Today I followed a few games from Tata Steel. I saw Nakamura lose his game to Carlson.

I worked on 3 puzzles in the Practical Chess Exercises paying special attention to thinking through variations to solve them.

I played 26 blitz games and about one third of them quick blitz. I reviewed a couple of games to assess what were the factors that contributed to winning and losing.

I did get a chance to review Sicilian Najdorf Bg5 variation.

I didn't get very much time as there were other chores and family activities to do. I'm looking forward to working on some chess exercises tomorrow.

Today I had a great lesson with Attila.

Major points we discussed out of the Power of Habit book that apply to chess improvement:
1) Look at the power of visualization
2) Writing a long of chess activity like the dieters will show patterns and make the activity conscious. Dieters experienced twice as much loss success than dieters that didn't write things down.

Primary pattern to work on improving: Good strategy (good position) and avoid bad move (blunder). Usually a tactical mistake.

We discussed that sometimes during a game they will be a psychological blow that blocks (blockades) our thinking process.

Attila has been working with a study on reviewing How to chose a move, by Soltis.

Attila discussed how his chess learning and coaching when he was younger. It appears that they studied entire games holistically and systematically instead of emphasizing particular concepts and how they apply in game play.

Important: Need to understand how/why we win & lose games. This applied to longer games as well as blitz if we want to improve.

Losing can also be a habit.
We discussed the value in working with puzzles and writing many variations and selecting the best move. This process needs to be worked on. Write down a thinking process before making decision.

To work on:
1) Visualize yourself winning a game, the good feelings of a dominate position prior to playing a game.
2) Log chess study and activities on the blog
3) Analyze games after playing them to determine reasons why winning & losing.
4) Study and analyze positions (and puzzles). Identify (write down) several variations 3-5 moves long to evaluate. This applies to any position in the game, end games as well as puzzles.

Day 1 of NM Memorial. I registered in the Open Section. I decided to play up to see how I could do. My expectation was to win at least one. I believe the avg rating was about 1900+ with a few of us below 1800.

My first game was against a player from Wisconsin. He was an older player and I hadn't look at his rating until well into the game. He played white and I played black. He played e4 and I decided to start out with the Sicilian. He played a version that I was not very familiar with and I quickly got into an inferior position and eventually lost the game.

It has been a while since I last posted. I have been working on my chess but only sporadically. I've been keeping up with my team4545 league matches and my correspondence chess.

Tonight I worked on getting ready for the NM Memorial. In my last training session with Attila, it occurred to us that my tactical training might be flawed. Fast tactical training only reinforces quick pattern matching and not calculation skills. I have been finding that my calculation ability has not being developed very well. We discussed looking at puzzles where I can take longer time to calculate variations and visualization.

I studied for about 5 solid hours with a combination of puzzles on chessworld.net and particular variations that I've studied with Attila.

This morning I worked on chess position training . I can't believe how rusty I get. To be fair, it is sometimes a challenge to remember a particular positions out of a variations.

I also worked on a particular line getting ready for my match with ronliv this evening. Attila had a wonderful idea of having us play a particular variation.

I played in the Santa Fe Open tournament. It was a 4 round event with a time control of G45/5d. I scored 2 out of 4. I did well enough and increased my rating by 10 pts.

Today I spent some time catching up with correspondence games on chessworld.net. Most of the games are going well. I have about 21 games that are ongoing. I believe I may be losing 4 of them outright.

After catching up, I spent some time following the USCL on ICC. I also spent 45 min working with chesspositiontrainer (CPT).

I also spent some time reading How to Reassess Your Chess 13-26 pp with positions/games set up on a board. I played through the Topolov - Sashikiran game and learned about positional weakness in how it might be exploited. Another example that showed having an active K as an attacking piece to deliver mate in the Short - Timman game. One of the key elements of the game that allowed the K mobility was black's weakened squares on the K-side.

I spent a total of 3.5 hours studying.