25 years old & learning chess - my practice blog

You should do more chessplaying and less blogging.  The time you spend blogging, as opposed to chessplaying, doesn't improve your game and just exposes you as a narcissistic dilettante.

Thank you for the tip.

To be fair, Silman breaks Endgame books into 5 categories and says:

"Clearly, VAN PERLO’S ENDGAME TACTICS falls under the second category" That being: 2) Entertaining

I am just saying that while the fire still burns within you to get better at the game, a more general introductory book would be my choice for a person in your situation.

There is a reason Capablanca said in teaching someone to play chess, you should start at the endgame and work backward. That boils down to...while mate is generally the goal (or securing a draw), knowing what is a 'won'...'winnable'...drawable endgame - and how to conduct the game once you get there - is imperative. After all, what is the point in getting there... if you don't really know what to do once you arrive?

+1

But I don't think there is a Chessable book. 

Seriously, someone only cursory going over this blog might be temped to think Taskinen is a shill for Chessable.
I can see though that this is clearly not the case. 

I do think he should hook up with someone who has been a good player for quite some time...who can help him navigate the pitfalls that lead even promising players to wrong ways of thinking and wrong study habits. I sure wish I had the benefit of that when I was younger. I also wish I had shelled out a few hundred bucks to get some real training with GM Palatnic when he was here and willing to do so. Oh well...

lol I don't even know what Chessable is.  I just figured that by him studying the games of the masters,he could see how all phases of the game are played and perhaps a few pitfalls to avoid.  

I agree with the last thing you said,I still wish I had that,to an extent,I love Chess to death and probably will be playing for the rest of my time here on earth,meaning it will always be apart of my life.  Now the reason why I say to an extent is because I refuse to do what some may do,some like Fischer for example let's say and dedicate 24/7 to Chess.  Now that's obviously something that someone wouldn't realistically do,not even Fischer,I'm sure he had to eat/use the bathroom some of the time (albeit probably with a Chess book in his hand xD lol).  However I was talking about using all of one's free time on nothing but Chess, as much as I love Chess and anyone who knows me at least moderately well know that I do love the game and I'm passionate about it, I do other things in my free time but it would be nice to have someone to go over my games with,someone who could feed me little tips here and there,also as you said someone to put me on the right path with my studying.  I often do alot of research on that,aside from my rating here,I don't really know my elo so it's kind of hard to tell what I should be studying,other then tactics at my level.  


P.S...If the time and circumstances were right and the right people were around,I may consider taking it more seriously then I do,to bump my rating and such,maybe one day. 

I think you and chesslover0_0 have a bit of a misunderstanding what Chessable is. All it really does is transform print books in interactive versions, where you can go through all the same information as in print book, but with the help of an interactive board, where you can go through the variations without having to set them up on a real board. So for example, when I went through Mastering Chess Middlegames, I actually more or less went through hundreds of annotated master games. Of course they were not complete games, but starting from various middlegame positions, and then you had the option to go through all the lines author has noted. Exactly all the same information that is in the print book.

I have printed chess books as well, but working through them is much slower because you have to set up all the positions yourself on a board, and then it's very easy to get lost in different variations and sub-variations. With Chessable, there is no problem with that, since you can clearly see where every variation starts and ends. And you can then go through them, ponder about the ideas and return to the starting position. All it really does is save time and helps you avoid messing up lines by accident.

I really like the way Chessable works, and therefor I have been speaking behalf of it quite a bit. But in the end it's not really that different to reading printed chess books or work with another e-book provider. I have tried a few and I think Chessable works the best.

I would love to have a coach, but I can't afford to really pay for lessons at the moment. So therefor I'm really happy with all the advice I receive here. I do go through a lot of video classes in a classroom setting by players like Yasser Seirawan, Ben Finegold and others. Of course it's not a substitute for a personal trainer, but still very helpful.

@Taskinen I will suggest you try the book Simple Chess by Micheal Stean. It is loved by many and it is not an expensive book. It annotates well instructive game by masters. I believe this book will add improvement to your game. 

 https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Chess-New-Algebraic-Dover/dp/0486424200

That's a good one.

John Emms 2 volume set by the same name is actually really good too.

Sadly neither are in Chessable format...seems he only does those.

