This blog entry is in response to a Openings Forum topic I saw a few days ago, appropriately entitled "Why the Philidor's". The topic author, who had enjoyed overwhelming success against this opening couldn't understand why black would even bothe...
In the Southern Open, which I played on August 1-2, I did myself the great disservice of losing for the SECOND time to Gregory Kimmel on the black side of the Scotch opening. After examining many of the Scotch lines in detail, it appears black ha...
After taking a little time off in my quest for 2200, I'm now ready to get active again. Accordingly, my first tournament "back" after a six-month layoff was the 2009 Southern Open in Kissimmee, FL (7/31/09-8/2/09). Thanks to the TDs for an excel...
This past weekend I had the good fortune to play in the first club championship of the Tampa Chess Club. I am not a good fast time-control player, so I had serious reservations given the G/1 hr time control. Coupled with the fact I would be near...
Who says you can never go home again? This past weekend, I took the opportunity to play in the 2008 Oscar Shapiro DC Open in Washington, DC. I grew up there, and through some very hard times indeed. I was only 12 in 1968 when riots erupted foll...
Having continued to overhaul my opening repertoire, tweaking even up to the last minute, I expected my results at the 2008 FL State Championship to be underwhelming. What I didn't expect after the first two rounds is a perfor...
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to play in the Southern Open in Altamonte Springs, FL (just NE of Orlando). While this "learning experience" didn't match my Boca Raton experience, it did come with some genuine lessons that made it w...
Just as I'm enjoying building my relationship with the Pseudo King's Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nf6 3. d3 Nc6 4. Nc3 Bc5 5. d3 d6 6. f4!) -- despite results of its recent rollout -- I purchase a copy of the new "Dangerous Weapons 1.e4 e5" book b...
A "learning experience". That's my code language for an OTB tournament in which I sucked. This past weekend, at the Summer Solstice Open in Boca Raton, I had a wonderful learning experience. What did I learn? Well, firstl...
LOL, OK maybe that doesn't deserve an exclam by anyone else's measure, but if you knew how much I've been wrestling with a putting together a workable repertoire for my push to NM (and then to FM) you'd sympathize. One of the reaso...
WIth only one weekend between now and the next tournament, my white repertoire is still full of holes. On the Sicilian front, I thought I was happy with 1.e4 c5 2. c3 Nf6 3. d3 d5 4. e5 and on 1. e4 c5 2. c3 d5 3. d3 and on 3......
The upcoming Independence Day in the United States (July 4th) means only one thing to non-history buffs -- that we are officially entering the dog days of summer. As for me and my goals, it means I need to get a handle on what chess tourname...
The next step in retooling my game (and this will apply to many reformed mate-happy attackniks out there who want to improve their results) are dreaded endings. I hate studying them. I positively hate them. But sometimes, to reac...
Having happily rediscovered my copy of Bookup Express, I started digging around in my software collection to see what other gems I may have neglected that might contribute to my development. I discovered a copy of Fritz 8 I had bought long a...
In my blog post "Rebuilding the Repertoire", PeterKirby and I had an informative exchange about the goals of an opening repertoire. Sometimes disparate goals can be reconciled; sometimes they can't (in which case you ...
After some reflection on my performance, it was now time to get ready for the next tournament. The one I chose to play in was the Orlando After Memorial Open and Scholastic. In my previous blog, I pointed out the possibility of adopting Fabi...
Armed with some pieces of a new repertoire, along with a library of unread new books on positional, strategic, and middle-game play (many of which I've owned for sometime, knowing the problem was on the horizon), I played in my first tournamen...
The process of rebuilding my opening repertoire begun conceptually several years ago. Although I have been generally dormant in USCF tournaments over the past several years, with my membership lapsing on more than one occasion, I have always...
As mentioned earlier, openings have always been the fun part of chess for me. Here on chess.com, although I've just joined, I'm hoping to make many contributions to the Openings forum. Again, my theory on openings is simply: If ...
As mentioned earlier, I've never been a fan of endgame study. I've always been of the opinion that investment in opening study yielded far greater rewards, mostly coming from quick wins when someone stepped into an opening trap. I...
In the previous blog, I spoke briefly about assessing my strengths weaknesses. Now I have to lay out a plan for rectifying them...quite another matter altogether. When I began to think about this quest several months ago, I thought I could j...
Let me start by giving a quick summation of my chess career. I learned chess at 9 or 10 from the instructions of a checker/chess set I got as a gift. By 7th grade (which would put me around 13 or so) I won my first tournament in an inn...
Improvement. In my chess game. Radical improvement. Think USCF 300 rating points from where I start my quest (2041). Now there's 300 points and there's 300 points. The difference between a player rated 900 and ...
