Personal progress.

I really like the personal chess progress postings from some people, like Kevin and David and others do. Inspiring and also fun to read.

For myself I don't have such a good regular training scheme, but this week I decided to read some more in chess books again, and trying to force myself to do more tactic puzzles every day.

In the last few months I did 4 to 5 puzzles every day during breakfast, but a few days ago I got busy with tactics puzzles on chesstempo.com again.

That was really hard!

Missing so many puzzle solutions that I wondered whether the puzzles got so much more difficult, or that I got so much worse myself.

But I reminded myself that the goal of doing tactics puzzles is to learn, to learn new things, and maybe to repeat the things that I already learned, and now could do quicker.

Then I also did some "blitz" tactic puzzles, and that went surprisingly very well.

Apart from that I also did some blitz style tactics at a new tactics website : http://blitztactics.com/

One reason I fail at some puzzles is that after doing the first two or three moves correct, I fail to find the best move in the end.

And with some puzzles I simply have no idea what is going on, and ... learn a new thing again :)

Luckily, from time to time there's very beautiful tactical pearls on the chess board which brings some warm chess joy !

Let's have a look at some of these puzzles :