Nova Daily - 29 June 2025: Flash Cards (Recap week 26)
Hi!
June has almost come to an end, which means we're approaching the last hours in which new blogs can still be submitted for the TBA competition. I'm almost through putting text to my judgements, and I'm happy to be almost done with it. It's great fun to look at blogs and see what they're worth, but I'm looking forward to be done with it so I can finally shoot my responses around. I'm also thinking about the way in which I'll write my summary of the month. I already have an idea, so you'll know in time.
Flash Cards
Learning vocabulary at school is one of those parts of your education that everyone will have memories of even years after their schooldays ended. Some love it, some hate it, but everyone has to do it. At the end of every chapter that you read through, there's a list of words that you should have learned, and that will invariably be tested one way or another. For me, learning vocabulary has always been something that I both liked and disliked. It often depended on the words and the stories that I associated them with.
Some of my classmates learned by quizzing back and forth with their friends. I typically was on my own and learned on my own. In order to provide a substitute for the friends that I didn't have, I invented my own learning game. I had the words in the foreign language written on small pieces of paper, with the translation into my native language on the back. I'd stack them all up and begin translating them. Then I'd divide them into two different stacks: correct and incorrect. The incorrect ones needed more attention. In its own strange way, I was already using a primitive version of the spaced repetition learning that Chessable, Duolingo and the Woodpecker method are known for. The method works.
This idea of learning with flash cards can be very useful. Some of the books that I really like also use these flash cards, but in a slightly different way. In an opening book, it's very nice to have the most important details listed on a flash card, so as to show the most important elements of the chapter. You can also use this with tactic books and endgame manuals. If I ever write a post about checkmating with knight and bishop, I'm almost certainly going to use the flash cards method here too.
In blogs, a good substitute for a flash card would be the conclusion at the end. In this, you can share the tldr-version of your blog. In order to make my own weekly recap posts a little easier, I might wish to create these flash cards for myself as well. Like, a bit more often than I'm currently doing.
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Small request: If you plan to write a chess-book, please include flash cards. |
The week in chess
The week was absolutely nuts, and not everything was positive. For example, I suffered from a lovely bullet tilt that cost me about 100 points today. It's a good indicator for my physical and mental state indeed: my bullet rating took such a hit that my blitz rating is now almost as high. Though that's no shame in and of itself, it's still an indication that I should start playing better, but even more importantly: that I should learn when not to play.
The most important result of the week was that I've managed to obtain a 2500+ blitz rating. I'm very proud of this achievement. The second most important achievement is my puzzle being used by other people as an example of endgame calculation. That really means something!
I spent two minutes on the calculation after repeating moves once:
Yes, I will do the analysis of this game eventually. But first things first. I still have some work for the blogging contest to do, and I want to do that well.
My current scores:
- Rapid rating: 2279 (+6)
- Blitz rating: 2505 (+57)
- Bullet rating: 2516 (-31)
- Survival: 63 (=)
- Puzzle Battle: 2075 (+23)
- Puzzles: 3536 (+15)
- Repertoire: 4353 moves (=)
Schedule for Week 27:
| Monday | Analysis of the game above |
| Tuesday | Rapid |
| Wednesday | Analysis of Tuesday's game |
| Thursday | Blitz or studying frequent bullet openings |
| Friday | Rapid |
| Saturday | Analysis of Friday's game |
Blogs:
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-22-june-2025-airplane-mode-recap-week-25
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-23-june-2025-the-firebird
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-24-june-2025-remake
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-25-june-2025-false-incentives
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-26-june-2025-the-big-shiny-embarrassment
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-27-june-2025-speedrunning
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-28-june-2025-scotoma
