After years of going it alone in my chess training, I’ve decided to take some lessons. Back as a kid I took private lessons for my French Horn, so somehow the thought of private lessons is inextricably linked with a dark basement and the smell of cat pee. This was different. My teacher, International Master Vojislav Milanovic (voja on ICC), lives in Belgrade, Serbia. We connected via Skype for voice and used ICC to review positions — not a trace of cat pee or dark basement about the whole experience. 
I’ve had only one lesson so far, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
dkappe
After a long break, I’ve started up on the Chess Trainer again. The latest release adds a larger board, a new test for improving your chess vision (where can a queen attack King and Rook and safely take the rook on the next move?), and fixed a few typos. I also removed the Opening Trainer, as there are other free and commercial tools out there that do a better job.
Drop me a comment if you find the tool useful.
dkappe
Chess databases like ChessBase or Chess Assistant or the Open Source SCID are nice tools for chess study, but there are some online databases that can serve in a pinch. You can’t search for a particular pawn structure or material balance as you can with a desktop chess database, but you can search millions of games for a particular position or explore an opening tree with victory percentages based on the actual games.
Here is a collection of online chess databases that I use from time to time. Enjoy.
Read more…
dkappe
I’ve decided to start posting some of my chess doing, book reviews, games, etc., under this project. For anyone interested, I used to publish Chess Space, sort of a Yahoo directory for chess resources and software, back in the early 90’s, so my connection with the web and chess goes back a ways.
dkappe
