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Skill Building Project #1: Chess in Italian (Week 1)
I started learning chess seriously around 20 years ago. During high school, I read a few chess books and went over hundreds and hundreds of games played by chess Grandmasters (GM). At the same time, I played rapid online chess (blitz) on websites such as Yahoo! Games. In blitz games, each player has less than…
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Chess in Italian (Week 2) Chess Expertise & Vocabulary
It’s been already two weeks since I started studying chess. During this period my rating on Lichess went up and down but stayed pretty much the same (around 2190). I’m playing mostly 3+2 and 5+3 blitz games. I continued learning and studying every day for at least one hour a day. Some days I would…
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Chess in Italian (Week 3) Puzzle Rush & Endings
During this week I started to focus more on a few endings. I noticed that I was getting good positions out of the opening and the middle game. The biggest difference in performance and many losses I had came from poor ending technique. I mean, my ending technique is not terrible, but there’s room for…
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Chess in Italian (Week 4) Handling the Unexpected
This week was atypical. Due to an emergency, I had to take care of a family member and wasn’t able to keep my one-hour sessions every day. Out of six days (the day I take my chess lesson I don’t do any practice), I practiced for an hour just one day. One other day I…
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Chess in Italian (Week 5) Self-image & Lichess Tactics
One of the topics I find especially fascinating is how our self-identity influences our performance in different skills. In the case of chess, how does our self-image affect the way we play? Is it possible that our performance depends more or less on the identity we create as we train to get better? The past…
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Chess in Italian (Week 6) Chess Psychology & Dvoretsky Endings
A couple weeks ago Andrea recommended me the book ‘The Seven Deadly Chess Sins’, by Jonathan Rowson. It’s mostly about chess psychology. Here’s an except from the book description: In this thought-provoking and entertaining book, Jonathan Rowson investigates, in his inimitable style, the main reasons why chess-players sometimes go horribly astray, focusing on the underlying…
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Chess in Italian (Week 7) Emotional Thinking in Chess
I always knew that chess is not a purely intellectual game, even though it looks like that: patterns, positions, variants, technical skills, etc. But there’s much more to that. There is a big emotional part that very often tends to be overlooked. If you have ever played online you know what I’m talking about. When…
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Chess in Italian (Week 8) Talking to Your Pieces
How do we know what to play next in a chess game? How can we tell which ones are the good movements? An interesting idea I recently learn about on ‘The Seven Deadly Chess Sins’, is talking to your pieces. It might sound strange and even a bit wacky, but stick with me for a…
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Chess in Italian (Week 9) The Art of Unlearning
A good part of how to learn something is unlearning our old ways. This is especially true with skills you learned many years (or even decades ago) in a not-very-effective way. We realize there are tons of things we could be doing better in a specific domain. That happened to me many times in my…
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Chess in Italian (Week 10) Humor in Chess
Perhaps the most important trait a player needs is a warped sense of humor.GM Tony Miles The first time I read there was humor in chess I was skeptical. How could it be funny a silent game that required concentration, calculation, and was usually played by quiet (and maybe also serious) people? It didn’t make…
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Chess in Italian (Week 11) Deep Dive in the French Defense
At the beginning of this skill building project, Andrea (my chess coach during these months) suggested I picked one opening to play with Black versus e4 and one against d4. For some reason, I’ve always enjoyed more playing king’s pawn games (those starting with e4). That’s why I looked forward so much to focus for…
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Chess in Italian (Week 12) Playing Blindfold Chess
This was the last week of the chess skill building project. The initial idea for my last lesson with Andrea was to play a couple of blitz games and then analyze them together. We did that, but decided to added something else: we would play the games without seeing the pieces (blindfold chess). There’s a…
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Chess Practice with Aimchess
Last April, I resumed my chess practice. This time, I decided to try Aimchess. It’s an impressive app that tailors exercises and training to your online games. By linking your accounts from platforms like Chess.com or Lichess.org, Aimchess analyzes your results and highlights areas for improvement. Even though this website is not as popular as…