Chess Study Blog

Just trying to keep a blog of my daily chess study.

Im 46 years old, currently rated 1818 USCF. I have played in 7 tourneys starting in Oct 2012. After my first tourney I got a rating of 1575. My goal is to become expert (2000) and then master (2200)

I have been doing tactics on Chesstempo quite a bit. I started there in Oct 2012, then I took some time off from the site but lately I do tactics pretty much every day. I am for 500/month but usually dont quite make it. Right now I am using a custom set of tactics that is tactics in the range of 1450-1650. These are challenging but not so overwhelming as to take like 30 minutes to see the solution. At this point id rather do 20 medium problems per day than 2-3 really hard ones. Since Oct 2012 I have done 4803 probems total

I also use the tactics trainer here on chess.com sometimes

I havent been very disciplined with my approach to study and this is what I hope to change. I tend to play tons of unrated blitz which probably doesnt do much for my tourney strength.

So I am trying to start doing more stuff like stoyko exercises, solitaire chess and other things to improve my calculation and visualization.

I also want to start playing more rated slow games online. By slow I mean maybe 20 minutes or maybe more like 30 and above. To be honest I hate playing rated online just due to the pressure associated with ratings, lol, but this is what one faces in tourneys so I need to get used to it.

I will still be playing unrated blitz as well. Generally I save all of my games in chessbase and at least go over them briefly with an engine to see where I went wrong etc

Another idea I have is to play games against the chesstempo computer starting from certain opening positions. For example use FEN to start the game in a Qc2 nimzo after 4...0-0 5.a3 Bxc3 6.Qxc3 7.d5 etc