Days 13 & 14 + 2nd Lesson w/ Attila Turzo
2/4/13 and 2/5/13 Polgar 5334: 271-306 (now moving into the 2 move mates), Chess School 1a: 403-419, BF: 195
Had my 2nd lesson with IM Attila Turzo yesterday morning and it went well. The plan is to continue with the Polgar and Ivanshenko puzzles but to switch master game books from Tartakower's 500 Master Games to Chernev's Logical Chess since Turzo says I need more annotations and diagrams to learn from. Tartakower is good but comments are sparse compared to Chernev. As far as endgame stuff I am continuing with the Mueller DVD but asked for more excercises with K + P endgames. Turzo recommended using Silman's endgame book in parallel with the Mueller DVD as the Silman book gives plenty of excercises and tests.
Finally we went over my loss to TheChessocist. He noted the same moves that Shredder thought were boneheaded but what was really beneficial was were Shredder just told me the next move it preferred with no clue as to why or how my plan should change, Turzo described why the move blew and then described several courses of attack and new goals that I could've made after making the best move.
That is the major benefit of having a teacher. The computer can tell you where you made a bad move but the teacher can not only identify the bad move but describe why it is bad and then give you a new outlook to rearranging the planning in your game and setting new goals for the game.
Also as far as the Chessorcist game went, he mentioned that the French Defense is not a good fit with my personality, that it leads to a defensive position with white which I hate and that to turn things around and open things up takes a lot of patience and skill even for more advanced players. He suggested that I read up on the French Defense while I still have the taste of defeat in my mouth and that I also try to check out some Chess.com Videos on the French Defense. I told him what books I had on openings. It was Batsford Chess Openings 2 from 1990 or so. He said to shelve it. That I needed something that verbally explained the openings and not some encyclopedia with just lists of moves.
The final recommendation was to figure out how to use Shredder fully to annotate games, etc. I have a Mac and made my annotations in Chessbase Reader running under Parallels which works well but you can't save anything, you can email your annotations though but overall switching back and forth between mac and windows and emailing, etc. is a real burden. I didn't realize that with Shredder, which I have on the Mac, I could add comments and stuff. I was just using it to play with and recently discovered that I could have it analyze my games.
