12 January, 2011

Team League 4545 - T47 - Final

Its now official, as the last playoff  round 2 game is over, and Magnum Ignotum slipped at the penultimate fence ( let's not mention forfeits again ! )

A round up of my T47 season is here and I have little to add, except that I enjoyed all the games, particularly those in the U1800.

My league rating has dropped a small amount from 1600 to 1592, which implies that I am probably playing at an appropriate level over the past 4-6 months.

I feel I can do better, so, along with many others will state the intention to try to do more 'chess study' with the idea that I do actually improve, either ratings-wise and enjoyment or even in some other unmeasurable way !

The obvious route is tactics and calculation, as I plainly miss many combinations.

Other areas are general endgame knowledge and technique, and what I will call positional "know-how".

In practice this 'know-how' may boil down to learning some standard positional plans and techniques, such as the 'minority attack', or 'playing against an Isolated Queen Pawn', with the intention of actually understanding what these mean !

As to posting a regular update...I will have to see how it goes. I have many good intentions, but as we all know, sometimes all these intentions do is pave the road to hell.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Signalman,

Great to see that you enjoyed the TL, you had a hard time but never gave up!

Regarding "more chess study", my impression is that the most important things are a) consistency and b) "completeness". If you only do a little but every day you will slowly make progress. With "completeness" I mean that one should make sure to train every part of the game (strategy, endgame, ...).

I got lost a little in the last weeks by focusing too much on tactics. It's clearly one of my weak areas, however, in a real game more is required and tactics alone don't win.

Signalman said...

Both are true, especially consistency...doing things regularly is the best way to make them stick.

"Completeness" is also valid. Focusing too hard on one thing to the exclusion of others may bring results, but can skew it too much.

A holistic schedule is what is required.

I've had a few thoughts around this and the actual schedule is still forming in the whirlpool of my thoughts.

A little longer and it will be spat out from between the Scylla and Charybdis of holistic and specific plans to be an enjoyable and practical way forward.