Nova Daily - 1 May 2025

Hi!

Following my yesterday's long blog I've already realised something important about my mental state when I woke up this morning. I had to resign myself to the fact that my ambition to play and analyse 300 rapid games in one year was too much. It's obviously too early to draw any meaningful conclusion after one night of sleep, but what I can conclude is that already today I feel less tense about it.

Minimalism

Over the course of this calendar year, in addition to the rapid games for my daily blogs I've also played 23 Classical OTB games (with a result of 5 wins, 11 draws, and 7 losses, and an overall rating decline of about 30 points). I haven't been able to read the chess books that I wanted, or find the peace of mind to prepare properly for my OTB endeavours. I still have some Vote Chess games that I participated in that I want to analyse in rather the same way as I have done with my own rapid games so far. It's not that difficult to see that I've been overloading myself, and I could well have burned myself out.

As I was transcribing yesterday's story about the aspiring student and the master who keeps adding extra years every time the former indicates to be working harder, it struck me as uncanny how reminiscent that was to my own grind.

Bearing this in mind, I like to see it as a wise decision to get rid of the self-imposed insanity. On top of this, I also believe that it was the right moment to do so: as I indicated in yesterday's blog, the level of opposition that I now face is becoming increasingly more challenging. I do think that it's useful and meaningful to keep the slow pace, but at the same time it's best to get the opposition that I need to face in order to progress.

I called this section "minimalism" because I do believe in the virtues of making more out of less. But I may have been looking in the wrong direction. Maybe I shouldn't do less puzzles or limit the resources that I have access to. Maybe I should limit the amount of games that I play, and analyse them better.

If after the next four months I will be looking back on this time and seeing my quality of both playing and blogging will have improved, I will likely be able to conclude that removing my workload will have been the right decision.

The game

So, as for today, I only played the game. I'll enter my thoughts today, and the rest of the work will be there tomorrow.

My thoughts:

I think that I played this game quite well. Tomorrow I'll dissect this game to the bone.