Progress Update '23 Q3

Introduction

Welcome to my new Duckfest Digest article where I give you all an update on my progress (or lack thereof). A little later than usual, as I was busy with other stuff and I spent some time enjoying the weather in Spain.

Currently I don’t have access to my Canva account, therefore my thumbnail is just a temporary place-holder. I will probably go for a new design, but for now this will do. That way I can still publish new articles.

My chess results were a mixed bag. I won all my Daily games, except one. For Rapid it was the other way around. I lost all of them, except one. But not much chess was played this quarter. I did play a Daily tournament with the Jerome Gambit, one of the coolest openings I’ve ever played. Jerome is also the name of the wise looking dude in my thumbnail.

Most of my time was spent on study & development. For tactics I’ve done lots of puzzles and Puzzle Rushes and for strategy, openings and end games I’ve consumed a huge amount of content.

Daily

My results were very good. Out of 17 games I have won 16, losing only one game. Many games were against lower rated players and/or unrated, so my rating only went up 33 points.

Jerome Gambit

The highlight this quarter regarding Daily games is definitely playing the Jerome Gambit. With a couple of members of the Bookworms Club we played a small practice tournament with the theme and I absolutely loved it.

In the third edition of the opening treatise Chess Openings, Ancient and Modern (1896), the authors wrote:

The Jerome Gambit is an American invention, and a very risky attack. It is described in the American Supplement to Cook's Synopsis as unsound but not to be trifled with. The first player sacrifices two pieces for two pawns, with the chances arising from the adversary's king being displaced, and drawn into the centre of the board

Key position

Main line

The main line is Kxf7 Nxe5+ Nxe5 Qh5+ and you’ll get this position

According to Stockfish the position is around -3.00 in favor of black, slightly lower even at higher depths. However, according to Openingtree.com the position is fairly equal. Despite the low evaluation, white has a 51.3% winrate vs 48.7% for black. 

Chioborra vs Duckfest

One of my better Daily games, probably in the top 20 of my most accurate games.

Rapid

Morris Countergambit (deviation)

Only 1 win in 7 games and that was with a bit of help from my opponent. He surprised me on move 4 where he played a weird, very rare and pretty bad variation. He later informed me that he intended to play Nf6, but his mouse went rogue and played f6 instead.  The result was a fun and easy game for me. 

Duckfest vs RuarasSwiftArrow

Study & Development

After the review of my last 50 games in May, I learned that I should work on my middle game, even though my relative performance was good. Simply because the vast majority of games are decided in the middle game. The opposite is true for endgames: few games are decided in the endgame, but when they are I’m not doing well.

Tactics

Last quarter was amazing for my puzzle rating. In three months time I gained over 300 rating points. But I had also discovered that I didn’t practice puzzles enough and I needed to do more. My immediate short term goal was to reach more than 1,000 rated puzzles solved. At the end of September my final score was 1,100 puzzles solved. Mission Accomplished.
Unfortunately, my rating dropped back around 150 points. Next quarter I want to get back to above 2600 rating and continue practicing until I reach my next milestone of 2,000 rated puzzles solved.

Puzzle Rush

This quarter I did around 40 puzzle rushes, most of them in survival mode. But no new records were set. Getting to a score of 40 or higher remains difficult for me.

On chess.com I also finished several of the GM Wollf lessons on Forks, Clearance Sacrifice, Misplaced Pieces and In Between Moves, the others are still in progress.

In of the lessons the following position was discussed.

This position was a bit of an eye-opener for me and it gave me a new insight: that I should spend a bit more going over Master games. Because I was the only one in my chess circle that didn’t recognize the position. 

Endgames

On endgames I watched a couple of videos and finished one lesson on chess.com. That’s not enough, so hopefully I’ll do better next time.

Openings

As always, plenty of time was spent on openings. 

• Revisited a couple of chapters of Gotham Chess’s d4 Dynamite Course
• Some content on the Queen's Gambit Declined (by Eric Rosen and chess.com)
• A lot on the Caro-Kann (by Alex Banzea, ChessGoals, KasparovChess)
• On the London (by Naroditsky)
• On the Dutch (by ChessVibes)
• Some general opening practice (by Chess.com)

And last but not least…
Hanging Pawns - The brutal Jerome Gambit (And how to destroy it!)

If you’re not familiar with it, check it out. it’s an amazingly cool opening,

Strategy

Most of what I watched or studied was on strategy. I’ve gone through some very interesting content on strategy in the game of chess, but also several good resources about strategy on the game of chess. More meta,  if that makes any sense. 

My sources were the usual suspects Ben Finegold, ChessDojo, ChessCoach Andras, Dan Heisman, GothamChess. And I want to give a shoutout to Kesetokaiba, because I enjoyed his content as well.

Content

As mentioned before, I have lost access to my Canva account so I can no longer access my templates and designs. Maybe their support can fix it for me if I reach out to them, but I’m not sure I will. I’m not entirely convinced the account is worth saving.
Actually, this may be a good moment to come up with a new design, improved and fresh. It will take a while before I have something better. For the time being, I have chosen to go for a quick fix, a very basic thumbnail that just enough resembles my other ones.

Because I want to publish more articles. In the past I always had a handful of articles that were in progress simultaneously, in various stages of completeness. I was able to finish a reasonable amount, but I struggled with the more comprehensive and ambitious articles. On top of that, I added more and more ideas to the pile, increasing my backlog even more. And now, I have over 20 articles in progress. Time to finish some of them, and kill some of the others.

Wrap-up

That’s it for now. Goals for next quarter:

• Play more rapid games
• Write more articles
• Puzzle more
• Continue Studying
• Try to have fun along the way.

Thank you all for taking the time to read my blog.