Testing the plan

 I intend to play a tournament at the end of the year. I hope that that will show some rating improvement. I have an ambitious training plan which I am grinding through on a daily basis. There is not much to say about that. I don't want to bore you with it, so I write less about it. For me it are very exciting times, though.

Currently I'm testing the plan, in order to see whether some adjustments must be made. The plan to learn five new openings turns out to be over ambitious. So I decided to drop the London system. Besides that, I'm looking to ways to make the QID to have some overlap with the Colle, so I can borrow the ideas from white.

The method of rote memorization of opening lines is not good enough. If you have a good memory, it is the lazy approach to obtain some knowledge with minimum effort. 

But I started to look a bit like my cat. She wants to be in the house where I am. Since she is faster than me, she tries to predict my moves. It turns out that she is wrong about 95% of the time. The reason is, that she has no clue about my motivation to enter a certain room. If I entered the kitchen yesterday 8 out of 10 times. it doesn't mean that I will do that today too. In the Colle you try to avoid the move c4 if you can. But if you have no clue about the circumstances why it is sometimes good or necessary to play c4, than pure rote memorization is simply not good enough. Since there are dozens of such decisions to make in an opening, and if you try to gamble which move to make based on statistics, the odds are not in your favor to guess them all correctly.

If I play the French against lower rated players, and I am right 5% of the time, I am already doing well, since most lower rated players have no clue at all how to play against the French. But at the same time, I have become an easier target for higher rated players who know two or three things about the French. They will soon discover a move from me that is in the "wrong" department, and will be able to punish it.

The past nine days I participated in a nine round chess tournament, the 11th Amsterdam Science Park edition. My main goal was to test if my ideas about chess improvement are correct. This are my conclusions:

• The PoPLoAFun system is the best way to approach tactics indeed. It works like a charm.
• The PoPLoAFun system is the best way to approach openings
• The PoPLoAFun system is the best way to approach middle games
• The decision to focus solely on tactics and openings is correct
• My method of rote memorization of openings is not good enough
• I must focus on the ideas behind the moves. That is a lot more work than I expected, even for the system openings I have chosen.
• My mind is no longer overwhelmed by the complexity of chess, This is mainly due to the following: tactics have become less taxing for my mind, and the PoPLoAFun system structures my chess thinking about other parts of the game.
• My approach to the Benoni and the French lead often to an endgame with a good knight against a bad bishop.
• My decision to postpone endgame study until my tactics end openings have a decent level is correct. I expect that I must accept losses or draws in won endgames for at least another year.
• My knight vision is not good enough. Albeit Troys has improved my knight vision greatly, it is not exactly the right vision to handle knights properly. I must find the right knight tactics database set in order to be able to improve.
• My joy in chess continues to grow

I have gotten a clear picture on how to proceed. I don't want to bore you with it too much, so I will probably continue to write less until the end of the year. The past tournament has given me reconfirmation that I'm on the right track. I suspect that at the end of the year I can show some objective and measurable improvement. And otherwise I will find some acceptable excuses why not. Acceptable for me, that is. 😜