Sunday, March 25, 2007

Let me introduce myself...

Hello world ! I'm a 28 year old belgian (amateur) chess player who's desperately trying to improve his game.

I started to play chess on january 2006 by joining the local chess club. Today, one year and three months later, my (provisional) belgian rating is 1396. I try to study chess each day , but I think I'm not doing it the right way. There's so much to learn (tactics, opening, endgame, positional play, study master games, ...) but so little time (I'm married and have a little son, so 1 hour of study time a day is all i've got !)... .

I've been reading the knights errant blogs for a while now, and I decided to give their study approach a try. So this is my plan :
  • Study lots and lots and lots of tactics each day. I don't think I will do the circles in the true sense of the word (250, 500 or 1000 problems a day will not be possible with 1 hour of study time a day), but I will try to solve a lot of tactical problems repetitively.
  • Building a tactical (gambit?) opening repertoire.
  • blogging about my chess study (and improvement ;-))

4 comments:

Ron said...

Welcome! Glad to have you. :) I'll be adding you to my sidebar and my bloglines feeds as soon as I publish this comment.

BTW (in reference to your comment about not being able to get through 250, 500, or 1,000 problems in a 1 hour study time slot,) you might be surprised. Once you've been through the problems many times, you can really fly. For example, I can go through the 720 problems in Module-1 of Personal Chess Trainer in about 45 minutes (which calculates out to 3-4 seconds per problem.) Modules 2 or 3 each only take about an hour (also 720 problems each.)

Anyway, good luck with your training program. I look forward to hearing about your progress.

Ron

Sir Piño said...

@Ron : It's true, I can solve problems faster when I've solved them before. On the other hand, I'm afraid I will end up 'memorizing' the problems. I'm not sure this will make me a better chess player... .

Ron said...

Actually, that's partly the point. You WANT to memorize the problems to the extent that you recognize them on sight and know the solution immediately. That way, when you run into a similar position in a game, you will recognize it and be able to check and see if the same "solution" works in that particular position.

King of the Spill said...

Hello. I really like your problem posts and discussion, good stuff.
Good Luck!