Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

So I have been sick for most of the month of October. Going on 4 weeks, I have not been able to do any of my deep practices and no chess. All what I have been doing is being sick, working, and resting.

Okay, if there is an uber-silly goal, is to become a chess master. Now, since I am more modest, I would be very happy if I can become a chess expert... and even that is pretty amazing.

After reading the talent code, I realized that the treasured chess book,
Comprehensive Chess Course, Lev Alburt, a chess-specific application of deep practice developed in the Soviet Union, could help me attain at least the goals that the book promises to deliver: take a serious student to Level A. This is actually my true goal, but hopefully I can move from there to expert level [:)]

Over the years the problems that I have had applying the lessons of the book have been that I have resisted memorizing the board, which is something that Alburt insists that it is important. I still don't understand why, but I decided to give it a serious try. Guess what? It took me about 8 hours of serious practice over a week to memorize the board. I could have done this 9 years ago.

Also, another problem of mine, is that I won't go over the board after a game. This is a problem because I don't learn from my mistake. I only learn from the overly bad mistakes, the ones that you get the instant pain from. But the more fruitful ones are the ones that one gets by going over a game and figuring out what is wrong. I personally don't like that pain, but it seems that that is the way of learning deeply chess.

So this is my goal: in 5 to 10 years, become a chess expert.

So my plan now is the following: do the exercises of the book, play over endings with the AI, play one game of 30 minute limit chess a week, study it, and repeat.

I will discuss my experience learning the board later. I will probably also start posting analysis of my games (Hey, if I wrote them, I may as well use them as content.)

My first goal is to make this plan a habit by the end of the year. Then I will set another goal :)