Selective Tactical Solving

I have decided to take a block of Level 30 problems (the first 100) and solve them repetitively until I am proficient at them. I'll get back to Art of Attack later.

Blackburne Hartlaub Variation of the Englund Gambit

http://blog.chess.com/view/blackburne-hartlaub-gambit

I am really enjoying this variation of the Englund Gambit as it takes away all the feeling of playing a Queen pawn game if White accepts both pawns offered to him . I would love to play this sometime in a tournament game.

At playchess I have played this three or four times where my d6 bishop checks on h2 and then a rook takes the queen. Some fun themes in this line.

I liked the game in this link. I have lightly annotated it.

Bdk thanks again for introducing me to the BH Gambit.

Let's cut to the chase

I started to analyze a number of my games but decided that they would only tell me I need to brush up tactically. The Rx is to do tactical problems. Over the past week I have been doing L20 Ct-Art and had a Pacman like correct percentage. I now have a laptop which makes it easy to do 50 at sitting in almost any environment. Almost done a second pass of L20.

Englund against a 2145 player

From Playchess.com this am.

http://blog.chess.com/view/englund-gambit-against-a-2140-player

As the arrows suggest in the diagram black to move (me) missed a decisive tactic. I find it interesting that even a better player missed the same tactic as it allowed his queen to be captured.

Hmmm. Pretty basic stuff. I think a little Ct-Art again might do me wonders................

At move 16 I was up a .85 of a pawn. Then the tide turned but true to form I was attacking till the end. Fritz liked 17 g4. In fact still ahead till my big mistake which was 18....Be6.

I do like it when better players want a breather and play me. I don't think I would want a steady diet of being kicked around however mixed in with my regular games it is fun.

trying something new

Starting to play the Sicilian as black a little bit.nothing fancy c5 d6 Nc6

Not a badgame

http://blog.chess.com/view/not-a-bad-game

I recently played this online game against strong competition. Interesting attacking ideas on both sides and the balance between the two attacks.

Study of Classic Games

Our old friend Likes Forests recently posted on the Mayet-Anderssen game which I annotated a year or so ago. I must say the annotations are more thorough and pointed to some lines that white could of played which I didn't consider. If you are curious, My initial post is found here which discusses the GM-Ram methodology and for ease of viewing I reposted my annotations found here. This is the first game in the book GM-RAM. I hope Likes Forest continues with this as I would enjoy reading this annotation on future games especially those games covered in GM-RAM.



LF asked me yesterday how long did I take to study this game. I did spend a significant time over a week or two studying it. I did memorize it and was able to play it in my mind completely. The GM-Ram Methodology suggest that one memorizes all 59 games. Well for me that is not going to happen. My buffer is too small and multiple games memorized tend to mix together. At various times I have memorized the Opera game, Evergreen Game, Immortal Game, the Double Rook Sac Game of Euwe-Reti and others. However I don't think I ever had more than one game I could replicate at one time. At this point I don't think I am holding on to any of them.......



You may ask the bigger questions



* Is Studying GM Games a good way to improve ones chess ?



* What Games should one study ?



I'll start off my saying that if I did things only to improve I would have quit blogging and studying chess a long time ago. I have seen improvement but certainly not significant or consistently enough to merit all this time. If I cared greater about my rating I would be doing Ct-art now instead of blogging.... I do tend to improve after studying deeply annotated games and the line in my play tend to get a little sharper and interesting.




I do however enjoy studying the games that are generally recognized by the chess community to be classic games. I am interested in the historical perspective and am interested in the March of Chess Ideas through time. Also the historical games often show tactics and ideas which are not seen at today's GM level but prevalent in the patzer world. Those popular classic games that are still being discussed often have exciting combinations, thematic attacks and are quite instructive. There is also the benefit of analysis and discussion about these games that make study of them enjoyable. I often get the most benefit in analyzing lines that may look good on the surface but don't hold up in play.

I often use ideas and a style of play that I get from some of these games and is shown in this past post

4652 Games and Counting

From 9.25.05 to present, I have been collecting games that I played on playchess which automatically saves them to a Internet games folder. From there I often analyse the games using Fritz over night and in the morning take a look at the more interesting games. At this time I have over 4652 games with some duplicates and others played by others.

I am thinking about ways to improve from this huge collection of games. It is somewhat overkill and I am thinking about ways I can learn in a systematic intellegent way. An element of my games that improved is openings. I use the opening analysis portion of Fritz that shows some sample games in the same openings as where they diverge. I do a quick scan of these and have picked up some ideas as to what some of the GM's and better players have played .

My latest idea is to put key words in my annotations to so I can search on games worthy of future study. I have learned that I can search on words and look to add key words. Such as :instructive position, rook endgame , attack on the kingside castle, pawn storm. There is so many gmaes that it is somewhat daunting how to classify and study them. Perhaps I will just look at my Traxler games or my wild sicilian games against Scottcat.