Sunday, June 10, 2007

What I'm up to

Still more chess. I thought some people might be vaguely interested to hear this stuff, the others will be driven off by boredom. There are only 5 readers here, anyway.

Oddly, Iowa seems to have a more accessible chess scene, just by number of tournaments and the existence of regularly-meeting chess clubs I could find, than Chicago, unless somebody would care to enlighten me. Enough so that I may plan trips home around tournaments in Iowa if I do get seriously back into things. I mean, there's North Avenue Beach, I suppose, but I'm looking for something structured where you could get in a G/60 or G/45 at minimum, hopefully downtown. I think the University's chess club may be open to people like me, but it would be on hiatus for the summer right now. I could look into playing with those random guys at that convenience store or McDonald's, but I'd feel awkward approaching them, just like at North Avenue. So for now I'm just dinking around the Chess Tactics Server, playing occasional blitz, and will soon have a nice little pocket chess game that plays at around 1750 for the bus ride, a couple G/15 every day on the bus or something should be helpful, but not ideal. Should I ever get that Windows box working again, I may be able to play some computer chess with reasonable time controls. Also working heavily on visualization exercises and, soon, endgames.

I seem to have hit a wall on CTS (fluttering around 1450, no correlation to real ratings), so I'm backing off for a few days and instead devoting my time to solving hard problems slowly. Then, Vukovic. Then, CTS with gusto. I will break 1500 (no correlation to real ratings)!

So, tactics, endgames, and visualization. There's a lot more to the game, but I figure that, at my current level of strength and rustiness, those will be the most valuable and pay the most dividends. Fortunately, they're also the easiest to make some quick headway into.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, apparently I've gotten very bad at chess at some point. That tactics server is kicking my larger end.

Hmm, my username is pretentious, isn't it! I need a new one. Suggestions?

Mr. G. Z. T. said...

I think it's fine.

Are you saying that from hanging around there for half an hour or something, or from days of fighting it? Because the first couple days would be invariably terrible, given the very specialized skill set required to do well at CTS.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, kind of 1/2 hour to an hour. Must soldier on!

Hey, I just found out that I have a job as an analyst for a pharm. consulting company. Wonder how that happened. It's their funeral. I mean, seriously, the guy was impressed that I could solve logic problems and write the sum of a geometric series. Is that really all it takes??

Mr. G. Z. T. said...

Congratulations! It's amazing what a high school education can do for one! One thing you might want to keep in mind: learn all the nifty little Excel tricks you can, especially pivot tables, keyboard shortcuts, and the use of HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP. Not only does it make you look smarter, it really does save time.

Anonymous said...

I'm making a pivot table right now!

Mr. G. Z. T. said...

You know, I tried to use Excel to import this web-log as a table and read it from there, but it just wasn't feeling it. Oh, and OFFSET is magic. And you can color the worksheet tabs, people are always stricken by that. This is what I do all day while trying not to fall asleep at my computer.

Anonymous said...

You know, I also wrote the LSAT recently. (No score yet.) It's ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the LSAT is a rediculous test. I'm sure it's easier than both the SAT and the GRE.

Reading and writing, they aren't optional, people, unless you want to live naked in the forest and eat bugs all day.

Mr. G. Z. T. said...

Yeah, well, you seem like the sort who wouldn't have much trouble in law school, not that I know how law school is. They have to make it a little easy, future lawyers are taking it...

Anonymous said...

It's like, I'm sure that it's easier to get into Harvard Law than it is to earn a real 1600, you know? At least for most people.

Thanks for the kind language. We'll see what transpires.*

* Which in Romanian means 'sweats.'