Rating 1663

Puzzle Rush Score 30

Today I enjoyed watching the last day of the the 9LX competition where Leinier Domínguez came in first place. As the positions are randomly generated the players have only 15 minutes to prepare their opening lines. I really liked this part of the broadcast as it showed the players thinking of what the key ideas where, how to develop each piece, where the weak pawns were that could be attacked or needed defending. Practical chess by grandmaster players. Also the fact that there was lots of decisive games made it an interesting viewing. It was also great seeing Garry Kasparov do such a great job against the current best players in the world.

 

I played this Four Knights game reasonably well (aside from one poor opening move). I found a nice deflection tactic  that helped me to close the game out quickly.

 

I watched a video lesson on The Kings Indian by GM Simon Williams. I haven’t played the Kings Indian much so I have been trying to learn a bit more about it. He used the following game as an example. I have added a few annotations looking at some of the main ideas.

Rating 1645

Puzzle Rush Score 32

Today I lost a blitz game when I had a winning position. I missed a very basic checkmate because my mind was focused on other things and so after making a few interesting moves I just gave it away. It is quite an instructive game though and I learnt a few valuable lessons.

I went on to read a short study on bringing the queen out too early as this is one of the drawbacks of the Scandinavian (like in the game above) as the queen can be kicked around the board with tempo.

Here is my first digital diary post outlining the chess study I did for the day.

This is part of my Climb To 2000 series.

Rating 1668

Puzzle Rush Score 30

Today I looked over a game played by the legend Garry Kasparov. Here is that game.

One thing that stood out to me when I was going over the game was the similarities with the Ruy Lopez after the sixth move 6.Bb3 a5 While this is clearly different to the Ruy Lopez. There are similar ideas of attacking on the kingside (which Garry Kasparov does an excellent job of). I haven’t played against the Alekhine defense much, but I could see myself liking these types of positions as white.

I also enjoyed watching the first day of the Chess 9XL Tournament on the St Louis Chess Club YouTube. The tournament has many great players in it, including Garry Kasparov.