September 5

I can spend hours on the tactics trainer (and I have). I can read books (and I have). I can hang out on chess forums, study openings, watch videos and listen to analysis of GM games (done it all).

But if I've got a chess board in front of me and I still impulsively and immediately throw out the first decent-looking move that catches my eye, I'm not going to get any better.

Honestly, in the last few months, I've gotten better at chess. But I think even more important than that is that I've gotten a better understanding of how far I have to go. I used to think that I needed to stop making blunders and memorize a few openings and I'd be ready for expertise. But the more I study, the more I realize how far I have to go.

I have two games to post tonight, and I don't have access to the PGNs right now so I'll post them later. One shows how much better I have gotten, and one shows how much old bad habits still plague me.

First and foremost is discipline. I have to train myself to have a thought process (hopefully a good one, but even a mediocre one would be better than) and I have to use it on Every. Single. Move.

A lot of this thought process is cribbed from the excellent ICC member video lessons of Dan Heisman (http://danheisman.home.comcast.net/~danheisman/Main_Chess/chess.htm). I've toyed with the idea of hiring a chess tutor a few times, but I really can't afford it. I can't even imagine the look on my face if I told my wife that I wanted to hire one of the cheaper tutors on ICC (as low as $25/hour) for an hour a week, let alone what she would do if I wanted to hire Mr. Heisman at $75/hour. Put that on the "if I ever had a secret rich uncle who left me everything" list.

Here's what I'm trying to do:
1) Check the checks. Both mine and his. I want to examine every move that would put his king in check and every response that would put mine and check, and see where that leads.

2) See what everyone is up to. I want to look through each of his pieces, with the most active first and going down the list, and see what they are immediately threatening to do (I still fail to notice bishops on one side of the board staring down one of my undeveloped rooks from time to time, for example).

3) Look for potential tactical weaknesses on my side and his. Are any pieces in line with the king? Are any pieces in line to be forked? Are multiple pieces protected by the same guard, and is that guard attackable?

4) If there are no winning checks, no obvious threats and no tactics to be played, I want to consider the position and see what puts my opponent under the most pressure or relieves it from me.

From those four thoughts, I want to develop a list of "candidate moves" and consider each of them, rather than just rashly playing the first one that looks remotely decent.

For the next few weeks, I almost don't even care about wins and losses. I just want to drill that process into my head until I don't even have to think about it anymore. I want it to be like learning to drive: You have to force yourself to watch all the dials and keep the car going straight down the road when you first start out. After you get comfortable, it's all second-nature and you just do it without thinking about it.

Some of the challenge here is the nature of online chess. It's hard to take it seriously and focused. If I were at an OTB tournament for which I'd paid an entry fee, I'd have one game in front of me that round and nothing else to be thinking about. At home on my couch, I can have the TV on in the background or a crying baby in my arms, and even if I lose, oh well, I can have a new game started in 30 seconds or less. I can also keep playing when I'm tired and know I should stop. That's no excuse for sloppy play, but I hope that once I've mastered my thought process, I'll find more formal settings even easier to play in.

The other main point is that the tactics training is beginning to work. I see combinations now that I wouldn't have dreamed of a few months ago, when I thought I knew it all and just had to quit making blunders and master some openings. Granted, there is sometimes the frustration that puzzles situations rarely occur in real games, and that if they do, it's not as if a sign flashing "mate in 3" starts blinking above the board. (I know I'm hardly the first bad chess player to express this frustration).

In other good news, my copy of Modern Chess Openings arrived in the mail today, less than a week after I bought it on Ebay. I can't believe how fast that turned around. Here's hoping it helps!