monday in bat country
ok, this week i’m gonna push it.
first off, i’m gonna go through all the basic mates. philidors, smothered, anastasias, epaulets, all that stuff. as it’s been said, go through the basic drills, make sure they are ingrained into my every being.
i will spend an hour each day on tactics, either with the CTS or the tactics books i have. in addition, i will go through at least 2 masters games a day, one of them being from chernev’s “capablanca’s best chess endings.” each game i will look over carefully, spending time with it, paying attention to how they moved, what pressures the pieces exert, i’ll go over it at least twice to get a feel for how they played it.
at least that is the plan for this week.
tanc (happyhippo) said,
April 21, 2008 at 5:22 pm
hello cl,
wow…. not to discourage you but that’s quite a lot to take in for 1 day.
i shuffle between work and chess. if i can afford the time, i’ll definitely study chess the way i prepare for my studies ie no nonsense - hard ball approach but alas…… the mind is willing but the body is weak.
best of luck in carrying out your plan.
blunderprone said,
April 22, 2008 at 10:48 am
I’ve been really getting into my old imey chess studies and psoting about it lately. Take a load off and let me know what you think… I believe I discovered a long lost relative of Blunderprones as noted in my latest post. Perhaps there’s a chess loser out there. It’s encouraging to know that other, more famous players made howlers almost as good as me … with consistency!
visual said,
April 22, 2008 at 11:24 am
Great plans. I had to check what anastasia’s mate means, found out I knew it, funny.
Many years ago, being already university student, I started to learn chess from scratch. I did exactly what you want to do - read a lot of books, studied different openings, combination themes, etc.
I spent more time on chess than on the university studies.
I started to play in tournaments and advanced pretty fast until I began to play with experienced adult players, which mostly didn’t know a lot of theory, but played steady and didn’t make simple mistakes (knowing how to play with/against isolated pawn or hanging pawns doesn’t help much in such cases).
Then I stopped to play/study at all for several years and then only played occasionally with computer.
Lately my kid was actively playing chess in scholastic tournaments, so at some point
I began to play and played a lot online as well as in several OTB tournaments, didn’t study much.
I found that as my practical play improved, all that theory knowledge began to pay off. All this old stuff popping up in my head - opening lines/standard combinations/strategic plans/endgame techniques started to give me the edge.
What I am trying to say is maybe you will not see the effect of your studying right away,
but eventually as your level of practical play will raise it will help you a lot.
chessloser said,
April 23, 2008 at 7:58 am
tanc - ambitious, yes, but i think i can do it, at least for a day or two…
blunderprone - when i see GMs make stupid mistakes, it’s comforting, it makes me think i have a chance…
visual - thanks, that gives me hope that perhaps i’m not just wasting my time…