The Back Rank

Friday progress

Well, I almost missed it and even though it's technically Saturday, I'll allow this as the Friday progress report. Front and center, here's the table of results:

Week Ending	CTS rating(max)-tries-%age	Chess Mentor	Book
Aug. 4th	1600(1624)-7000-76.3%	59	Baburin, Chap 1
Aug. 11th	1614(1624)-7807-76.8%	67	Baburin, Chap 2
Aug. 18th	1615(1634)-8770-76.3%	72	Baburin, Chap 3
Aug. 25th	1623(1637)-9900-77.6%	79	Baburin, Chap 4+5
Sep 1st	1641(1651)-10798-78.0%	80	Baburin, Chap 6-

Obviously that is a huge jump in my CTS rating. Several of the things I had been working on at CTS began to click. One thing I had been focused on was seeing the whole board. I have read in the past a study where they track the eyes of grandmasters and amateurs and found that amateurs focus their eyes on a portion of the board while grandmasters view all parts of the board nearly equally. I'm trying to view all of the board in just a few seconds, and it's getting easier. This has helped with some of my other weaknesses such as spotting long diagonal pins and finding open files for rooks.

Not much work done on Chess Mentor this week. Though it's deceptive because even though I did only one new challenge, I did several old challenges as repeats. I didn't finish the chapter from Baburin either (that's why the "-" in the table). It is one of the longer chapters, but that's a poor excuse. The other thing I did do was to actually play some chess games! I typically play a few blitz games (3 or 5 minutes) during the week, but I know that I have to play some slower games to practice what I am learning. So I played some slower games. I wasn't totally happy with how I played, but some things were good, I should probably post annotations here as a form of public flogging.

This week I'll be heading to the beach on vacation. I'm taking a book of checkmate exercizes (embarassingly named chessercizes) with me and will be doing mate in 4 problems while I lay out in the sand, or perhaps as I sip a daiquiri by the pool. Anyhow, my next post will be next Friday, which is only slightly less frequent than my usual rate.

Labels: chess tactics server, progress report

posted by Loomis @ 1:05 AM 1 comments