The Back Rank

Tournament tomorrow and current progress

Tomorrow I will play in a one day tournament. Maybe playing two weekends in a row will be good for me. I sure need something to wash away the feeling from last weekend. Though I probably won't play another tournament until October, possibly at the end of September. I'll test out the idea of trying to at least list every legal move. The first two rounds are G/40 and the last two rounds are G/60, so I'm not sure how that will go with the short time controls. I may abondon it if I find myself in a large time deficit.

I thought I should also make a record of what I'm up to, so there is some progress to track. As I mentioned earlier, I do problems at CTS and use ChessMentor for more in depth (longer time, tactical + strategic ideas) problems. So I'll give my current stats for those.

CTS:

• Initial rating: ~1530 (Can't recall exactly, but I remember early on being psyched to get to 1550).
• Current rating: ~1600 (I am now over 1600 all the time with a high of 1624)
• Problems done: 7000
• Success rate: 76.3%

Chess Mentor:

• Challenges with scores: 59
• Average of initial scores: 61
• Average of latest scores: 79

Chess Mentor is a little odd because problems (challenges) that have only been done once have the same initial and latest scores. So the number of the latest scores doesn't fully measure the improvement due to repitition.

Additionally, I have started working through "Winning Pawn Structures" by Baburin. The book is mostly on the isolated d-pawn. The first section is on advantages of the isolated d-pawn. I have completed the first chapter, "White advances d4-d5." Following chapters are "Attack on f7", "the Rook lift," "Bishop sacrifices on h6," "h-pawn battering ram," "Queenside activity," and "Play on the e-file." I'll update my progress on these chapters as I go, and then the section on disadvantages of the isolated d-pawn.

The ratings are in from last weekends tournament: 1708 -> 1685. Maybe I can recoup some of those points tomorrow.

Labels: chess tactics server, progress report

posted by Loomis @ 5:26 PM 2 comments