Nova Daily - 30 November 2025: One More Month To Go (Recap Week 48)

Hi!

We're a mere 31 days away from leaving 2025 behind. It's unbelievable how quickly the year has passed so far. I'll be looking forward to looking back to the entire year in my end-of-year blog, as there will be a lot of material to contemplate. I don't plan on playing much OTB for the remainder of the calendar year, so I can amass what I've learned this year and draw up a good picture on how productive I've been.

But we're not there yet.

One More Month To Go

I'm never really out of ideas. I have more than enough books to read, whether chess-related or not. There are always enough topics to work out, lessons to learn, and stories to write. And if for whatever reason I'm out of immediate ideas I can always play another game and analyse that. There are always things you can do to provide content for yourself.

I'm not sharing all of the topics I'd like to write about, because I'd like to keep some for myself. However, I would like to see if I can gather enough material to draw up a little something about my favourite chess-player. Those who have been reading my blogs for a long time may well know who that is. Hasn't changed.

Over the last week, however, I've been thinking about only one topic, and that's the blog I published a few hours ago. It's become another lengthy one, but there was much that I wanted to include. It's not really 250 000 words long, but in all honesty, regarding this topic I probably could've done that. As it is, this year alone I believe that I've written more than that amount of words in my blogs. I'd have to count, and I'm not really looking forward to doing so.

For December, I have a few plans to realise. One of them is to write something for BlogChamps Season 10. The other things will be to gather all my games and draw up some conclusions there, and to do something that (if it works) you'll notice in time.

For now, however, my physique is telling me that it's time to get rest. Which is difficult, since Monday will be full-throttle again.

The week in chess

With only two purposes for the week (finishing my November TBA entry), I hardly did any chess this week. I lost a blitz game against GM Nino Batsiashvili, which was unnecessary, and I lost to an FM right after that. But I made up for this and ended the week higher than I was one week ago.

My current scores:

Rapid rating: 2352 (=)
Blitz rating: 2528 (+17)
Bullet rating: 2557 (=)
Survival: 63 (=)
Puzzle Battle: 2185 (+16)
Puzzles: 2610 (=)
Repertoire: 4486 moves (=)

If you can't sleep tonight, try this: