Nova Daily - 13 April 2026: Beyond Flawless
Hi!
The website has made a new effort to create an even more user-friendly interface that lets its users customise their own profiles. So far I'm mildly in favour of this, because it allows me to pin some features to the sidebar immediately. This way I can have Puzzle Rush, Analysis, Explorer, Blogs, Vote Chess, Clubs and Events at a single mouse-click. That's somewhat useful.
I'm rather less charmed by the fixed position of the chess coach at the top. I've quite enough entities screaming in my face all the time, so I can do without another one. I already solve chess puzzles before I sit down to play my games, and I know how to review my own games. Since the review batch only looks at single games in isolation, I don't think that it's able to identify that I happen to botch a lot of favourable positions. It'd be much more useful if it could actually generate a personalised profile of my strengths and weaknesses upon sharing my own games. There are tools for this, but (unless I'm grossly mistaken) the CC Coach isn't one of them.
Beyond Flawless
This title doesn't really mean anything super mysterious or overly narcissistic. All it's saying is that I now have a higher rapid rating on chess.com than IM Polina Shuvalova. As I presume is clear from this blog, I find Shuvalova quite cool and inspiring in her non-conformity, sporting ambitions, and personal style, and I believe that she has the charisma to inspire many chess-players on and off the board.
All the same, I don't think that my personal path should necessarily compete with hers. I have my own things to accomplish, and I don't see myself as an influencer. If I want my blogging legacy to inspire anyone, it's to follow your own path and turn your own dreams into reality. And should I happen upon Shuvalova in an OTB encounter, I'm not going down without a fight.
The game that lifted my rapid rating above Shuvalova's was the following:
The game was quite nice and straightforward. My opponent had clear troubles devising a plan, which was evidenced by his not being able to find good squares for his pieces. I'm not sure whether he missed Nd6 or thought that he could deal with it properly, but it was a little present for me.
As I indicated above, my main concern with the review batch is that it only looks at games in isolation. While my absolute assessment qualities are inferior to that of the machine, I can do a significantly better job analysing games and relaying them to both my readers and my future self. And in this case I'm in luck: I have several recent games that saw this exact same Accelerated Keres variation. That includes two OTB games that I played this calendar year, but also contains 21 games in my history on the site. It makes sense for me to study all of them together and obtain a more complete understanding this way. Next to this, I have Marin and Dvirnyy that I can freely consult.
Interestingly, this entire 2...c6 variation isn't covered by Ntirlis. I can take a stab at why that is:
Maybe this line deserves to be worked out further. What's quite telling is that the engine already evaluates this position as close to +0.8 after 3 moves.
Tomorrow I'll be gathering my games with the Keres variation and put them together into a more thorough study of this variation.
