Progress Report, Week 6

(Here was Week 5, Grade B)

Like many of you, Dear Readers, the Christmas holidays and associated travel, shopping and other indignities interfered with training this week; all that aside, I did have a good Christmas and managed to improve a little more at Chess Tempo, + 40 -12 and rating now 1801 (1738). At 76.9 percent I'm creeping toward the percentage I should be hitting. I can only aspire to the heights reached by fellow Reno Chess Club member Soapstone (E. Hong) who is now in the top ten at the site in Standard rating at 2101, 82.85 percent for over 2000 attempts.

Also got in two 15 5 games at FICS (where I'm RLP)and won both against 1700-1800 rated opposition to bump my Standard rating up from 1690 to 1745. And once again, no blitz was involved in the making of this motion picture. Again, I was amazed at how much better I played at 15 5 than at 3 0 or even 2 5. No blitz is paying off.

Did some very brief reading in odd moments in the Gallagher book on Tal, but no board work, so a little, partial credit there.

And now, a word about my next big project; I have downloaded ChessDB to my new computer and will (apparently) be able to extract games from the FICS files, so I can present them here. An even more exciting prospect is inputting a database of all the games (700+, I think) that I have in a big cardboard box in my closet, representing my whole career of tournament play 1981 to the present. In the pile I have a few wins over Experts, a bunch of instructive and amusing (for you, Dear Reader) losses and plenty of stories to go with the games. Blog fodder for years to come! (YIKES).

Oh yeah, for this week's study program, I'll give myself another grade of B.