Greetings, and salutations

Hello everyone, I have never really been active in the community aspect of this site....and I wanted to get off my butt and try to change that. I am 25 male, and live in North Carolina. I have been slowly trying to improve my chess, and have had reasonable success.(In a large part thanks to tactics trainer and the wonderful videos.) But here lately I seem to be hitting a roadblock, and I would just love to play some longer time control games agianst an opponent who will go back over the game with me. To help me find my positional mistakes. Or if not that indepth, would just be rude enough to point out my blunders as they happen =-).  It can be Live or correspondence. I just feel that I am not gaining anything through my normal 10 and 15 minute games.

You can set up whatever parameters you want to challenge other players with, live or CC.  You may not find "chatty" or "talkative" opponents but you can always have the chess.com PC analyze your finished games and post them here in your own blogs and/or the game showcase forum to elicit other players comments.

As a Diamond member you can also set up "tailor-made" tnmts for yourself to take part in (along with others of course). I like making up thematic tnmts with openings I'm interested in learning.

And yeah, you need to start playing slower TLs to really improve your game. GOOD LUCK!

Thanks for the reply Nimzo, I really like the idea of custom made tnmts.(Something I had never even considered) And I know this will sound very newbish, but I find that since I have zero formal training with chess annotation that wading through general game analysis can be a nightmare. Mostly because I dont always understand the format and/or all the symbols. Does anyone know of any educational materials for the basics of chess annotation.  Not so much a symbol key, I have looked at quite a few of those...but a more detailed instruction of how the lines are set-up, i.e Alot of annotation gives the game moves, the alternate lines, commentary, +/- evaluation, etc. It is just kinda overwhelming. Perhaps just jumping into it and annotating my OTB games against my father, and then hand entering them into a engine for analysis could improve my overall understanding. Anyway, sorry to ramble on and thanks again for the advice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_chess_notation

+ is an advantage to white in terms of pawns, - to black.

Wiki for the win, thank you Scott.  I am going to go over that page with a fine tooth comb and then start trying to annotate my casual games for practice. My friends are going to look at me so strange, but thats not uncommon.

I will play with you,

I am also from NC, 20 in college and working part-time. Just let me know when will be good for you