Philidor Defense (13), & daily study regimen

Today’s game is from the third round of the initial Lowry Grand Prix series. I was paired against a young man from our sister chess club in Augusta, GA. In the early middlegame, I overlooked a tactic that left me with doubled, isolated center pawns. Later, a series of exchanges ended with a royal Knight fork, which precipitated my resignation.

To summarize, a list of what I need to improve:

Tactics – The Knight movements seem to confuse as I tend to look only on where a Knight can reach with its initial jump, and overlook what threats exist after that jump is made.

Blunders – In both of the tactical mistakes, I am not analyzing far enough during either the move-choosing
phrase or in the blunder-checking phrase.

 

Current daily study regimen (2-3 hours is a typical day):

Tactics – 10 puzzles per day from chesstempo.com using a non-timed set of problems. The difficulty level spans both sides of my current USCF rating. My goal is to solve a majority of the problems with an average time of under 3 minutes. If/when that occurs I will raise the difficulty level.

Study – 20 minutes per day studying Modern Chess Strategy by Ludek Pachman. In that time, I can usually cover 5 pages. The first pass of the book should take 2 months. The examples are in a Shredder pgn file. 

Endgames – 15 minutes per day working through the problems from Practical Chess Endings by Irving Chernev. The book contains 300 problems and a normal morning covers 2-3 problems. The problems are loaded into ‘Scid vs PC’ with Houdini defending at full strength and 6 seconds/move.

Twice-a-week game days – either a chess club tournament or against a suitable opponent from Chessmaster 10. CM10 is set for G45/3. If the games are quickly over, I will annotate them the same day

On non-game days – 45 minutes per day playing through master games or annotating my games. For master games, I am using a free program called Guess The Move from https://sites.google.com/site/fredm/ which provides instant feedback on the quality of my move attempts. The master games are from A First Book of Morphy by Frisco Del Rosario This is a new program for me with the goal of practicing my thought process on every move. In addition, 15 minutes per day reviewing, updating and practicing my opening repertoire using the free Chess Positional Trainer.

Extra – I am solving or attempting to solve 2 problems each day from Chess Exam and Training Guide by Igor Khmelnitsky. I am currently in the second half of the book and should complete it this month. The result will rate my level of play in 12 separate chess areas in USCF equivalence.