Moscow Feeds Tournament Tactics

Moscow - I've been studying the Semi-Slav, Moscow variation. If you follow NIC or Informant, you know the Anti-Moscow is hot.

1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 e6 5.Bg5 h6 6.Bh4 dxc4 7.e4 g5 8.Bg3 b5 9.Be2 Bb7 10.h4 g4 11.Ne5 h5 12.O-O Nbd7 13.Qc2 Nxe5 14.Bxe5 Bg7 15.Bg3!? White sacrificed a second pawn in Sakaev-Borovikov, Halkidiki tt 2002 (5), and since then, many master-level games have been probing this line. It's very exciting and sharp.

Feeds - RSS can notify you whenever a chess blog has new content.

For example, in the RSS sidebar to the left I can tell temposchlucker, dk-transformation, and sir kaan kara all added new blog content for me to check out. 1. If you want to make this easy for your visitors, in your blogspot settings go to the "Site Feeds" tab and turn them on. 2. Download Sage to do the same thing yourself... it's free! 3. On a few blogs, such as dk-transform's, site feeds don't seem to work even though the owner enabled them. But I found a neat trick! You can still subscribe to them manually by visiting their site and adding "/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" to the URL. Eg: http://dk-transformation.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Tournament - In the chess.com 1400-1800 correspondence tournament I've won the first eight games and I'm up a piece in my final two games.

I posted a sample game online. Should I be happy? A small part of me says yes, this proves I can play consistently. The rest says no, I've been wasting my time. I need to find strong opponents to play me OTB at tournament time controls. Perhaps I will drop out before round two and go visit one of the local chess clubs.

Tactics - I studied 19 hard tactics from the ChessCafe puzzle book and 64 easy tactics from Predator at the Chessboard.

After taking about 15 minutes/diagram to solve the 12 "Back Rank" puzzles from the ChessCafe Puzzle Book I figured I must be weak at that motif. I went ahead and solved 64 "Back Rank" puzzles from Predator at the Chessboard... almost instantly! I'm not weak at back rank mates, or any other tactical motif. I'm weak at solving positions that combine two or more motifs--combinations. So... I'm convinced that the ChessCafe Puzzle Book is right for me.

That's all for this week. Note the progress in my fitness counter. :)