Chess Goals for 2014

Happy New Year Everyone!

Wow it's 2014 already! Can't believe how time flies!

It's been a crazy year for me. So many changes.. adjusting to married life,new job responsibilities, maintaining a home. Gosh I never knew how much my parents had to do to keep a home running.

And I'm not even a father yet!

Naturally, finding the time to play chess has been a challenge. I am thankful however that I do manage to squeeze in a game or 2 now and then. Played some beautiful games this past year.. lost more then my fair share of aweful ones as well.(Like the following game that I"m going to post which I'm not even going to annotate on because i'm so lazy! Heh.)

Alright, on to chess goals of 2014. This is always kind of tricky as I don't want to overexpect too much of myself else I look back and get depressed.

After much great thought, I decided the following chess goals should be quite decent for me to archieve.

1) Complete at least 10 chess tactics a day (I have a great iphone App 'Tactics trainer' for that.

2) analyse all my chess games, especially all my losses

3) Work on my endgame theory. Maybe one endgame exercise a week?

4) be more systematic in my chess opening repertoire, which at present is almost non exisitent. I"ve yet to nail down a solid opening repertoire for Black against 1.d4 but I've got a feeling it'll be coming down to the queen's gambit declined.

5. study some classical games, at least 1 game a week to improve my middle game understanding.

Heck, with all the above, maybe I should try out chess mentor and see whether it'll be easier to see whether to reach my goal of ELO 1800 then 2000. After that I will retire from chess 'training' and just focus on playing for fun. Ha ha

Any thoughts on this, Chess.com community? Lemme know.=)

Gambitattack