Still on the drills

Almost 2 weeks since I started the micro drills, and I can already see some benefits. I don't think my capacity to spot forks and skewers has greatly increased, but looking all this time to an almost empty board has improved my general board vision, for sure.

When I started the drills I was really in doubt if I should spent 28 days with vision exercises, but now that I can do them (a lot) quickier and see the results, like a better vision of the connections on the board, specially seeing diagonals and files at the same time, I'll stick with them for another 2 weeks anyway.

I've also added two exercises to the ones proposed by de la Maza. After forking R/N/B in concentric circles, I then put a pawn and start to fork it the same way, but now with a Knight. I chose the pawn just to be different, as the knight can fork any two pices safely(except other knights, sure).

The other one I saw in a column by Dan Heisman, and also concerns the knight. A white knight starting at a1 moves to b1, then c1, d1 ... h1, h2, g2 ... a2, a3, b3 etc, in this zig-zag motion, until it covers all the board. The difference is that there are 4 black pawns at c3/c6/f3/f6 and the knight can't land on the squares occupied or controlled by them.

Yes, I know my teaching skills sucks, so if you didn't understand(I'd bet on it), the original article is here, under the section "Chess IQ Test".

Today I also managed to beat a player 100+ ratings points above me. I can say, this sensation is GREAT ;)