, Black's dark square bishop is still hurting. Hopefully I will be able to convert my superior minor peices into a queened passed pawn and win the game.

Bad Bishops

I'm a big fan of Jeremy Silman's books and I've been trying to apply what he teaches about imbalances to my chess games. In these positions from a http://www.timeforchess.com/ correspondence game I'm playing you can see that my plan is to make Black hate his dark squared bishop. Over the course of 4 or 5 moves I think its becoming a pretty effective plan. Have a look, but please no comments on what to do from this point because the game is still in progress.

Even a blind squirrel can find a nut

White to Move

In this interesting blitz position I made what I thought was a pretty good tactical shot. Can you find the move or do you have too much Tryptophan in you from the Thanksgiving Turkey still.

BabasChess (http://www.babaschess.net/) and FICS (http://freechess.org/) make for a nice free chess experience on the web. I play a bit of g/5 or g/5 + 2 on there. Sometimes even play g/15 or g/20.

How to lose in two moves

Black to Move

This is a position from one of my recent games on http://www.timeforchess.com where I had the black peices. Black's position here was looking pretty good and I had alot of pressure on white's kingside.

At this point I got pawn happy. I thought that the prize for building up so much pressure on white's king side was the collapse of his queen side and I hastened to capture 1. ... Qxb2 2. Rae1 Qxa2

Sadly at this point the black queen with its 2 prize pawns is stuck out of the game and is not able to return in time to save black's King from the onslaught of white peices.

3. Ng5 Nd6

4. Rxe8 Rxe8

5. Rxe8 Nxe8

6. Qe3! 1-0

Rooks can dominate knights

I've played chess for a long time, and I've always known that a Rook is better than a Knight. Of course every 2nd grader knows that, but what I didn't know till I saw a diagram like this recently was that a Rook can dominate a Knight completely taking it out of the game. This also illustrates why Knights belong in the center. The Rook could not bully the Knight so badly like this if the Knight was more centralized.

It should be noted that the Queen can dominate the Knight the same way. Notice that the right square to be on to do this is the square that is 2 space diagnol to the Knight. I've always known that the square 2 spaces diagnol to the Knight is the safest square to be on if your trying to avoid being attacked by the Knight as it takes at least 4 moves to get to this square for the knight. This knowledge comes in really handy in blitz chess. Its one of the basic patterns you can master at the chess board.

How to use this space

I'm not sure how to use this space at the moment. My thought is it won't be terribly instructive to anyone other than myself. It will give me a spot to post some analysis of my own games and afford me the chance to get some feedback on that analysis, assuming I ever have any visitors.

I'm going on the theory right now that studying openings will not help me improve much. I do have a couple of books on openings but I mostly just look to be prepared for the first 5/6 moves so that I can get started without any major surprises. Then I try to apply the basic rules of chess I've known since I was in 4th grade, and Silman's imbalance technique as best I can.

I spend most of my study time trying to assess the imbalances in various positions from opening, to endgame and devise a plan for each side. I believe the majority of what you will find here is my thoughts about positions from my online games, and club games and what I thought the plan should be for one or both sides.

I might also post some endgame studies or miniatures I come across that I find instructive if for no other reason than because spending the time on the position to post it should help me solidify it in my mind and remember it. I hope any beginning or intermediate chess players will find this blog somewhat instructional as well. Maybe we can even attract some better players to help point out where our analysis is gone astray and we can all learn from that.

Lost on Time, but how to continue?

Black to Move
I achieved this position tonight, but ran out of time and lost the game. I think black is doing well if he can capitalize on his light square bishop being better than white's dark square bishop. Black can also make use of the 'a' or 'h' files.

I played ... Qh7 here in time trouble but I think a more appropriate move would be to lock the pawns up on the h file then try to dominate the a file.

First post is of course a...

Test post. Maybe someday I will put something profound in this space. Until then please stay tuned.