Yeah I just researched Chessable,seems like it doesn't exactly translate books into interactive books,as in take everything in the book and make it movable like in a PGN file,I would have loved that!!!.  I think it just takes the material and then quizzes you on it,using such methods as spaced repetition and such.  I could be wrong as I looked at it briefly but that's what I got from it.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing but you still have to do all the work OTB but I read algebraic notation super slow,I'm learning the squares but I can't read algebraic notation fluidly so I would have loved something like that,where I can just read and just move the pieces as I went along.  Oh well maybe one day someone will invent something like that xD. 

Oh, but there is!

I have several very good books you purchase from FORWARD CHESS. The interface is the best out there. They use several publishers.

EVERYMAN CHESS (single publisher, not as good a selection IMHO) has their own interface...but as you purchase these in pgn, you can use them on any PGN reader, even programs like Chessbase. 

Or you can do this too.  For example if you have The Life and games of Mikhail Tal book,

you can play/follow the games here.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1000825

As far as I understand Forward Chess, Everyman Chess and Chessable are pretty much alike. All of them share the same purpose of letting you go through chess books interactively without needing actual chess board. Forward Chess does have the biggest catalogue, but considering how quickly Chessable has added more and more books and publishers, I don't think that is that much of an issue. I just started using Chessable first and I've been very satisfied with the service and it provides exactly what I want from an e-book reader tool. So I don't see any reason to change to using Forward Chess, since there are dozens of interesting chess books I would like to go through on Chessable, but I can't even go through them all.

Nothing 'wrong' with Chessable that I could see when I checked it out about 2 months ago.
One thing I did with Everyman (got several from them) is to download the pgn files...for opening books, I then tweak to my needs and then load them in something called Chess Position Trainer....now I can train memorizing (and further tweaking) various openings I play.

Right,I have done that when I went over some games from "Logical Chess move by move" by Irving Chernev at that site ( Chessgames .com) ,what I do is,I get the game up at that site and use that as a reference point for when I want to go over the variations.   The variations I then go over on my real board,it takes time but it's been working so far,the only slight downside to it is that you have to be confined to a computer.  

I'm sure you guys know who life time master A.J Goldsby is,he suggests having at least 3 boards,1 board for the actual moves of the game,another for variations and such and finally a small magnetic set for even more variations and analysis,that's hardcore! lol xD 

Milestone reached!

Due to an inflammation in my eyes (as a side effect of getting the autumn flu) I haven't really spent much time with chess lately. I have a tough time looking at the screen from close. I did however play few rapid games yesterday, and did surprisingly well after a few days of no playing. I guess it's true what they say about your brain needing a rest every now and then, to process everything you have learned. Five games, five wins and crossed 1500 rating in rapid for the first time. This was the goal I set to myself couple months ago, as in what rating I would like to achieve before I have played chess for a year. So that goal can now be crossed off from the to-do list few months early and on to new goals! By the way, it's pretty interesting that my rating seems to increase about 100 points every time you add more time to time control: 1300 in bullet, 1400 in blitz, 1500 in rapid and 1600 in daily. I think my next rating goals would be trying to push my rapid rating towards 1600 and blitz rating towards 1500.

I did watch the documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World from HBO, so that's some "chess" on the side, even if I haven't done much playing/Chessable/tactics.

Congratulations! Hope that 1600 comes soon!

Congrats on your milestone!

Thanks guys! :-)

Yeah I'm guilty of this when I play street fighter,some times I just play and play and play lol,I don't take a break.  I think taking breaks is like doing spaced repetition a well known method for learning something easier.   I kind of slacked on my Chess lol xD but I'm going to come back to it....

Puzzled with tactics

As you've probably noticed, I've been updating my progress reports every month. And with a new month looming around, I've been trying to up my tactics rating just a bit before the next progress report. Unfortunately, the hours spent with tactics trainer has only decreased my tactics rating by about 100 points. :-( Which is fairly puzzling, since I just checked my success rates: I hit my highest TT rating of 2140 on August 20th. After that I have attempted 219 tactics puzzles, fully completing 141 of them (success rate of 64,3%). So despite having a higher success rate than normally (my average is 59%), I have only managed to lose rating. :-(

I think that the target times on these puzzles are getting ridiculous. 100% success means, that you would need to solve a 2000+ rated 5 move puzzle in 30 seconds? It takes me always at least minute or two to complete any of these, and as a result every completion yields only 1-5 points. Make one mistake and it's -14. Climbing is tough! Oh well, I'm still trying to get back over 2100.