Towards Stronger Game
Some days ago I decided to start playing chess again after some years break. After I got some experience about chess on here, chess.com, I went a bit further. I promised myself to be as strong player as possible, and this lead me to think about how to train myself towards the goal. This blog is mainly my diary, so that I can truly see, what I've decided and what has been done.
Two or three days ago (depending on what time zone you live) I visited on my local chess club to get some more experience on the board. They played 5+5 min games, in which I've never been comfortable. Not even I tried to learn myself to the timing in live chess here. I assume, I need to play such games much much more than I've played at this point to be actually able to play and enjoy them. Nevertheless, I lost 8 games and won one. That's not bad, if I take into account the facts that those games were my first set of games on the board after six years, I had stomach ache (clearly because of excitement) and the games were played way too late in evening for me.
As for my plan about the steps I am going to go through next, I thought following five aspects:
- The chess club will have 90+90 min tournament games in upcoming nine weeks. I'm going to join in and see, how it goes. At this point my goal is to play 'reasonable' chess. I'm not going there to win, but simply learn chess and tournament etiquette.
- I think, I'm lost almost in all aspects of chess game now. Because the tournament I'd like to have some overall view about chess before the first game. It would be also nice to have some more examples how to play. In this purpose I'm reading a book but can't be sure about its English name. Maybe you can find it - if you are interested - by its German name: Max Euwe & Walter Meiden, Amateur wird Meister. (No, I can't read German, but that name has been printed on the book. :D ) I try to read two games in a day even though I realise that is too much for me to understand everything. Maybe I need to read the book later on again to fully understand it.
- It seems that chess.com has many nice features when it comes improving chess skills. I'm planning to buy a premium membership to get access to all those features. Perhaps most important one, the unlimited access to tactics trainer and chess mentor.
- Live chess will be used to gain experience about timing. Not only for fast games (like 5+5 min), but also the longer ones (like 15+15 min). I do need to know, how to play when I explicitly see my time is running out. And even better: how to avoid such things to happen!
- Last but not least, turn-based chess to improve my skills in overall. The only problem here is, that occasionally I'd like to have more games, but as I've noticed, too many is too many, and too short time is too short. Thus I need to limit my games a little bit...
Hopefully this plan will give me something. At least I'm trying. Let's see how far it lets me go!
