Reaching for 2200: Back to School Blues
It's back to school for me and walking into the building for the first time in one and a half years was quite the experience. My first school day, probably the least interesting of the year.
That's how I felt.
Anyway, putting that aside, let's get on to the main topic today. My study plan progress. This week again was very, very uneventful. I was very busy, prepping for school, tennis team practice, club administration, etc. Also now a lot of people randomly challenge me and for some reason I just can't seem to decline. Unless the challenger is ridiculously low rated.
Today it's late here in the East Coast and I literally only have a few minutes (okay, maybe a bit more...) to write this, so I'll keep it brief.
Unfortunately I was only able to watch three of the videos in IM Danny Rensch's Pawn Structures 101 video series. By the way it's a great series which I highly recommend to you all to watch. Just forgive Danny for talking fast, slurping coffee loudly, and moving the wrong pieces at the wrong times occasionally and you can learn a lot.
Last week I watched the first five videos in the series:
- Pawn Structure 101: Orthodox/Minority Attack
- Pawn Structure 101: Panov-Botvinnik
- Pawn Structure 101: The Stonewall
- Pawn Structure 101: Caro-Slav 1
- Pawn Structure 101: Caro-Slav 2
All of them great and educational. This week I watched the next three:
There are two more videos recommended for you to watch in the Pawn Structures 101 series,
the never ending Caro-Slav structure, but in the whole series there are a lot more videos, explaining some Sicilian structures such as the Scheveningen, English, and Yugoslav (Sicilian Dragon - my last post was talking all about crushing the Dragon: https://www.chess.com/blog/colorfulcake/how-to-crush-the-sicilian-dragon) I will probably watch many of those too. You can find the whole series here: https://www.chess.com/article/view/video-series-on-pawn-structure-101
It's worth watching. Unfortunately I can't summarize the videos this time, last time it was hugely time consuming, but I'll insert a few of the games that I played in the past week. Here's a crazy Open Sicilian game where I sacked a couple of pawns for the initiative. I missed a few chances but in the end won with a neat combination. It's a miniature of only 21 moves. I analyzed it lightly a few days ago to make it a bit clearer.
Lots of blunders and mistakes but the finish is cute.
Here's a clean draw against a much higher rated player, @uzbekistan111 of (surprise!) Uzbekistan. He was rated over 2160 when we played, is rated 2177 at the time of this writing, and has peaked at a whopping 2312! No analysis for this one, it's pretty straightforward.
That's it for today. I don't know when I'll be able to post next because of school and extracurricular activities, but I'll try to post before my next study plan update. I may need to find study material outside of the study plan too.
That took half an hour to write.
Well, thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time. Hopefully I can squeeze some time to write about something quick and fun!
