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After you are satisfied with the repertoire you have selected, and are studying it in an ongoing way (and practicing/testing it in blitz and/or offhand games, perhaps), as much as your time and inclination allows, it's time to think about:

3. Your form as a player (and person):

Even before you enter a tournament, any number of factors may work against your having good chess form. Examples:
[1]- poor diet
[2]- sleep poorly during tournaments, or in general ...

The following (both Parts 1 & 2) is based partly on old chesstalk posts of mine:

How does a player prepare his openings or prepare for games? Much has been written about these subjects, but I will try to sum up what I think is some very useful advice for players below grandmaster level especially.

First, before thinking about tournament play, try to figure out if you have a suitable repertoire. To check this, or to build a custom made repertoire from scratch, first ...

So the CFC's quarterly meeting is going on now. This is the first time in 10+ years I've not been involved in a meeting, which is a bit strange!

Anyway some thoughts.

First of all, the decline in participation seems to be continuing. Perhaps it's partly due to there not being extremely controversial items up for discussion, but 2 1/2 days into the meeting there are only 16 voting members signed in. That's out of a total of 62 current voting members (there are a few vacant ...

Sorry for the recent lack of activity here, I've been more sick than usual this past week! I'll have my thoughts on the CFC meeting tomorrow.


White to move, Mate in 5.

For the first time I ran into some time trouble and while I was worse in the ending perhaps with more time (or if I was more comfortable playing fast) I may have held the game.

My performance rating for the event was 1865 which was not quite as high as I wanted to see (I want to be seeing 1900+ performances). However according to the ratings calculator it should be enough to bump me over 1800, which is one step closer to my short-term goal of being a Class-A player by my next birthday. ...