About Takchess

In case your curious ....

Your host Takchess is a 40ish man who has become reinterested in chess after a long absence 30 years. The catalyst: reading the book Bobby Fischer Goes to War. I became interested in playing the game and learning about the game in a much deeper way than when I played high school study hall chess. Man cannot live by the Four Knights alone!

So in the span of a year, I have gone from not playing at all to playing in a chess club every Friday Night, with my 400 saved games from playchess.com in my Fritz database and reading about chess on a daily basis.

I've come to realize that it's fun to read about deep strategy and grandmasters plans but it is of little help if you lose pieces to simple tactics ! I will save those Bronstein books for a much later time. A number of things have convinced me of this 1) the losing of games due to simple tactical oversights 2) Reading De La Maza's Rapid Chess Improvement and Dan Heisman in his Novice Nook Column.

That's why I am here. I've decided to work on a MRCI (Modified Rapid Chess Improvement)
based on the ideas from the book. I am at square 1 doing Concentric Circles as well as learning initially from a very basic tactic books of 400 problems:Chess Tactics for Students by Bain.
I have completed this once and am doing the problems again. Heisman speaks of the value of
doing very simple tactical problems initially and doing them again and again and again to have a solid base for future tactical learning.

I hope to use this weblog to keep track of my progress and to make some notes on chess tactics hopefully of interest to you.

Takchess