Study log. 30 Aug 2016
Tactics
Today I did around 50 tactical problems on chess.com. Unfortunately chess.com stats shows only 30 last problems so I can't tell for sure how much I did and how much I got right and wrong. Out of last 30 I got 23 right and 7 wrong.
The reason why I did more problems than planned was that I performed very poorly in the morning. I just woke up and started solving problems right away on my iPad. Apparently it wasn't the wisest decision - I should have warmed up, had breakfast, drank coffee etc. All the normal routine. But without doing all this stuff my brain was a bit sleepy and couldn't concentrate well on the problems. I remember myself staring at relatively easy problems and not seeing anything for 5-10 minutes. I think I got around 50% wrong out of first 20. It was unacceptable result, that's why I did more. Lesson learned: be in a good mental and physical shape in order to work on chess efficiently. Don't do chess training when you don't feel good or cannot get concentrated. It is pointless and a waste of time.
Also during my morning tactics session i noticed my old bad habit of guessing to reappear. In some problems I did careless moves without proper calculations and I believe I failed some problems because of that. I also noticed a specific type of problems which is one of the hardest for me: I find the most challenging open positions with a lot of options where my and opponent's pieces can go. A few problems I got wrong were just because of my another old problem - failing to see opponents best defense.
Solving today problems got me from 2075 to 2085 tactical rating.
Games
The first game was very quick and took only five minutes so I decided not to count it for my 2 games a day norm. But I am putting it here nevertheless.
The second game was Benko Gambit - one of my favorite openings for black against d4. Even though it wasn't accepted, the moves order was unusual, and my and my opponent's play was far from perfect, I kind of liked this game:
