Friday, May 11, 2007

TGIF

Big weekend: my wife's graduation is Sunday. She is getting her Master's degree in Information Science at UNC (when it comes to college basketball, we live in a house divided). Her parents and my mom are here visiting. I'll try to sneak in some chess, as I have a league game Monday night.

In the circles front, I should finish circle 4.1 of CTB in a week (that is, Phase 4 of the program, circle 1). I have already done the problems once, but I then go through all the problems I missed until I get them right before moving on to the next mini-circle. I will likely get around 70% correct, significantly worse than Phase 3 (85% first time around), and significantly worse than I get in Level 10 of CT-Art (around 80% so far). For those thinking about doing the circles with CTB, you might consider doing circles in CT-Art level 10 before CTB Phase 4. Phase 4 of CTB is significantly harder than Phase 3.

And some sundry notes about the blogosphere:

Loomis is back in earnest, with his characteristically good chess content, and thoughtful comments on people's blogs.

The Knights are plugging along. As some of us predicted, Personal Chess Trainer seems to be a favorite amongst the newer Knights. I just bought the new 2007 version and agree with Abend that it is a significant improvement over the previous version.

Temposchlucker has a new post, which has a link to an important new scientific study of chess players. Since Tempo stopped blogging, seven new Knights have joined the party, such that there are now more third generation, post-Temposchlucker Knights than pre-tempo knights actively working the Circles. I will henceforth refer to dates as BT and PT.

Does this signal that Temposchlucker might be making a comeback to the lucrative world of blogging? I doubt it, but one can always hope.

5 Comments:

Blogger guillembaches said...

Hi! Nice blog on chess.

Do you want to share links?

My blog on chess and technology is guillembaches

Best Regards,

IM Guillermo Baches

5/12/2007 09:21:00 AM  
Blogger transformation said...

dear blue devil. bravo! what a delight to read your blog next to the pulsating late night hearthrob of the best alternative public radio in the usa cum techno-new wave retro or punk, which i get to hear once a year now, just outside of New York visiting my 80 year old Mother for mothers day, WFMU...

i am decidedly from the BT era, but greetly appreciate the much new blood of the AT era ushered in by you. if we have BT, and AT, does that mean we can have BT revival, or Post Modern AT?

new post this corner, Part III: Tolstoy: Fox or Hedgehog and the analysis of many versus fewer chess games. errrr. himm. no alcohol. Part IV follows.

hearty congrats to mrs. BDK's fine accomplishment. now you can stay home full time and focus on chess and quit your job? :)

warm regards, dk

5/13/2007 03:48:00 AM  
Blogger Jeff said...

As an owner of PCT I would be interested to hear more about PCT 2007. From the website itself its tough to see what they improved on. Is it just the excercises themselves or the delivery as well?

5/14/2007 01:16:00 PM  
Blogger Blue Devil Knight said...

Jeff: they have added two new sections, one on openings, and an annotated endgame section that explains K/P endgames. It does a pretty good job IMO.

It also has Crafty attached so you can fire it up if you don't trust their analysis. This is very helpful.

It is further reviewed here by Abend.

5/14/2007 01:35:00 PM  
Blogger likesforests said...

The built-in Crafty analysis board is a great! I use it whenever PCT disagrees with my moves to see if my move was good or bad and why.

The commented endgames section gives you another perspective on some common endings. It's no substitute for an endings book, but it's nice to have.

The openings section is worthless! For the Scandinavian it showed only one line where Black makes inferior moves and then announced: "White has advantage" ?!

Good luck with your decision. :)

5/14/2007 02:59:00 PM  

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