Some new arrivals and an update

We went to visit family in LA, so I didn't get any chess related activities in over the weekend other than to finish my initial look through Andy Soltis's latest offering What It Takes To Become A Chess Master. It appears to be a nice complement to his earlier work Studying Chess Made Easy where Soltis gives specific advice on how to study and improve. He does give some advice in this book on how to improve the traits and habits being discussed, but not nearly as detailed as the earlier work. I think he does raise many good points though and it is a good addition to my collection.

In addition to Reti's Masters of the Chessboard, I also picked up Kasparov's latest tome in kindle format as it was being sold for under $14 versus the roughly $30 for the hardback. I might eventually get the hardback to complete the collection, but it seemed like too good a price difference to pass up and I wanted to look at more chess books for the kindle. As I stated in the earlier post I had also picked up Chess Secrets: Giants of Innovation. It's formatting looks pretty much the same as the Kasparov book which makes sense since they are both Everyman products. The diagrams are pretty clear and the text looks nice enough. Having a second look at the Reti book I noticed that the diagrams seem a bit blurry, which I didn't notice the other week. It isn't so bad that I can't stand reading it, but it is slightly annoying.

Some other physical books that have arrived recently are the latest entry in Artur Yusupov's book series, Chess Evolution 1, The Grandmaster Battle Manual by Kotronias, The 2nd volume of Donaldson and Minev's massive work on Akiva Rubinstein, the latest edition of Anand's game collection for Gambit, and Grandmaster Versus Amateur by Shaw and Aagaard.

On the training front I have been doing a minimal amount of tactics (10-20/day) on chesstempo and am back in the mid 1800s standard, and I have started a series of correspondence games on schemingmind. The main thing I need to do with the correspondence games is keep the amount to a manageable level. It is easy early on the start a bunch of games, but as they progress it gets difficult to keep up with all of them if you have too many going. I have been thinking of jumping in to one of the 45 45 leagues (ICC, FICS, or playchess), but I am worried about whether I can work the games around family obligations, plus the inevitable interruptions that come with having a young child if I play the games at home. I will have to discuss with my wife if she is willing to let me do that one night a week. Perhaps I can play them from work in the evening in order to concentrate on the game.

Mason - Tarrasch, Hamburg Chess Congress 1885

I played through another game from Tarrasch's 300 Games tonight (Game #65), playing solitaire chess while I did it. I took an extra point off if my move changed the evaluation of the position to the worse, for example from += to =, and I gave myself a bonus point and didn't count it wrong if my move evaluated better than Tarrasch's move. If the move evaluated pretty much equal to Tarrasch's move then I didn't count it as wrong as well. I seemed to be doing fairly well, starting off my game at move 9, but I hit what seemed like a rough patch on moves 33-38 though my wanting to play e3 on moves 36 and 37 seemed to evaluate much better than Tarrasch's selections. I did have a few spots though where my move swung the evaluation, with one case being my moving a rook to the square just vacated by Mason's bishop on move 42. I guess I could claim time pressure, but I completely spaced on the bishop. I gave myself 30 minutes, with a 1 minute increment. Other than the oversight on trying to play 42..Rd1, the one move that bothered me was not playing 15..N:e5. It seemed to me that white would be able hold onto that pawn. I didn't see him interposing the rook between the queen and pawn like that allowing me to pick up the pawn. Overall a fun game to play through.


Not a bad start after not looking at a board and pieces for close to a year.

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Back from my vacation

I have been pretty busy most of the past year and haven't spent any time on chess, but now I am getting back into the swing of things. It is kind of like the Godfather movie where Pacino says "Everytime I think I'm out they pull me back in." So it is with chess and myself. I have the bug, and so no matter what I eventually find my way back to the game. The main focus at this point I think will be consistency and quality of training rather than quantity, and hopefully I will avoid burn out and then be less likely to let life carry me away from the game. So I should be posting here regularly again.

On that note, today I purchased my 1st 2 kindle based chess ebooks. Russell Enterprises's algebraic edition of Reti's Masters of the Chessboard was priced at $7.49 I believe, and Pritchett's Chess Secrets: Giants of Innovation. I'm surprised at how well the Reti book looks on the kindle. I will take a closer look at Pritchett's book this afternoon. My earlier worries that the format wouldn't work for chess books seems to be unfounded. My bookshelves are probably cheering, but I imagine my bank account will not be.

Igor Khmelnitsky's Chess Exam in 1 day

So I decided to go through the exam yesterday, and set about creating an excel spreadsheet to keep track of the scores. I didn't initially plan to blaze right through the test, but after completing the spreadsheet I started in, and then kept working the problems. I just finished it about an hour ago. I imagine the best way to do it is work 1 or 2 problems a day until you are done. I don't know how much impact that would have had on my results.

