tjradd vs. fredisblog
Back at it a little bit. Should have considerably more chess content coming to this space again soon. Hope so, anyway!
Haven’t Disappeared
I’m doing a lot of work over on www.livestream.com/gorgonian
Live and interactive, so come check it out. When not live, replays of the live events are playing.
Standard Video #17
Really weird game. Never seemed to have my head in it, but I guess it’s good news when I can win this type of game when not playing my 100% best. Definitely have had trouble with this level (rating-wise) player in the past in my videoed standard games. This might be a sign of improvement, in that respect, then.
The Streak Ends
Well, I finally broke my winning stream today. My formula returned a player rated over 1700, and I played like I wasn’t anywhere near that. Actually, that is probably an exaggeration. I feel like I played the opening and early middle game fairly well, and pursued an active plan that was right for the position. I also feel like my opponent made a strategic mistake I could’ve capitalized on. Unfortunately, I acted on a misconception about the nature of the position, and tactically blundered in the process. It was a strategic mistake as well, and there was just no recovering from it. I tried to fight on, but it wasn’t to be.
Live Standard Game #15 Fails
Unfortunately, I lost the video for #15. Fortunately, I win anyway! This was my eighth win in a row, and my first game after modifying my formula to attempt to get more higher rated players. It was an interesting game where I absent-mindedly moved a piece when I was actually just talking about it in the video (that is gone forever) which subsequently hung a pawn,
c4??
watched my opponent castle right into an attack,
O-O-O?
and eventually spot a pretty trivial mate in 5.
Nxb4??
Here is a link to the full game: http://www.chessvideos.tv/chess-game-replayer.php?id=47572
And here are my updated stats:
Live Standard Game #14
Seven straight wins! Today’s game was a quick one, due to my opponent missing a tactic. Always nice to finish it cleanly like that, though. Getting to ten straight wins would be great, but getting to 1600 would, too. I’m actually pretty close to both of them.
New Live Standard Game (#13)
This game was a roller-coaster. Highest rated player I’ve beaten so far in my live standard game run, too. I had a much quicker win in the late middle-game that I just blatantly missed. The kinds of wins that chesstempo.com is supposed to be helping me spot. Ahem. One of the problems is I have to learn how to think about those things so that I can still find them, while not wasting time looking for them when they aren’t there. As you can see in this one, time does become an issue. Anyway, enjoy!
Tactics Tracking #4: 100 Puzzles in 24 Hours!
During the final 5 puzzles, I found myself getting sleepy. It wasn’t all that late at night, either. I think my brain was just about done. I didn’t do so hot on the last few, but part of that was there were some really difficult ones thrown in there. Anyway, here are some stats!
Tactics Tracking #3
Another 25 problems in the books. I’m still hitting at about 18 out of every 25. I had fewer silly mistakes this time, but the mistakes were still what I would call “bone-headed.” I say this to mean that instead of the mistakes being something that a half-asleep toddler could see, they are mistakes that the toddler might need to be paying a bit of attention to see. I’m working on trying to get the tag stats to automatically compile with some outside help. With over 100 problems there might be some statistics worth seeing. I’m hoping this will do some good, but even if it doesn’t, I’m at least getting some pretty graphs out of it. Progress seems evident.
Tactics Tracking #2
Started off the morning with 25 more tactics problems. I’m getting more data for what sorts of problems I am missing, so soon I should start to have an idea what kinds of problems I miss and which ones I am a pro at. My rating went up this session, so that is good, too. I added a smoother line to the graph section. It graphs the average rating I’ve had over my last 10 problems. Still some variance in that line, but hopefully it shows a general trend a little better.
