Back from Holidays

For information about my experiment, please refer to my first post.

I took a few weeks off because of the holidays. During that time, I found some very interesting research about Working Memory. Strong chess players appear to have better Working Memory than the general population. It is obviously correlational, and we can't tell just from that if it's causal, but I decided to implement some Working Memory drills in my training. Given what we know about educational research, transfer is optimized if the training task is as similar as possible to the performance task. For chess, that would mean blindfold chess.

I did my normal chess focused meditation (running lines in my head), and I was able to do that for 27 minutes. That is a massive improvement over last time (previously I did 12.5 minutes). I have no idea why there was such a massive improvement. We'll see if that duration persists or if it was a weird fluke. After the meditation I did some blindfold chess work. I went over a game without a board, and I solved a blindfold chess tactic. I attempted a second tactic and failed miserably.

I entered a casual weekly classical tournament (time control: 60+30) to practice my ability to play long time controls. I played 2 games. I did rather badly (1 loss and 1 draw). Mostly because of 2 reasons. 1. Endurance (I've never played that long before). 2. I was too much in a blitz mindset (playing too quickly, relying too much on intuition, etc.) I was actually winning both games very significantly and then I melted in the endgame. I'm planning to enter this casual tournament every week.

My games at the chess club went well. I played 9 rapid games. 8 wins and 1 loss. The 1 loss was clearly a matter of endurance. It was the last game I played. I was winning and then I blundered a piece to a simple tactic. Even though I lost, I think the quality of that game (except the blunder) was very high. I'm pretty happy with my club performance. I won some games against an opponent that I lost to earlier. Overall, I think my performance was pretty clean.  

My USCF Classical Rating: 1713 (provisional)  

My USCF Rapid Rating: 1667 (provisional)