chugging along
I forgot how long some of these levels were. After blowing through level 10 in 45 minutes, I'm just now halfway through level 20. So far I'm at 96%.
Can't really conclude anything from that. But on my last time through this set of problems, I did them at 98%. So I may have dropped off just a little bit, but my guess is that this is specific to this problem set and not a drop in tactical ability in general.
Some of the problems are quite tricky. If you really consider all the defensive resources, you may convince yourself the tactic doesn't quite work. Thinking back, I'm sure I did some of these problems 'correctly' while considering less about them than I am now when I'm not doing them correctly, simply because I knew the solutions by the 4th or 5th repetition. And there's probably very little value in learning the solutions of these problems if the process doesn't help me learn to play better tactics.
But I'll be sticking with it.
Labels: progress report
I'm baaaack
I've decided to use this blog again!
A lot has changed since I last blogged here, but I've come to a point where using this blog makes sense again. For one thing, my rating has gone from 1729 to 1921. This is obviously a big change, so why haven't I been posting on my chess improvement blog what I've been doing to accomplish this ?!? Two primary reasons for that, 1) I wasn't following a regimen that lent itself to periodic updates or keeping a regular log and 2) between moving and changing jobs twice, time for blogging was limited and 2a) I blogged at chess.com.
So why not just continue blogging at chess.com?!? I'm listed as a Top Blogger there and my blog actually gets a fair number of reads. But that blog has never contained the kinds of things this one did and will. This blog is a personal place where I dump my current progress and thoughts. The chess.com blog was too polished, containing only instructive analysis of my games. I'd like to keep the two ideas separate. And there's something nice about a low readership when you're not aiming for quality, and I won't be aiming for quality here -- just spewing.
So what have I been doing the last year and a half while my rating has gone up 200 points?!? Playing a lot of OTB chess. I play at least one tournament every month, and often more. In some months reaching 10 OTB USCF rated games. I have no doubt this has helped a lot. I've used the Tactics Trainer at chess.com, occasionally popped on to Chess Tactics Server (chess.emrald.net), read books, analyzed my games, analyzed games with higher rated players, etc.
And what will I be doing now?!? I have just re-installed CT-Art on my new laptop. At first this did not work, because I'm running Vista. I googled it and a
solution came up. This worked for me. So the plan is to get back to a regime of tactics training using CT-Art. The last time I did this, I got through repetitions up to level 40 with very high success rates. I hope to be nailing some of the higher levels this time as well. I crunched through level 10 today in a total of 45 minutes, 100% success rate.
I'll use this blog to flog myself in my CT-Art training, all results will be posted here.
Labels: progress report
