Saturday, May 19, 2007

Status Update

Since I last posted, life got really hectic. I laid off the tactics big time. The thing I need to realize is that I need to take a steady, consistent diet of daily tactics. I shouldn't gorge for a few stays and then starve myself for a week.

Perhaps the biggest challenge I face in completing The Circles is time constraint. There are just so many things to do in a day. Obviously work takes up most of my day and when things are slow at work, I wish I could use that time to study tactics. But since I can't install CT-ART on my PC at work, I've decided to just input chunks of 10 problems into pgn format and then study tactics from CT-ART that way (since I could install a pgn reader on my work PC).

I've also decided to dedicate more time to studying from some of the books I have as well as playing more games on FICS. So hopefully I can work a bit on tactics at work (when it's slow or on my lunch break) and then study and play on-line at night.

I'm still trying to stick to the plan I discussed last time. I'm up to #460 in CT-ART.

1 comment:

Blue Devil Knight said...

Work and chess. It's hard. Work should always be the priority, so it's good to not read you've been fired for playing chess at work!

You are clearly right about binge versus sustained problem solving. Binges don't stay in memory the way frequent small study sessions will. When I'm on my first circle in problems, I sometimes only do 5 a day, or sometimes I'll just do 10 but faster than I should, being sure to really analyze the position in the next circle once I'm moving a bit faster as I know what I'm looking for.