November Training Recap
USCF Rating: 1680
Year to date: +150
With November behind us, there is only one remaining OTB touranment for me in December. I've had a good chess year so far and will have eclipsed 100 long OTB games by then end of 2015.
I was able to play seven long OTB games during the month and one long online game (including a nice result in the Indiana State Championships).
I also finished my first complete reading of "How to Reassess Your Chess" (4th Edition). It took me about 14 months to complete it and I was lucky enough to assemble a small group of other chess.com members who were interested in the book and we had 6 or seven group study sessions over the past year or so. Some time in 2016 I plan to go through "How to Reassess Your Chess"again, this time in even greater depth. Instead of doing 3-5 puzzles at the end of each chapter, I'll do them all. I also plan to use it as a positional syllabus and reference other resources on each chapter's topic in order to really master each one. For instance, I'll reference Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy, chess.com videos and ChessMentor courses, etc. But for this first reading, I wanted to get through the breadth of material first, before digging in deep.
I've been lucky to have participated in several chess study groups with other chess.com members and I highly recommend this as a method for everyone in the group to see improvement.
In my continuing quest to improve my understanding of dynamic and attacking chess, in November I started reading Gary Lane's "How to Attack in Chess." (After finishing this book I guess I'll both know how to attack and how to reassess...) This is a fine little book so far (currently on the third chapter). In addition to some nice games and annotations, each chapter ends with ten very relevant puzzles and a nice grading scale. Once I finish reading "How to Attack in Chess," I'll be moving on to Lane's more advanced attacking manual, "Prepare to Attack," which seems to be more about setting up those conditions that point toward a successful attack.
