Nova Daily - 28 April 2026: My personal favourite
Hi!
Crowning off a fun day, I broke my personal blitz record. It now sits at 2608, so I effectively one-upped myself. Much as I hate it when people one-up others, I love doing it to my own ratings. I'm nowhere near where I want to peak, but I have a goal in mind that I'd like to obtain in my lifetime. I hope to be able to show that goal one day.
What's even more fun is that the game actually started with a mouse-slip on my end.
My personal favourite
The other day, @VOB96 opened a forum post asking us in BlogChamps what we would consider our best blog. It's very interesting to see what people would choose and why. And simultaneously, it's also something that says a lot about how people view their own work.
In my case, it's very hard to pick just one. I decided not to go with any of my Dailies, because to a very large extent they're short work. The level of planning involved in longer posts simply isn't there when I write my daily Daily. But all the rest are candidates. All of them are very different, and all of them are blogs that I really felt I wanted and needed to write. The Salov-Ljubojević beef didn't need to be written, but I found this story so hilarious that I really wanted to piece it together.
In my reasoning why I chose for the one that I ultimately did, I indicated that whenever I write outside my Dailies, I would want it to stand tall in a year from now. That sounds like a very conscious consideration, but it isn't. Not really. I don't usually tap into popular trends and hypes, which is why you typically won't see me write extensively about something like PogChamps. Unless it's a relevant topic for a different discussion, of course.
The first blog that came to my mind when deciding my pick was A bish of a knightmare, because this was the one I had expended the greatest amount of time and energy in. It took me three weeks to pen this one together, and I spent way too long on that grid with the knight occupying every square in succession. This is my definitive work on the checkmate procedure with knight and bishop, and my magnum opus in many respects: it's a statement what I'm capable of in terms of research, analysis and focused effort. The labour and magnitude of the work alone would justify choosing for it.
My reason for not picking it are that it's not really a blog. It's more like an interactive online study book on a topic that many people have covered before me, and I'm sure that many will do so afterwards. I do believe that I gave it a personal and quirky touch in a way that you won't find anywhere else, and this was my reason for wanting to write it in the first place. But "I injected my personality in this blog" doesn't make it stand out from the rest of my work.
I also decided against picking any of my fiction blogs. I loved planning and writing the stories for Gary and Dawn, and I love reading these types of stories. However, if I'm honest with myself, I feel that my signature style and my unique contribution to the chess community at large lies more in the realm of analysis, research, and my personal quirkiness. The mix of storytelling and analysis as I used in my Trojan War blog would be a contender, especially with the fixed board in the top right corner, but I'm ultimately not happy enough with the overall result to consider it my best work.
When it comes to personal quirkiness, analysis and research, there are several things that could qualify. I didn't choose for my bad advice blog, because this branch of topics is quite alluring, and many others would do something similar. It's a very me-type of thing to write about garbage advice on the net. I think I did a good job in mine, and I'm very happy with the result all the same.
Two blogs that I had to disregard because I don't like the limited amount of time that I spent writing them are my Harry Potter blog and, ironically, the one I wrote about time. The Harry Potter blog was my kicking in the door in TBA with three gold medals, including the unanimous vote for Best Blog. I had a lot of fun writing it and piecing it together, but ironically it's the type of thing that I initially didn't want to create. At the start I wanted to my blog to be a chronicle of my progress as a chess-player rather than a showcase for my writing. Next to this, there are several things that I'd have done differently these days.
My time blog was okay, and it's a topic that's quite underappreciated in chess literature. Still, having taken only two days to put it together start to finish means I could've done a better job at it. My blog about the devilishly boring in chess took more time, but do I really want to be remembered as the person who wrote a blog about the boring in chess? Even if that's something that I like to weaponise against my opponents, I don't see myself as "the player who bores you out". I can play attractive games of chess too. Likewise, my Dunning-Kruger blog is out because it's a bit of an elaborate sneer. One that I felt needed to be made, but not the crown jewel in my writing oeuvre.
This left me with two blogs to choose from, Meta-Analysis and Youth Players. Between these two, it might seem a bit odd that I wouldn't pick the analysis blog, since in chess this is perhaps my main area of expertise. However, in a work like this, it's inappropriate to discuss my own analytical work beyond the introduction because I'd be boasting about my own skills or imply my own work too much. I necessarily had to rely heavily on the works of others, and as such it's a case-study of the work of others rather than a display of my own skills.
This led me to conclude that my blog about youth players was my best effort to date. I feel that it's a complete effort in many senses: it contains a good amount of literature research, many of my personal experiences, and the type of analysis that is very uniquely me. On top of everything else, it's a coherent story start to finish, and it's exactly how I had envisioned it before I sat down to write it.
Mouse-slip
The game I won to bring me to my new personal peak in blitz is the one below. For someone who hasn't played 1.d4 in a serious game in years, I'm really surprised that I even survived the opening, especially given that it's a Benko. For now I'll leave it at just the game; later I might include some analysis, but here it's enough to celebrate the achievement.
