Journey of a Chess dad - EP 2.
Reflecting on Week 1 and Week 2 plans
Hello Everyone,
I'm here again to share my experiences and results from Week 1.
For last week I had 3 main goals: Practicing calculations with the Woodpecker Method, Play a few rapid games + have a look at one chapter in Yusupov's Buliding up your chess book.
In short, i quickly had to realize it's not that easy to find even 1-1.5 hour in the day to practice some chess when there's a 4 months old little guy around the house and it's also around Christmas time. : )
Having said that I feel I managed to progress with the Woodpecker puzzles quite good, and could find time to play three 15+10 rapid games as well. I didn't manage to look at Yusupov's excellent book, and decided to drop it from next week plan for now as I rather concentrate fully on Woodpecker for the time being.
Woodpecker - Week 1 result
The Woodpecker book started with some 'easier' excercises and I could have a think on 188 of them last week. 181 I got right with whiich I'm pretty happy with.
The goal for next week is to maintain the number of excercises solved and hopefully the success rate as well.
| Woodpecker Cycle 1 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date of session | Minutes | Number of excercises | Points scored | % |
| 12.23. | 60 | 37 | 35 | 94,6 |
| 12.24. | 60 | 54 | 52 | 96,3 |
| 12.25. | 30 | 20 | 18 | 90,0 |
| 12.26. | - | |||
| 12.27. | 60 | 35 | 35 | 100,0 |
| 12.28. | 60 | 42 | 41 | 97,6 |
| 12.29. | - | |||
| Total | 270 | 188 | 181 | 96,3 |
Rapid games
I ended up with a 1 win - 2 lose record for the rapid games played last week. Have to say here that all 3 games went terrible and just got lucky in one of them. I haven't fully analysed the games so far, but I introduced a game analysis day in my week 2 plan and plan to return with a separate blog post on them this week.
A few takeaways:
- My time management was bad - often had less than 2 mintues after 20-30 moves. I assume I can develope on this by playing more.
- Need to have a look at my opening lines!!
- Blundered a tactic in one of the games and chose strategically wrong plans in the other two. I'll try to understand what could be the correct plans during the game analysis.
- I'll have to try and close out distractions - distracting thoughts - while playing and focus one the game.
Week 2 plan
The practice plan greatly helped last week to maintain my motivation and structure. This time I tried to be more realistic with the time allocated.
| Week 2 | ||
|---|---|---|
| 12.30. | - | Game analysis |
| 12.31. | Woodpecker (45 min) | - |
| 1.1. | Woodpecker (45 min) | - |
| 1.2. | Woodpecker (45 min) | - |
| 1.3. | Woodpecker (45 min) | - |
| 1.4. | Woodpecker (30 min) | Play two 15+10 online game |
| 1.5. | Woodpecker (30 min) | Play two 15+10 online game |
Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year,
toopszli
