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Familiar Ground
Local friends, mostly Tango dancers. That's me in the middle.

Familiar Ground

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Whisper
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I would like to say I've been productive lately. I've been studying. It doesn't show in my rating results because I haven't been playing much. I also took a 10 day beach vacation to the Canary Islands and deliberately went offline.

But I'm back, and I've been trying out some of those new study ideas, with varying success. In particular I was looking at the Sicilian for Black, as playing Black is one of my weak points and I have very little in battle plans for that side of things. Levy Rozman of Gotham Chess does not advise the Sicilian for anyone under 2000 ELO rating and I found out why. It can be a complicated system of play and it's rather easy to close, which I already knew. I've played against it a few times and once you close it players, at least players my level usually move on to something else.

Still, as I've mentioned in my Chess Gems post, you don't really understand a game system until you can both win with it, and defeat it. So I felt I needed to learn it.

When I was trying to find information about actually playing the Sicilian I ran into a lot more information and videos about how to defeat the Sicilian. Such is the state of that game system. It is quite well hated by a lot of players.

So anyway, yesterday was the start of a Team Canada vs Team Spain Under-1500 year end friendly and I was thinking about what to play. In match play you don't find out who your opponent is until the start so preparation is a little difficult. All you know is it will likely be a player around your level. But I had some ideas and I was looking to play systems I know best.

As it turns out, that was good thinking. I'm matched against an 840 rated player and I took a quick look at a few of his games and found that he seemed to be weak against diagonal moves. That plays right into my ideas to play the London, as White and the Caro-Kann as Black.

We put in a few moves last night, at the start of the match and I've got to say. It feels good to be back on Familiar Ground with systems that I know quite well.

Wish me luck!