Welcome to SquirrelChess.com!

As I started playing chess online I thought this would be a rather unsocial hobby. While many chess players come and go and I hardly play more than a pair of games against the same person, I am always pleased to play chess with a few "regulars". DreadPirateJosh is one of the first persons I played chess with and I still remember that some of his encouraging words helped me not to give up. Here is a game from our latest encounter. Most of the pieces came off the board quickly and I found myself in a promising endgame position, one pawn up. After a few careful miscalculations, however, the pirate managed to sneak a pawn to promotion and I resigned. I tried my best to understand this endgame better. While I have now an idea where I went wrong, I still don't have the skill to convert my one pawn advantage into a victory (I tried a few times against the computer), but may be t=it was a draw in the first place, anyway. Comments, particularly from more experienced endgame aficionados, welcome! (hint, hint, ...)

I updated the chess games database I am using and put the new version in the downloads section. It is a collection of more than 578000 chess games I put together from various sources on the Internet. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge TWIC for the latest master games and the chess archive of the U Pittsburgh for older chess games. The database is available both in SCID and PGN format. The old version got a few hundred hits, so I hope some people who don't want to spend the money for one of the commercial databases might find this useful.

In my previous post, I mentioned that the chess blogosphere seemed to be more quiet than it used to be. Right after writing this, I stumbled over a whole series of interesting posts and discussions. Just today, Chessloser writes about getting stronger (both literally and at chess). He discusses, if a book aimed for players above a certain rating is appropriate for lower rated players.

I have been thinking about similar issues lately. I started to work with a chess coach a while ago, studying basic chess strategy and endgames. Does this make me a better player? Well, somewhat. To a certain extend, I believe that higher players would get more out of these lessons than I do. I still struggle too much with losing to simple tactical shots to be able to use concepts like pawn structures effectively. Don't blame my coach for this, though - we discussed this before we started the lessons and he warned me that they are designed for slightly higher rated players. It all boils down to knowledge and having the skill to use it. I might know now more about strategy, but my tactical skills are too weak to effectively use my new knowledge.

You might wonder now why I pay somebody for chess lessons if they are not efficient for me. Well, first of all, I do think they make me a (somehow) better chess player. I actually start to see some improvements in my correspondence chess games, where I have more time to check my moves for tactical mishaps and therefore generally blunder less than during "live" games. But for the most part, the knowledge gained from studying material that is a little too advanced for me makes chess more enjoyable. For instance, it helps me to understand annotated master games better, enabling me to appreciate the moves of chess masters more than before. And after all, I both play and study chess to have fun.