Time is always running faster than expected and now it is already 6 months ago since I got interested in chess. It would be nice if I would have a quantitative measure for my progress like a runner stopping the time for a one-mile run. Of course, there are all kinds of rating systems for chess. However, I still did not play enough rated games to be able to see a statistically significant trend. Nevertheless I feel that all the time I spend studying chess was not wasted. First of all, I still enjoy it (which is quite a surprise to myself, because I stick only to very few things). Secondly, I can see some light at the end of the tunnel: At the beginning, I tended to drop pieces even in the ultra-slow correspondence chess games I play. But lately I feel that the number of outright blunders in my games decreases slowly. I believe that this is due to the time I spend doing one-move tactical problems over and over again. At least I hope so, because I am still afraid that I will commit a series of terrible blunders as soon as I submit this article.

Three months ago, I set a few goals for the future. For instance, I vowed to spend less time surfing chess web sites. I am still wasting too much time searching the cyberspace for the "magic cure" that will transform me into a chess master. I do know that it is more about hard work and patience, but well...

On the positive side, I did more tactics puzzles and worked my way through a bunch of annotated master games, although I pretty much stopped this practice two weeks ago due to lack of time. I also started to use the same openings in all of my games. But so far I have only an opening for playing white (Colle System) and a defense against 1. e4 (Scandinavian). I chose these mainly because they are supposed to be relatively easy to learn and did not spend much time on playing these lines well enough and I am still learning the traps by trial and error. Just challenge me (sciurus) for a game at ChessWorld to set a few traps for me or just to have a fun game!

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