Training Update
Last Wednesday I spent the day working with Joel Johnson on some lines in the Closed Sicilian before his game for the Arizona Scorpions against Chicago. Afterwards I watched the match and updated the demo boards for the games. Arizona won convincingly 3-1, with Joel winning a fine game in the Sicilian.
I have continued to do my daily tactics training on the trainer, and have been doing lessons in chess mentor quite frequently.
I finished going through Renaud & Kahn's Art of the Checkmate, and I have started working through Martin Weteschnik's Understanding Chess Tactics. I also spent some time going through more of my copy of Starting Out: The Gruenfeld.
For my master games work I have continued to play through games in John Nunn's Understanding Chess Move by Move. I have almost finished reading Michael Stean's Simple Chess, which is the text I am working on for strategy right now. I am still working through Silman's Endgame Course for my endgame work, and playing the endgames against Rybka to make sure the lessons sink in.
I haven't gotten any over the board games in, but I have gotten in some blitz games and had an opportunity to play some Closed Sicilian and Gruenfeld games. I also started some correspondence games on here and the iecg server to get in some work on the Caro-Kann and Gruenfeld.
I also have started to go back and analyze my games. I am starting from scratch on all of them, even though I have analyzed some of them before.
I'm starting to feel like I have shaken the rust off from the dormant period of July-September, but I need to get in some over the board games to really get back in the swing of things.