Rating 1824
Puzzle Rush Score 28
Daily Study More work on The Chess Newsletter today. You can now subscribe to the mailing list from this website (just have a look on the main sidebar). I played two blitz games. Its a Friday night and I am always tired by the end of the week. I can usually tell because my Puzzle Rush Score is often low. So I reviewed my games and then watched some Speed Chess Championships to unwind.
Rating 1824
Puzzle Rush Score 39
Daily Study Today I played a few blitz games and that was it. Here is one of the games that I enjoyed.
Rating 1816
Puzzle Rush Score 35
Daily Study Today I studied the following game played by Bobby Fischer and Hector Rossetto. In his book My 60 Memorable Games he titles this game “The unpleasant obligation” The game was quite interesting and there were a few key moments that stuck out to me. The first was this lovely rook move 24.Ra3 very simply moving away from the center and threatening to take a pawn. I did not see the move as I was to focused on what was going on in the middle. The second thing that I found very interesting was the way Fischer paralyzed all of his opponents pieces in the endgame and basically made whatever moves he wanted until his opponent had nothing left to do. I was trying to come up with quick plans to end the game, but that wasn’t necessary and the easiest win was to just let the opponent run out of moves.
Rating 1840
Puzzle Rush Score 46
Daily Study Today I learnt about an incredibly cool site called Opening Tree. You can enter your online chess account and it will go through all of your games to see what openings you play and what score you have against certain openings. I found this incredibly interesting and just enjoyed exploring for a while.
One interesting thing I found out is that there were a few openings I play that I score quite well in, but there may be positions within the main opening I am not so good at handling. For example I have a good record playing the Ruy Lopez. I have won 43 games and lost 21 with the white pieces. However, within the Ruy Lopez there is a line known as the Morphy Defense where I have lost 5 out of 7 games, showing that I clearly don’t have a great grasp of the types of positions that arise in those lines.
The site is great as it highlights areas I can work on improving (at least with my opening theory).