I made master. Well, okay, only on Chess Tempo. After my 2,883rd problem, I raised my Standard rating to 2200 (83.85% correct, ranked #7), getting 55 in a row correct at one point. Blitz stays at 2500. I’m almost more proud that I’m the most active among the first nine players. Mr. hetmaaktnietuit and I have been playing leapfrog for the past couple days which isn’t really fair because he has a longer jumping distance in that his RD is higher.
Perhaps Chess Tempo is not as popular as Chess Tactics Server because of the relative ease of manipulating results. With enough patience, I could verify each answer in Standard using a chess engine, before I commit and lose points from a mistake. Also, players who only solve a few problems at a time have huge point swings due to their high RD.
In GM-RAM, I finally finished the last rook ending, breezed through the queen endings, and delved into the minor piece endings (#61). I put in a message to join Blue Devil Knight’s Silman Endgame Course pgn project. If this succeeds, I can add it to the following resume of endgame files I have produced:
Znosko-Borovsky’s How To Play Chess Endings
ChessCafe’s Endgame Studies #1-192
Levenfish and Smyslov Rook Endings Diagrams 1-94
Brian Gosling’s Practical Chess Endings #1-394
Now if only there were a good paying job that entailed pgn-ifying chess books.
Annotated my last unannotated game since WSO. Perhaps I’ll go back to annotate my recent losses to club experts.
Scraped up enough momentum to look at the first three games in Bronstein’s Zurich, after holding Burgess’ 110 Greatest and Nunn’s Understanding in the batter’s box.
Still neglecting openings. A local semi-retired expert recently wrote me and said that he’d be tempted if I ever organize a Chess960 tournament. Of course Chess960 pretty much defeats opening theory knowledge. The purist in me won’t let me consider chess variants as anything but a diversion from my central task, yet I refuse to study openings. Perhaps a Chess960 tournament could be a gambit to lure him into becoming a regular at the club again as well as being an interesting diversion one night at the club.
3 comments:
doesn't matter how easy it might be to manipulate the results, the fact is, you did it. and without your lucky sweater! (did you have one of the lucky pens in your pocket at the time?)
congratulations anyway.
are you memorizing the GM RAM games? you should post on that, if you are doing that, how it has helped, if at all. i'd like to know what you think about the whole GM RAM thing...
Thanks, chessloser. On GM-RAM, I'm going through the endgame diagrams in numerical order. I think I've learned a lot about basic rook endings. Some moves are quite starkly beautiful, so there is an aesthetic benefit. Has it helped in a game? Probably only a little. Not sure what I'll do on the full games at the end. I think it's a valuable exercise, probably for Class A and above. Silman's Endgame Course is likely to be better for people starting endgame study.
So it was you that produced the L&S Rook Endings 1-95 pgn file.
I have put it into Chessbase, & added variations & commentary from the book for 1-67 as of today. Why did you stop at the end of chapter 1 ?
I am going to add 96-318 if I can't find them elsewhere.
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