To play or not to play?

That's the question(I've been thinking lately). When I started studying chess, mainly in the de la Maza's scheme(I'm still on the visual exercises), I believed something like 'the more I play, the better!', but now I'm wondering if that's really correct.

I feel like when I play too many games in a row I don't benefit much from them. I forget the mistakes of the earlier games, and probably start to repeat them. So, how much should I play? Once a week? Once a day? Many games a day? I'm inclined to play one(and just one) slow game a day, with futher analisys and reflection on my mistakes. Don't know if it's the best way to go, but I'll give it a try.

Between, I'm still doing the micro drills, and finishing the "Chess For Dummies" book. Hope I can get to the circles soon...

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 ;)

Yahoo! Games

Since I started playing chess for serious, I've been looking for a place to play on the net. I see many of the knights play on ICC, but this telnet+winboard interface is confusing for me, so I decided to play on Yahoo! Games. They have a pretty interface, and many, many people to play(usually 8000+ online players).

I played there a while ago, under a different login, and got a rating around 1250, but I was losing most of the blitz games(1/0, 2/0, 5/0). Now I'll be playing just slow games, guess that's the best way to learn and improve. Nothing better than THINK ahn? :)

Player information for knightwizzy:

Rating: 1200
Games Completed: 0
Abandoned Games: 0
Wins: 0
Losses: 0
Draws: 0
Streak: 0

Chess For Dummies

Almost a week of micro drills and I'm starting to feel more confortable with the exercises. My ability to spot queens forks has incresead greatly, and I can't wait to try it on real games. I've also created some more drills to complement my chess vision training.

As I'm getting quickier through the drills(around 30 minutes for both Concetric Squares and Knight Sight), that's time to start a book. My chess knowledge is so little that makes it hard to know where to start.

What upsets me the most now is my lack of opening knowledge. I know general principles like control central squares, do not move the same piece twice, develop knights before bishops etc, but that's not enough. When playing games different from 1. e4, e5, the whole situation seems strange to me. I lose a lot of time trying to figure out what are my opponents plan, and what I should play, but usually get nowhere. Openings, in special, is something I must study as soon as I get a better general understanding of the game.

By now, to build up this "general understading", what I need is a beginners book. A book that does not confuse me with a lot of variations and deep strategic issues, something that just passes basic ideias. I chose "Chess For Dummies" by James Eade, which I already had at home. This book seems to be an easy reading, just what I was looking for.

CT-ART + WinXP ?

Today I installed CT-ART 3.0 on my Windows XP, but it doesn't work. When I run the program it gives me address errors like "Access violation at address 00559A46 in module 'Ct-Art.exe'. Read of address 0000000024" when I click the buttons, and sometimes "Runtime error 501(249)", which finishes the program.

Has anybody had a similar experience? Is this a XP problem? The cd has a patch, but it didn't solve the problem.

Hmm, seems like this was not my lucky day...

Day 1, First steps

Today I started the MDLM's program with micro drills. I did both the Concentric Squares, forking Rook, Bishop and Knight, and the Knight sight exercise. I felt the Knight one to be easy, maybe because I already have a good vision on how it moves, but the CS was somewhat trick: that's easy to forget a fork here and there, so I had to do it carefully.

As this training aims improving chess vision, I was facing a dilemma: should I use my real board, or a 2D board on the computer screen? As I'm just playing over the net, I chose the second option.

The beginning

Tomorrow I'll start Michael de la Maza's chess program "400 points in 400 days". His method is based on doing the same set of tactical problems over and over again(well, in fact 7 times!) in order to improve caculation ability and pattern recognition.
Before start solving the problems I'll do some visual exercises, as sugested by MDLM. My ideia is to occupy my time the next 14 days by doing Concentric Circles and Knight Sight exercises.