Here is how it went:

last night:
Problems   1-10: 71%   2051
Problems 11-20: 65%   2077
Problems 21-30: 34%   1084
Problems 31-40: 67%   1871
Problems 41-50: 45%   1605
Problems 51-60: 60%   2101

this morning:
Problems 61-70: 43%   1582
Problems 71-80: 56%   1904
Problems 81-90: 32%   1409
Problems 91-100: 50% 1648

Overall: 52% 1647

The different categories sorted by rating:

Openings               2155
Defense                 1834
Standard Positions 1793
Endgame               1726
Tactics                  1711
Strategy                1647
Sacrifice                1616
Attack                   1616
Threats                  1592
Middlegame          1455
Counter-attack      1253
Calculation            1199

The book says more than looking at the ratings you should look at what they are relative to each other. Calculation was definitely a disappointment. Some of that could be attributed to the pace at which I did the test, but it is also a factor of my poor thought process. The openings score is funny. I never study openings, and I think the sample size is very small, like 6 positions, and they mostly have to do with recognizing tactics in the opening. So I don't put much stock in that category being highest. I think the main thing to take away from this is that I need to focus on calculation/visualization work, counter attacking, and middle games.

It would be great if he would continue to publish more of these type of exams. I know that there is the tactics based book, and the book about Fischer, but I am talking about exams that touch many different areas and assess where you need improvement.

Edit: Speaking of more tests, I just found out he has a new website.

http://www.chessik.com/index.htm

Initial Thoughts on New Ideas in Chess

The new algebraic edition of Larry Evans book New Ideas in Chess arrived today. I'm not the biggest fan of chess books from Cardoza, but Evans book is highly thought of so I went ahead and pre-ordered when it first showed up on Amazon.

As far as the content goes, the book seems to be very good. Evans breaks the game down into four basic elements: Time, Space, Force, and Pawn Structure. I believe Yasser Seirawan used the same breakdown later on when he wrote his Winning Chess series. Prior to discussing the elements, Evans takes readers on a walk through the history of the evolution of chess. He tends to use game fragments instead of giving the full game score for the different examples he uses. It is easy enough to look them up in a database, but surprisingly not all the games are in Chessbase, or chessgames.com which was a slight problem.

So far I have just read through the chapter on the evolution of chess, and skimmed through most of the remaining chapters of the book. My only complaint so far is that editing seemed to be lacking in the production of the book. Out of the first 6 diagrams, 2 are screwed up. Diagram 2 is visually screwed up, with the first and last ranks horizontally offset by about half a square. Diagram 6, has the wrong position. Since the book suggests that you work the examples from the diagrams instead of setting them up on a board, it is a problem when you can't be sure the position you are analyzing is correct. The game diagram 6 comes from is Steinitz - Golmayo, Havana 1889 which unfortunately is not is Big Database 2010, or chessgames.com. I did find it online, and was able to play through it. Funnily when I played through it I recognized some of the game. It turns out I have played through the game before in Herman Grooten's Chess Strategy for Club Players. I have included the game below.

Once I seriously work through the whole book, and determine if the editing is better in the rest of the book I will decide whether or not it is better to get this edition or track down the Dover edition.

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Nigel Davies Blog and other tidbits

Speaking of GM Nigel Davies, I just found his chess blog today.

http://chessimprover.com/

It looks like he will be discussing lots of different things about improving your chess, so it should definitely be worth reading. As pointed out below I enjoyed his book 10 Great Ways to Get Better at Chess. My only wish was that there had been some more discussion of the 10 topics he covered, but then I'm not really sure what else could have been said as he made his points quite well.

I will be working on coming up with a pre-game ritual as he suggests. Interestingly, Andy Soltis' column in this month's Chess Life touches on that as well as training. I have been playing correspondence chess on the LSS server, but I need to view more as training for otb than I have been. That was my original intent, but I need to keep that as the focus for that work. It is just a method of training.

I also plan to follow his advice of choosing events, in particular the time control you choose. By his algorithm I should not be playing games faster than G/25 in order to improve. Actually G/25 is very fast for improvement and I should be looking to play much longer games, but that is the low end for time controls. No Blitz!!

I have been playing some blitz though against the cpu with it having a Scotch Game book containing lines for:

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 e:d4 4.N:d4 and 4..N:d4 , 4..Nge7 , and 4..d5.

This corresponds to the 1st chapter of Vladimir Barsky's book The Scotch Game for White. The format of the book is interesting. It contains a quick repertoire section that gives a quick outline of the line, a step-by-step section that goes into the theory, and a complete game section that gives complete games in the line.

Another key area for improvement that GM Davies covers is improving your fitness level, and to that end I am working on running again, and looking to learn tai-chi.

I still manage to get my daily dose of tactics on chesstempo.com, and I have been working through Silman's Endgame Course which is another of the 10 areas that Nigel recommends working on.

10 Great Ways to Get Better at Chess

10 Great Ways to Get Better at Chess by Nigel Davies

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An interesting book by GM Davies. The vast majority of the book is annotated games. There are 10 sections dealing with different ways for people to improve. In each section in addition to giving some advice, he has a case study and then shows some games from that person where they were having a certain problem, and some games after they had worked on or resolved those issues. Each section then ends with a set of key points about the subject it discussed. The section on pre-game rituals was interesting, as was his discussion of choosing events.



View all my reviews

Edit: I should point out that the goodreads rating system isn't granular enough to do justice to this book (or many other books). I probably should have bumped it up to 4 because of that. I think it is a good book and provides good advice to a player looking to improve.