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.

My plan with chess was to play a game a week seriously in real time. Well, I kept putting that off, which means that I really didn't want to do it.

Well, it seems that chess means a lot more to me than I previously thought. And I do have to state that chess has helped me during the hardest times in my life. In any case, it seems that chess is very serious for me, so serious that it is even worthy to procrastinate an actual game.

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 :)

fics is the free internet chess server. Xboard is a chess client. This is how you make them work together:

I usually use xboard. It's possible to, e.g., log on to servers like ICC and FICS, which I find to be good places to play chess at.

Just run

ICC: "xboard -ics -icshost chessclub.com"
FICS: "xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org"

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-20184.html

Today we had a successful chess lesson with Alexander and Isabella. Alexander helped to put the pieces on the board, mirroring what Isabella was doing. We played a few games of pawn games. Next time, we are going to delve into lesson two!