My first week in Mr. Alburt's Neighborhood

Mirrored from wangschesshouse.

Ok the more attentive folks out there will notice that I changed the name of the blog.  Well not really, the address is and has always been wangschesshouse but I changed the name that appears ont the Blog itself.  Apparently there’s some such Patzer’s Corner at chess.com and I didn’t want anyone confusing the two. 

Yeah, I know it seems like a bunch of trouble to go through for 3 people, but it wasn’t a bother at all.  Besides I had actually wanted to do it for a long time now.  I came up with both names before I really knew anything about blogging and didn’t quite understand what I was doing, but now that I….well you get the idea, there’s a bit more continuity to the whole blog/name thing.

As I said last week I’m going through the Comprehensive Chess Course Series by Lev Alburt, I laid it all out here.  This will be my improvement plan.  Of course I suffer from the same affliction that all chess bloggers suffer from, no time!  I will nevertheless give my best effort to go down this path wherever it takes me.

There’s just one problem…If I am to start the next big chess improvement plan thingy we  I should have a snappy name for the group.  The Knights Errant are MDLM followers, the name is inspired by Don Quixote.  Michael De La Maza, Man De La Mancha, Man De La Maza, Sancho Pawnza, see it all fits and is terribbly clever.  Thing is I don’t know how go about naming the group.  I’m not too concerned, so far it’s only me I’m still responding to “hey you” so no rush, but if you have an idea, please reach out.

Anyway I trained Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.  Friday is….well Friday and even I’m not that far gone yet. 

Monday: I worked through the 110 problems on level 10 from CT-ART.  It took me about 5o minutes and I scored a 86%.  As I suspected my tactics are a little rusty, this is why I decided to do a few tactical puzzles every day.  I then studied Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player (CTTP) for another 40 minutes.

Tuesday: Same thing with CT-ART except it took 40 minutes and I scored 98%, I then worked through CTTP for another 50 minutes, got to the end of Lesson 2.

Wednesday: Did 30 problems from level 20 of CT-ART, scored an abysmal 61%.  There are something like 250+ problems at this level so it will take me a bit longer to work through it, no worries, it’s not a race.  I played a G15 on ICC.  I was on the white side of a Sicilian Rossolimo.  My opponent blundered on move 12 and it was a done deal.  I spent the rest of the evening analyzing the game. 

Thursday:  I was pretty tired so I just finished my analysis and did another 50 problems on level 20 of CT-ART and called it good.

Saturday: I finished the excercises at the end of Lesson 2 in CTTP which took an hour to do got 9 out of 12 correct which isn’t too bad.  I also played this game. 

Pretty uninspired stuff actually, I’m test driving the Bogo-Indian and I thought I could keep the Bishop pair but it really tied up my position, not to mention that I missed two easy captures that would have put the game in hand easily.  I won but it was pretty wretched looking.  Anyway I analyzed the game and I know how to handle the opening better, and got an idea for the simple tactics I missed.

Overall a pretty good week, I did what I had to do, studied some chess and won two games.  Winning is pretty hard for me to do by so I’ll take it.  Hopefully I can update you all again next week.

Have a good week folks.