Training Update

The greeter game code definitely appears to be working now as I had 11 greeter games pop up today. So that should keep me busy.

Today I did very few tactics problems on the trainer, perhaps a dozen or so. I did finish the rest of Nunn's Understanding Chess Move by Move. I highly recommend this game collection to everyone who wants to improve. 30 very instructive games are annotated, with a summary of lessons to be learned at the end of each game.

My next game collection to work through is Valeri Beim's Paul Morphy: A Modern Perspective. I had started work on this earlier, and I am currently a little over half way through. After this will most likely be Steve Giddin's 50 Essential Chess Lessons or one of Neil McDonald's game collection books. At some point I will have 2 annotated game books going at once. I want to work through collections of top players throughout history using Silman's ideas of working through them to build your analysis skills. So I will do that with one book, which will be very slow going, and then continue to work through regular game collection books at more brisk pace.

Silman's advice on improving your analysis skills is the following:

1. Play through the first 10 moves or so in the game. Then cover up the moves.
   
2. Go through your whole thinking technique, figure out your plan, and determine your candidate moves.
3. Analyze each candidate move (in your head, no moving pieces on the board).
4. Write all of this down (plan, candidate moves, analysis)
5. Look at the move the was actually played, check out the opponent's reply, and then start this process again for the next move.
6. When your are done with the game. Go through the annotations in the book, and compare them the notes you made.