Hester Mofet's games 2008, 1 of 4.

Before I took some time off from blogging (and chess) I played some games on FICS. Today I started with an attempt to annotate them.

Here's the first of four games I played.

(show chess board)(hide chess board)

Suggestions on this game, it's annotation or annotating your own games in general are more than welcome.

sort of active again...

Sunday January 18th, 2009, 19/25 correct = 76%

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009, 22/25 correct = 88%

CTS at 75%!

I didn't mean to bore all y'all again with CTS this fast after my latest post. I intended to write a posts on my progress with the Steps Method or TCT. But I had no choice, today, with a session's splendid result of 100%, I crossed the 75% success rate barrier!

Here I come 80%! let's see if I can do that within 55 sessions (11 weeks) from November 13th?

My 100% score now in the afternoon may suggest Rolling Pawns is right in the comments under the 2500! post that at certain times of the day you're performance is better. Speaking for myself several factors come to mind: 1. biological cycle; 2. being tired and 3. being able to relax and take my time. The third one is what he suggests is a factor in what makes his time work for him.

I'm working on a poll, where you can vote if I'll make it to 80%, but this public computer is giving me trouble with it. It keeps complaining about a valid date/time, but I'd say 30/11/08 and 23:59 are correct. I will try it at home later this weekend.

2500!

As some of you might know, I try to do 25 exercises on the Chess Tactic Server on a daily basis, at least 5 times a week. This is half of my chess training, the other half consists of working in my Steps Method books or in TCT.

The other day (November 13, 2008) I reached my 2500th problem on CTS. At that time I had a success rating of 74,4%. Now I'm not getting anywhere near my peak rating of 1247, but my success rating is climbing, slowly but certainly! And obviously that's all that matters at this point.

My rating has been climbing a bit slower than I hoped, especially as I managed to have a 100% score in two sessions in September. Lately I have noticed that being tired can have huge effects at my solving ability. Thus I should make sure I get enough sleep. My goal, for now, still is to break the 80% barrier.

It would have been prettier if I could give you the info after my 2500th exercise, but since I didn't think of that at the time I leave you with the score sheet after today's session.

Handle mentat
Country Netherlands
Rating 1162 (1162)
Current RD 35.1
Highest Rating 1247
Date of HR 2008 Jul, 03 - 10:38
Tries 2575 (1500)
Success 74.6 % (69,1 %)

Between brackets are the values I had when reaching the 1500 mark. No, the fact that my rating stayed the same is not a typo, but maybe this is prettier after all.

Another flash game

Not unlike Liquid Egg Product I actually want to present a game that may not be as addictive as DTD or Gemcraft, but at least has anything to do with chess. A bit more like Temposchlucker who, trough his blog, introduced me to Troyis.

Black Knight is a game that, you guessed it takes it name from the black knight in chess. The object of this game is to move a knight on a chess board like field in the least possible moves towards the star. Sounds easy so far, and it is, but to make things more interesting our dark knight can only move over squares and some of the squares are missing. The location of the star have to be revealed by "killing" the white King (??) and other pieces join in as well, and you can "provoke" the pieces to (limited) movement.

I am currently at level. 15 with 313 moves, I got stuck once or twice. I'm sure a lot of you can do better, I would like to invite you to post your score in the comments.

Update:
Today, October 30th, I have finished the game in the beautiful number of 1492 moves, I could probably do it in less and might even try it, but I like this number. A lot of the people who inspire me in chess (that's you my fellow bloggers) life in The Americas after all.

Who will fight with me for the Red Lantern?

Everything that has an end, has a beginning. For every first place there is a last. Every Tour de France has a Red Lantern

Yours truly signed up for the L.E.P. III tournament, more info here: http://www.liquideggproduct.com/i-was-expecting-a-more-sophisticated-poster/

I have no real news, I have been training a bit irregular, but signing up for the tournament probably will get me back on a schedule.

A New Season

A new season in the chess blogosphere, now that the Summer is over various bloggers have returned to an active status. Full of energy and ideas they start with new series of posts. A few of special interest to me.

Likeforests: The Strategy of My System (in the sidebar of his blog) and now tactics, or was this just this one?

Blue Devil Knight: Chess for Zebras.
He's reading the book so at least someone will be able to tell us what it is about, since most reviewers only tell us about the first chapter.

Transformation: Tools for Structuring. It's not going to be about chess databases, but the first post already is full of useful information.

I would also like to put your attention to the great mystery of the disappearance of Tommy G, who after publishing a second article in a series on How To Study From A Book seems to have disappeared completely. He, his comments and his posts will be missed by me and probably others. Does anybody know what happened to him?