Sunday, December 17, 2006

Identity crisis

I'm in the middle of a change of style. I used to be a one trick pony. I am used to a highly aggressive gambit-style. In daily life I'm not a risk taker. Since I have discovered the strategical style of Capablanca, I'm in love with it. I try to ape his style. With very little succes, to be honest.

I suck terrible at strategical play. Right now I'm sitting between two chairs, so my results OTB are terrible too. I hope I can fix it a little before the Corus tournament. That's why I beefed up my efforts at correspondence play. I really need much more experience in my new style of play.

I'm very happy that my weakness manifests itself so evident. Only if you see how bad you actually play, you can use this feedback for improvement.

To illustrate how confused I am, I even played 1.d4 today for the first time in my life. How long will it last before I play the French or the Caro-Kann?

Thanks to Ed we are working thru How to reassess your chess from Silman.
PCT is going slow, but steady.
Montse has done a good analysis of my latest game, which shows there is a lot room for improvement. I start to enjoy chess even more than I already did, with these new developments. But boy, do I suck!

4 comments:

  1. Wrong!

    You do not suck at chess. Looking at your rating, you are better at chess than about 70% of the chess players in the world. That is not sucky.

    Here's the difference between the Old Tempo and the New Tempo:

    What you are now is teachable and that means you have no boundaries as to how good you can get.

    You are going to be one fine chess player.

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  2. Jim,
    thanks for the cheering. I really need that now and then on the road to mastery. There are moments that hope is my only companion.

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  3. You must have been pretty affected for you to go out and work thru HTRYC.

    We will be awaiting for TempoV.2.0 then.

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  4. How long will it last before I play the French

    Don't do it!

    This message brought to you by FDLFPF (Friends don't let friends play the French).

    ReplyDelete