New Years Resolution

2012 is going to be a really big year for me, at least it is if I stick to the multitude of resolutions I have been making today. While I have certainly set a lot of goals, however, I have been careful to be reasonable. I have a reasonble weight loss goal, some additional fitness goals and some financial and lifestyle goals that I also feel work well together and are entirely attainable.

With that in mind, I thought I might go ahead and put up my first blog post here on chess.com with a reasonable resolution for 2012 in regards to my chess playing. I enjoy playing chess, and do have some amount of competetive drive in me, but I have to admit that I have no intention to become a grand master, or even a master. I am, in truth, not driven to put a lot of time and effort into doing much more than enjoying my time playing the game and learning just a little here and there.

After some consideration, I feel like it's reasonable to believe that over the course of 2012 I will learn a little, play a lot and I am going to aim for maintaining a chess.com rating of better than 1200. I've hit a plateau lately around 1150 that I feel I can and will break through by increasing the base of opponents I play against and putting in some amount of time with a variety of chess training tools; I expect to hit the tactics trainer fairly regularly and put some effort into learning forced checkmates. Beyond that, I'm going to slow down and analyze more.