Thursday, August 24, 2017

Simple Chess: Tuesday Night Action 35! Round 5 (Clayton vs Blackwelder)



It has been rough on my road to 2000 since June. I peaked at a rating of 1783 and have been in free fall ever since winning only 2 of my last 9 games. It all started with my miserable performance at the Carolina's Classic. If you haven't read that recap then you can do so by clicking here. My rating has now fallen to 1696. I'm not worried about my rating but I am upset at my decision making at the board as well as my lazy calculations.

Posting my frustrations is not a way to get a pity party going. Instead I think it is important to know that if you want to continue to improve at chess there will be moments where it is frustrating. There will be times where you feel like you can't improve and instead you are going in reverse. If you want to improve, you have to keep pushing.

With that being said I am excited to introduce the new format my blog posts will take starting next week. Balancing your knowledge and skills in chess is important and therefore my blog posts will have a topic that is covered each week. For example:

The Thursday following round 1 of Tuesday Night Action 36 will be about tactics training. I will include positions that I solved on Chess.com during one of my daily 30 minute sessions. This will include my thought process, my ability or inability to calculate to the end. Hopefully you will gain some knowledge either in a new pattern or in how I think when calculating.

Following round 2 the next week the topic will cover a strategic concept that I will have studied using the Chess.com lessons. I will highlight my thought process, the key concepts that stood out to me, and anything else I found useful.

Following round 3 I will share my work using the Chess.com drills feature. This means I will be working my way through key positions that one should be able to win or hold out for a draw. I will post my actual methods used against the computer. I will also go back through and include some analysis. These positions will mainly feature endgame positions but there will be other instructive positions as well.

Following round 4 I will share a game where I try and guess the moves of a strong player. You will be able to see a complete game by a stronger player. You will get to see what moves I thought were accurate. You will get some insight based on the annotations of another strong player. I am most excited about this portion of my upcoming blogs.

Following round 5 I will post all of my games from the recent Tuesday Night Action tournament with complete analysis. This will hopefully be a great way to link everything from the previous four weeks together including how I learn openings.

The goal behind the process of writing my blogs this way is so that someone can truly join me on the road to chess improvement.



Here is my round 5 game of Tuesday Night Action 35:




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