Mental preparation? I sat down and my heart sank when I saw who my opponent was, he was rated 1/2 of my grade but during an earlier game at Buckden seemed a good deal stronger. And so I forgot to think, again and lost.

Thinking about the effect this game has had on me, I feel that this is the point at which I realised that I had enough talent to progress much further.

An interesting game where I realised that I truly didn't understand the themes of this variation of the Sicilian defence, luckily neither did my opponent.

Here is probably the first game I actually won rather than my opponent lost via a large blunder. Playing the bishop sac was exciting but made me shake like a leaf!

Here Ian D demonstrated his ability;

Here is my game from the interassociation challenge;

Here is my first game of the Bury Area league

Here is the second round game, another total lack of thought led to another painful lesson;

Here is my first round game against Luca in the club championship when I learned why h3 was important in the closed Lopez;

Here is the final game against the talented junior Michael R. After a misplayed opening I managed to scrape a draw with more bluff than anything else.

I took a bye in the third round feeling pretty drained by the two games I had played. Then I had the misfortune to draw a tough teenage opponent M.F. Since I had played him before (and had torn him to shreds before blundering the game away) I didn't have the correct mindset. That coupled with my (false) knowledge of the opening led to a short and painful lesson in chess,

Here is the second round game of the EACU congress;

Now that I have analysed most of the games for this season upto the last two I will start posting the games and comments. None are masterpieces of chess strategy but I hope that anyone who stops to have a look will add some comments to aid my development.

One problem I have had for the past few weeks has been the ability to sit down with a book, a game score or anything in the evenings. I think I have burned out alittle after the stress of submission and the constant drilling of puzzles at work.


Of all the things that have been said about doing circles or repitions of puzzles I cannot think of anyone who said they are easy to do. I've managed to complete 6 circuits of Chess tactics for kids and have now got to the 99% correct level, which has made me deceide that two cycles with 99% accuracy constitute an end point for these puzzles.

As well as these I have been working through Alburts - Chess Training pocket book, which I am on the third cycle of, which I have found thought provocking to say the least. So far I have improved across the three cycles by about 20% each time upto 80%, again if I reach 99% across two cycles I move on. The most interestng choice for the next book to replace this is GM ram, something I have read alot about from the many fans of this book.

One thing advocated in the book and by other coaches is to memorise master games. I have taken the games from GM ram and started to memorise them, not easy but strangely not impossible either. I think this is an example of overlearning in action, repitition of the same game everyday leading to the knowledge being stored in the long term memory. The first effects of this are starting to show in my play though I can't say that Anderssen's beautiful attacks are yet present (unfortunately). A corrollary effect has been an increase in my ability to absorb new positions from other games I have played or analyse.

I have made attempts to start looking at other areas of chess but these so far have been half hearted, again linked to all of the other things I have been dealing with for the past six months.

This is my third attempt at a chess blog, the other two felt somehow wrong. The content was neither interesting nor a reflection on what I have felt about chess and my efforts to improve.


I started playing chess competitively last September having finished studying and finally getting a real job. Unfortunately the area I moved to in Cambridgeshire is relatively sparsely populated compared to metropolitan areas and the chess scene is less active as a consequence. These impediments have been changed since I took the decision to move to the larger Cambridge chess club where the opportunities to play and interact with more players has been a real revelation.

For the past year I have been working pretty hard snatching time during tea breaks and lunch times to study. Recently I finally managed to get my thesis accepted for my PhD, a real milestone in my life since it has taken nearly 6 years to get to this point for various reasons.

This has led me to look carefully at what I want to achieve in chess; a target rating, a target for the number of game and a realistic target for the time I can spend studying.



After analysing each of these I have reached a set of targets;

1) To increase my grade by 10 points per year and to reach 140 (or 155 after the scheduled grading correction) in six years

2) To play no less that 30 graded OTB long play games a season

3) To study an average of 2 hours per day