Today’s blog entry is from an online turn-based tournament game. I am playing a variation of the Philidor defense described in Jerry Van Rekom’s “The Black Lion”. The transition to the middlegame is marred by a White blunder. Afterwards, there is interesting imbalances with White having multiple pieces for a Rook and Pawns.. The endgame should be drawn, but White did not know the proper defense.
Long ago I put Pandolfini’s Endgame Course into a pgn file. Then played against Shredder set at full strength until I thoroughly knew the endgame under study. This is endgame #186.
The variations and move symbols are Houdini’s (1.5 w32), diagnosed with ‘Scid vs PC’ at 10 seconds per ply. The verbal comments are my thoughts during the game and my interpretations of the analysis provided by Houdini. The score chart is at the bottom of this entry.
While reading some of my fellow chess bloggers' postings, the September 27th post of Robert Pierson’s on The Chess Improver made me reconsider my chess book selections. Looking at the Chess Books that have Helped Me the Most (see bottom of this blog), it is apparent that the most useful books for me in my (almost) 200 book collection were not written by Grandmasters, but by authors closer to the Expert level. Maybe Grandmasters do not know how to teach to the lower class (1200-2000 range) audience. With that in mind, I read the previews & recommendations on amazon.com, then ordered “Secrets of a Grandpatzer: How to Beat Most People and Computers at Chess” by Kenneth Mark.
If this is true, why didn’t someone tell me or if someone did, why didn’t I listen? If you see these books appear in my ‘Most Helped’ list, then know that I learned something quite important.
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