Monthly Archives: November 2011

Weekly Progress Report #59

This week was again focused mainly on playing (and a little analysing), with an online training game on Monday, a Club Championship game on Wednesday, and the British Rapidplay at the weekend (coming to around 17 hours in total). The training game was interesting, though ultimately unsuccessful, the club game was a sharp draw, and the British Rapidplay threatened at times to become an excellent tournament, but ended up being merely a fairly good one. I scored 4.5/11 in the Open Section, playing nobody graded less than 20 points higher than me, for a 182 performance. Here’s a selection of the week’s games:

The club championship encounter.

Next, a relatively smooth win in a French Tarrasch.

Finally, a loss in which I was ground down in a King’s Indian turned Benoni type structure.

Weekly Progress Report #58

I’ve played three competitive games this week (a little over 12 hours including some preparation and analysis) – a Durham league game and the first two rounds of the Northern 4NCL.  I won the first two, and had a very comfortable position in the third when I went a little crazy, eventually managing to lose it.  Here they are, with light annotations for now:

 

Catch-up Progress Report (WPRs #42-57)

My apologies for the long gap since my last post, and especially since my last weekly progress report.  This post summarises how I’ve spent my time since then, and I will now resume weekly updates.

In the first half of August I spent a lot of time on chess, doing from 34 hours to a peak of nearly 53 hours per week during my two tournaments (Major Open and Sunningdale).  After that I took a break from chess for a couple of weeks, and then spent a lot of time thinking about my year’s training (which totalled around 630 hours over 52 weeks) and how it might be improved for the coming year.  Since then my training has been somewhat in limbo for a variety of reasons – I’ve been busy starting the new year at uni, I’ve been continuing to have doubts about the best way to proceed, and I’ve been looking for a face-to-face chess coach.

I’ve not played a great deal of over-the-board competitive chess since August, but have played some.  I scored 2.5/6 in the strong Keynsham rapidplay in September, with a performance of about 161 – almost exactly my current ECF grade.  I’ve played two games in this season’s Durham League, losing to a 167 as a result of a bad blunder, and then beating a 165 in a time-scramble (having been under pressure for much of the game).  This coming weekend I will be playing in the first two rounds of the Northern 4NCL, and the following weekend I’m intending to take part in the British Rapidplay.