It’s been almost a year since my last update, so it’s high time I let you know how my chess is going.  I’ve been concentrating on studying programming at 42 in Paris so haven’t had a huge amount of time to dedicate to chess.  Still, I hit a new peak rating of 2096 in January, and think I am improving gradually in areas such as time management and ‘sitzfleisch’.  By way of an example I give the following recent highlight:

On the other hand, I am still more than capable of having disastrous games.  At the last 4NCL weekend I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for playing chess, and so tried to finish both games quickly.  The result was the following car crash of a game and a marginally better effort the following day accompanied by a rating loss of 20 points.

My current efforts to limp over the 2100 mark remind me of my mindset after I passed 2000 for the first time: I was very keen not to drop below 2000 and so made some conservative decisions, with the result that I slowly bled points down to around 1950.  At that point I set my sights on the 2100 mark, after which my rating started going in the right direction again, eventually reaching 2091 in December 2016, up from 1957 in September 2015.  That’s a simplified version of what happened, of course, but I think it’s time to try something similar again, so my target is now 2200 by 25 January 2020.  The secondary goal is to post more often than last year, which shouldn’t be too difficult.

Wishing you all chess success, and a happy and prosperous Year of the Pig!