On things that do not work

I love strategy games, but my foray into chess was a strong wake up call : I was playing as if I had attention deficit disorder. Years of switching my attention from one thing to the other at work and I had lost all capacity for extended periods of focus. I saw this as a blessing and a curse, an opportunity to improve my overall focus ability. My first on-line rating stabilised at about 1100, I was leaving pieces en prise, pushing pawns in from of the castled kings for little reasons, weak strategy and tactics. I got a few books, improved the tactics, learnt some strategy, joined a club, had some lessons with a coach on openings, then for personal reasons I had to leave the team and stop the coaching, so far enjoying a progress to about 1400. From that point I though the next year would bring another 300 points improvement ... and that clearly did not happen. So to keep on improving I have to do the things that worked and drop the things that did not worked.

1. Playing blitz games. Believe it or not it makes me a weaker player. No more blitz in 2012.

On the to-do list:

1. Playing slow games (on the Internet or OTB)
2. Exercise in tactics very regularly. Tactics must become the number one activity.
3. Work on the existing opening variation I have from the lessons
4. Analyse serious games

Things I aim to write about

In this web log you can expect to read about

• the process of learning better chess at beginner-intermediate level
  
• chess books
  
• analysis of famous or interesting chess games
  
• interesting tactical exercises
  
• my own lost games
  
• analysis on any other strategy game
  

Things you will not read here

• chess news (plenty of places where you can learn who is winning tournaments)
  
• my life outside chess
  

Welcome on a chess adventure

Chess gives near immediate feedback on how good the moves are and similarly our ratings progression tells us how good our learning/improvement process is. One learn a lot more from a lost game than from a won one, and I now have a great deal of experience on a good and a bad learning process. I would like to write this blog to document my improvement process over the next year, hopefully show a significant positive improvement. I hope to get all sorts of feedback from readers, thanks in advance to add me to your links or RSS feeds. The format I am aiming for is a weekly, substantial post. I already have a small pipeline of things to write about, so stay tuned.