New plans

In the last year, I've played chess quite a lot. Even if I rarely have time to visit my chess club, I have participated in several chess tournaments. In addition, I play online blitz almost daily.

I think I will soon start a new chess blog, where I would analyze my own games. It is something I've planned for years, but never had time for it. Using a blog for this could well give me the motivation for seriously working on my chess.

At the moment, my rating is somewhere around 1840 (national rating), the official ELO is about 50 points lower. So I'm a decent club player but don't really understand anything at all.

I'm just a patzer like you...

Blogs I follow in 2013

Just a short note.

These are the chess blogs I follow at the moment:

1. ChessVibes
2. Chesscafe
3. Chess Improver

At the moment, I'm too busy for reading blogs. I think that the time spent on playing chess is better spent than time used for reading blogs!

Ruy Lopez books

I've played Ruy Lopez every now and then since the early 1980s. Now I want to keep up on the recent development with the opening. This is the reased I decided to start a new blog about Ruy Lopez books. If you want to read more about Ruy Lopez you should bookmark the Ruy Lopez blog. But there are also some interesting articles about Ruy Lopez in the Kenilworthian blog.

My d4 repertoire

At the moment my opening repertoire is still experiencing some changes. One of the reasons is the fact that I've had not any time for competitive chess lately. I even had to stop playing ICC blitz because of my studies.

This is, however, my repertoire for white at the moment:

1. 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6/e6/c6/c5 3. Bf4 (London Attack)
2. 1. d4 d6/g6 2. c4 (intending King's Indian with Nge2)
3. 1. d4 f5 2. e4 (Staunton's gambit)

So nothing too fancy, basically it is a low-maintenance repertoire that should be playable without too accurate theoretical knowledge. To add some spice in the soup, I have also studied Torre Attack (d4, Nf3, Bg5) and Trompowsky that seems unfortunately to be a bit suspicious choice nowadays. My results with these d-pawn openings have been encouraging and I have won some nice attacking games with traditional plan of putting the king's knight to e5 and advancing the d and h pawns.

London system on Internet

I have not been able to find a lot of analysis about the London system (1. d4 followed by 2. Nf3 and 3. Bf4) on Internet as free web content. Here is what I have so far found:

* Gary Lane, Opening Lanes 57
* Gary Lane, Opening Lanes 54
* Sverre's Chess Corner is a weblog written by one of the authors of Win with the London System.
* John Watson & Eric Schiller, How to succeed in Queen Pawn Openings (pdf)

Have I missed something interesting?

A forgotten blog?

I finally remembered having started this blog almost a year ago. A lot has happened since that: many losses, many wins and some draws.

I ended up changing my white repertoire pretty completely. Now it is based on d4, London attack and Torre attack. Both of them are openings with easily comprehensible ideas and thus they are appropriate for an ordinary club player who does not have enough time to study incomprensibilities of Botvinnik variation in Semi Slav. In addition, both of the openings have more sting than Colle attack.

There are some good books for those willing to learn these openings. For Torre, I would suggest getting Graham Burgess' book The Gambit Guide to the Torre Attack. For London, get Sverre Johnsen's and Vlatko Kovacevic's Win with the London System.

Difficult decisions

When playing chess I often find myself losing myself in the jungle of variations. According to John Nunn's Secrets of Practical Chess, I should probably think less and move faster:

"When analysing a given position, it is fair to say that one almost always sees more in the first five minutes than in the next five minutes. The five minutes after that is even less productive and so on."

Nunn claims that "if a player spends more than 20 minutes over a move, the result is almost always a mistake." In his opinion, it is better to follow one's instinction or even just choose at random a move out of two equal possibilies than to analyse for too long.