Temposchlucker

. . Begin this year I reached the age of 50. As you might know that is the age where every selfrespecting man will start to exercise his midlife crisis. It's the age where you make up the balance of your life. If you are egoistic you ask yourself if you have gotten enough out of your life. Since the answer is probably no you leave your wife and get a younger woman. Or a sportscar. If you are religeous then you realize that you haven't done enough for your salvation and start to do charitative work. You start to ask yourself if you are not wasting your time. And so I started with geology.

. . . This weekend I played in a tournament with stiff competition. From the 42 men in my group there were 2 grandmasters and 15 (international) masters. And 3 Dimitri's, which is an indication of the east-block caliber. The opponents I faced hoovered between 1919 and 2140. I was the lowest rated player with 1874. I played 7 games and got 2.5/7 (+1 3= 3-) which is about what to expect. What can I say about it? It was very instructive. In the 3 games I lost my opponents admitted I was better in the opening untill deep in the middlegame. Due to my (relatively) well understanding of the Polar bear and the resulting positions. My opponents had little clue. But in the second half of the middlegame I committed a slight inaccuracy and was invariably heavily punished for that. I played 6 Polar Bears and 1 Caro Kan. I felt that there was little difference in our tactical ability. Allthough I'm somewhat slower. In two of the drawn games my opponents played a (pawn)gambit. But my understa...

As you could read in my previous post, two positions of Dvoretsky's book took me a weekend each to adjust my ideas about chess. Now I'm working on a third position and a weekend proved to be not enough to overhaul my ideas. See diagram. ' ' ' Dvoretsky says that if it were black to move it speaks for itself that he would trade queens since 1. ... Qf5 2. Qxf5 gxf5 is good for black. Why? In my ridgid vision the creation of an extra pawn island is not good. So of what comprises the advantage of black? Or is it his only way to maintain equality and are other moves worse?

. . . Rating progress or regression is sufficient reason to break the radio silence since I promised you to keep you informed about my path to 2000. I reached another all time high with 1874 (=+18) points according to the new dutch ratinglist. In the past year I surpassed a whole bunch of guys against whom I was looking up before. Margriet improved to 1552 (+44) I noticed lately that I was more talking about chess improvement than I was actually working. The break from blogging has indeed boosted my study efforts as I hoped it would. This is my approach: I made a checklist with which I have to verify each position in order to assess the characteristics and to find the best move. Then I lookup the answer and usually I haven't found the right answer. Then I adjust my checklist so that it will help me to find the right answer the next time. Since I switched over to Dvoretsky's positional problems lately this usually means quite an overhaul of my idea's. Unbelievable how ridgi...

. . . For the third time my reasoning has lead to the same conclusions on how to improve at chess. This means that there must at least be some truth in it. Now the time has come to just execute what I have formulated. Otherwise I would just continue to talk for the sake of talking. I will shut up for now and keep radiosilence until I have reached 2000.

. . . Who would have thought of e6 as the best place for the night? I didn't. It seems it is all about building a database of cues in stead of patterns or ideas. Most patterns are already there, in my system, ready to be recognized. It just needs cues to be triggered. Lack of cues means that you forget your ideas or patterns during play. It is maybe the key of Phaedrus' transferproblem .

. . . . Let us see if we can make this animation stuff practical. The idea I missed here is the regrouping of the knight. It stands in the way on c3.