TPS Report #15

Ventured back to Chess Tempo to push my rating back into the 2000s and my accuracy back to the mid-80s. There seems to be some ratings deflation going on since a new set of problems were introduced in January. That or the server suffers from declining users. I have FWO game 6 and Club Qualifier game 1 to annotate. I also plan to annotate 2 or 3 of Daniel Naroditsky's games and Sevillano-Khachiyan from the Reno tournaments.

I've been swamped trying to get out the Games Bulletin for Far West Open. It's probably doing things the hard way, but I like to go through all the games and look for tactical shots that were interesting or missed. I can enter 109 games in a couple days despite bad handwriting, but the light annotations take me a good 20 hours of work spread over 10 days. It's fun and educational, but sometimes tedious and it often makes me sleepy.

From fpawn's blog, I learned what was happening at the National Junior High Championships, Division K-9 in Dallas. My Far West opponents from rounds 4 and 2 are listed in the final standings at #4 and #6, respectively. It's cool to have games against such promising chess youth.

I've considered a chess tournament blowout month in October with the North American Chess Association's Pro-Am on October 4-5 followed by the Continental Chess Association's Midwest Class Championships on October 11-12 both in Chicago, followed by the Western States Open in Reno on October 17-19, but I don't think it'll fly with my family. Besides, the travel tends to run me down physically and mentally, even more than a typical tournament does.

UPDATE 4/8
Made it to #2 on Standard tactics ratings on Chess Tempo with 83.59% accuracy over 3,613 problems.

It's easy to be the king of a pond when all the other fish have deserted.