Aiight folks. It's time to buckle down and get semi-serious about learning to play chess semi-well. Josh recommended me to do one of these training journals even if I don't have all the time in the world, so here goes nothing.

Where I am right now:

- I'm in college with a job and don't have much money/time to invest in chess as I'd like
- I only know a handful of openings
- My FICS rating is still provisional
- My Chess Tactics Server rating is just about 1300
- I haven't played on an actual board for five years. There's not a local chess club, as I live in a very rural area, so I'm sorta restricted to online play.

Short term goals:

- Learn some common openings on both side of the board. This isn't a priority to me as I usually do OK even if I don't know what exactly is being played, but it can't hurt.
- Get at a stable 1500 rating in standard and 1200 in blitz on FICS (I'm really bad about playing under time pressure)
- Hit marks of 1400, 1500, 1600 on CTS
- Get over this dumb cold I have

Long term goals:

- Play in a real tournament and get a real rating!
- Get a mic and create my own coherent analysis videos
- Solve chess? I dunno.

That's it for now. I'll post a few of my games in here now and again and maybe we all can learn something... or at least get a cheap laugh or two at my crummy play. Wish me luck on my meteoric rise to the top of the chess world! Also, feel free to challenge me to a game on FICS (my handle is MrBlister).

Go big or go home?

Glad to see that you've created a training journal! As I said, I found that even when I had little time for chess, my journal kept me motivated. Plus, we can always look up to guys like Robofriven who constantly update their journals with quality chess analysis.

Video analysis would be really cool, once you have time. I find that when I don't have much time, the best thing to do (to at least keep in shape chess-wise) is to solve problems on the CTS for 15 minutes or do some visualization exercises.

P.S. Where in Virginia are you from? I used to live there until I decided to become a Texan.

Currently, I live west of Richmond in a small farm town called Powhatan though I've also lived in both Roanoke and Fairfax for some time. Where did you live?

Great to see another training journal
Wish you good luck with your improvement

And the dumb cold you have, same problem here I got one in chess team tournament on saturday. It was sooooo cold , everyone was shaking but we kept on playing! That's the spirit The tournament was great also. Fortunately, I've almost recovered. Wish you the same

If you want to see real improvement then I believe correspondence chess is the right place to start. I've learned a lot playing really slow games. Don't forget to analyze them carefully afterwards, forum members are helpful with comments as well
I play on http://www.chess.com with the same handle

SafeAsMilk,

I used to live in Northern Virginia (Reston and McLean), but I went to school at William and Mary, in Williamsburg.

I logged on to CTS for a little bit and almost solved everything it gave me. Now I'm 37 points higher.

Rating 1337
Current RD 25.4
Highest Rating 1337
Tries 326
Success 77.9 %

So after a fine afternoon of boosting my CTS score, I figured I'd play a game (I'm white)...



The opening went fine... I rarely mess up the Bird.

10. e4 was probably a bit premature.
12. Na3? was a stupid mistake, dropping a pawn and putting my knight on the edge of the world.
Black's moving the kingside pawns on move 14 and 15 was pretty questionable and allowed me back in the game.
By 19. Qh5 computer analysis says I just about equaled.
I took way too long to make moves 19-28 and only had about 30 seconds left.
I'm not sure what the purpose of 28... Rf5? was
After 30... Qg4??, I miss a mate in one (with Qxh6#) due to time trouble!!
The rest is just a blunderfest... I really need to think MUCH faster in my games.

I think 10.e4 is fine. I think the main thing is that after Nc4 and ...d5, you need to take on d5 and play Nce5, then I think you have a comfortable position.

I think on move 20, castling queenside would've been a good choice. It activates your queen's rook and gets your king to safety. I know you played it the next move, but I think it would've been better right away so that you could save your h-rook for the g-file and play Rdf1 instead.

The rest of the game was just time trouble