Chess Diary #2

Today I managed to enter the starting moves of 25 more "best of the best" games into the database, and I did my 25 Tactics Trainer positions. Rating +49! Regained all the points I lost yesterday, except for one.

Tomorrow I won't have much time for chess. I'll be reading "Winning Pawn Structures" during my train commute, and I plan to try to find a tactics exercise within its analysis for tomorrow's blog.

I got the idea of searching for R+pawn vs R endgames in this week's TWIC (#783). The endgame occurred 15 times. I setup some positions in Scid and played them out vs Rybka. Still trying on the winning game... The other position is in fact the only one where the tablebase judgement was different from the end result of the game.

To play these, I paste the FENs into Scid (Edit | Paste Start Board) and then use Play | Serious game to play them against Rybka. To be black, you'll have to flip the board (in Scid, the engine will always take the side playing at the top of the diagram...)