Tuesday, April 22, 2008

My Daily Chess Habit

When things get busy at work, we're really busy. Hardly time to catch up on news, to read the blogs, or to write posts. When I'm busy my normal chess routine is severely disrupted. Which got me asking: what's your own chess routine?

Ordinarily I'm up early to catch up on regular news. After that, I take a few minutes to scan the usual big chess sites: Chessbase and TWIC, of course, and lately I've been heading over to ChessVibes and ChessDom almost without fail. Then I check out the blogs to see what people are talking about. Being a blogger, this habit is kind of important. Then I also take the time to log onto Google News and search for "chess". Most times, nothing special comes up, but that's essentially how I get those articles you read about.

At night, it's play time. It's ICC for me, although I head over to playchess.com when I can be bothered to remember. I knock off about 10 or so 1-minute games over a span of 30 minutes and that's about it. It's either off to work after that (I log in remotely) or write a quick post like this one.

Also, about once or twice a week I check my chesspublishing.com account for the latest updates. ChessPublishing is about my only other paid chess subscription, only recently signed up and I thoroughly recommend it. GM Ruslan Scherbakov's "d4-d5" section is a must read.

5 comments:

Tom Chivers said...

Um, I check my google reader for blogs, news, etc, and that's basically it! Oh, and I have two chess-related google alerts set up too.

Anonymous said...

Usually I check Chessbase, scan a few message boards and blogs, save any new puzzles/articles to work on later. In the evenings I work on the puzzles that have accumulated the past day or two. Tuesdays I'm off to the chess club, Wednesdays I try to catch Dennis Monokroussos' weekly lecture. If I have the inclination I'll watch a few lectures from one of Chessbase's Fritz-trainer DVDs, or watch one of the ChessVideos while having a meal (better than watching the depressing news or the latest idiotainment fad/sitcom). And over a month or so I play through most of the annotated games in New in Chess on a chess board, practising analyzing without moving the pieces.

--Daniel J. Andrews

tanch said...

hello tcm,

my daily routine involves a lookup on the latest games on chessgames.com + chessbase news looking for possible interesting lines/variations/refutations.

i've basically stopped playing blitz anymore either on ICC or playchess (used to have an a/c there).

i'm not sure if i should update my chesspublishing.com a/c these days. i find that i'm getting too engrossed in investigating opening theory when i should be working on other things instead.

cheers

Anonymous said...

When I tried to access ChessPub Forum recently, my access was denied, even though I was a member on the Forum. Has ChessPub recently disabled Forum Access for non-subscribers, or is it just a bug of some sort?

Note: A Message with the heading "Forbidden" comes up. Anyone know why exactly?

timhortons knight chess blog said...

I hope to observe youre game at icc but it seems that youre an incognito master, anyways im playing at icc too and learning much reading youre blog since i start writing one, more poweer to you.