Today I didn't go to the Coronado chess club. I was too tired from the long day on Tuesday and today was very full. My thoughts were to work on How to Reassess Your chess specifically on the Knights chapter test. After completing the test at the end of the chapter I started going through the solutions. Unfortunately  I found that I missed most of them-not understanding the positions and how the knight was key.

Today I watched a couple of videos on acerook playing blitz tourneys. I reviewed 1st chapter of How to Reassess your chess and played through 1 game and a position.

I am going back to focusing on my How to Reassess your chess in order to structure my study. Tonight I spent about 1 hour on The Bishop test on page 75. When I get back on Sunday, I'm going to work on a detailed study plan.

I've had a full week with work. I worked on about 6 puzzles at dinner thinking that I would go to the Chess Club. I did feel much like playing so I cut it short tonight.

Today was a very busy day as we were getting ready for Joseph's Eagle Court of Honor. I did get a short bit of time to study a few puzzles in the morning. I worked on about 5 puzzles in about 30 minutes.

I played 4 games of blitz. I won half of them.

I also looked through an endgame book on pawn endings.

I practiced about 30 minutes on puzzles. Today was the only day I had a chance to work on the line that Attila gave me that I would play Ron with. I was on the white side of the Sicilian dragon -- playing e4! I found only a couple of games, but most seemed to end in draw. I thought that O-O would solidify white more instead of the Bg5 version. I also struggled with the position and the variations around Bg5. I basically only could spend 40 min preparing looking for games and thinking about some plausible variations.

After the game Ron and I went over it. I pretty much lucked out at the end. I believe that my opponent had the  advantage with the extra pawns, but pawns were not very far advanced. It was a good game and interesting.

Later in the evening I spent some time analyzing the game thinking about some of the other side lines we could have gone through.

Before I went to bed, I worked on 10 tactical puzzles and solved most of them mentally.

I didn't feel very well after lunch so my chess study was very minimal.


I played about fifteen 3 min blitz games, winning about 10 of them. I have been using this type of practice to investigate openings. Unfortunately, the quality of play is very low and the opponents don't seem to get into good variations.

Today was very busy I did get a chance to study during the Super Bowl. I studied puzzles for about 2 hours.

I did manage to play a few blitz games but unfortunately I didn't do all that well. I did find that the nature of the Cheng's puzzle book book that they are very difficult with some that are subtle positional features.