Training Update 10/16/2008

I was able to get in a better training session today than I did yesterday.

I did a couple short sessions of tactics problems on chess.com. I started off pretty poorly and cratered my rating to the lowest it has ever been, I raised it back up, but I still have some ground to make up to get back near my high in the 1900s. That will come with time though.

I also did a Guess-The-Move game on chessgames.com. Bogoljubov - Euwe, 1941. I scored 41, but I guess it was a drill so I did it a second time and scored 53. :) There are over 4,000 games playable in the guess-the-move database, so this could be a fun training tool. You get points for making the correct move, or good alternate moves, and lose points for making bad moves. Here is the game:

I spent some time working through some endgame instruction in Silman's endgame book, and then practiced the Q v N endgame against Fritz.

Next up was some time going through the introduction to Starting Out: the gruenfeld. I am leaning towards the Gruenfeld for my response to 1.d4, and the Caro-Kann for 1.e4. In the past I have been playing the Alekhine's defense, and the Polish defense. The reason I spent some time today was that I started up a set of games on chess.com, and on the iecg server, so I need to get up to speed for those games. In my opening training sessions lately I have been working on the closed sicilian, and a response to the Alekhine's. I am using the chess.com and iecg games to further work on my opening knowledge.

I finished up the evening by working through some of the visualization exercises in the Chess Visualization Course.