The start of the blog. Me and my aims..

This is the first post in what will hopefully become a weekly (maybe more) thing.

My aim is to progress towards a 2000 rating in both live and correspondance games and in order to do so, I need to analyse my game and most certainly improve!

A bit about myself:

First of all don't be confused by the flag - I'm actually English but I now work in Finland.

I played a lot when I was younger (at school and for a club etc) and reached 104bcf (would be about 120 ECF and roughly 1600 FIDE). This was just through playing casually in school matches and against friends, nothing too serious. I was board 1 for my school for 5 years (we weren't that good), and played for the county a few times on low boards at u14 and u18 levels.

However, I never studied the game seriously except for learning very simple principles when I first started playing.I think this was largely due to the fact that my everyday opponents at school were always worse than me so I had no real incentive to study and more to the point nobody to study with!

Now, 6 years later I've started playing again and hope to become a better player than I was then by actively studying the game and playing regularly. This might also mean "unlearning" any bad habits I had that are ingrained into me..

Initially, I hope to use this blog to go over a game once a week and receive comments by players much better than myself.

Generally I hope to:

- Do 30 minutes of tactic training each day focusing more on finding the correct solution and understanding it than on speed.

- Progress with Chess Mentor lessons. At the moment I'm using adaptive training. I may go through a particular series if I find a "leak" in my game.

- Watch some of the videos on weak areas of my game. Roman's videos have particularly impressed me so if I have time I'll probably tend towards his for now.

- Play both live and correspondance games and seriously analyse several games a week (and at least look back through every one even if only quickly in some cases). In the analysis I hope to discover key points within the games and then discuss candidate moves. Then I can compare this with a computer analysis to see how accurate I was any why my lines may or may not work. From that hopefully I can find areas of my game which may need work and tailor my training a bit more.

Anybody that wants to send me a challenge is more than welcome to. I will accept as long as I have less than 25 correspondance games ongoing. I had 40 or so at once not so long ago and blundered half of them away...

Wish me luck!!