Measures of improvement

To review your own games is excellent training. I like to look back at old games to get a better understanding of my improvement. Recently, I started to create a “Top 5 list” of all my OTB (“Over-the-Board”) games. I think such a list might be useful as a measure of your improvement. How? Well, one idea is to set goals such as: “At least one of my next ten games should make it into my Top 5 List”

Rating Improvement is of course a simply measure of improvement but the thing is that you can play the best chess of your life without winning a single game! The Top 5 List does not necessarily consist of won games.

Please note that making in into the Top 5 List is quite demanding if you have played a lot of games. A simple but crude estimate of the chance for a single game to make it into the list is “5/N”, where N = the total number of your games from where the Top 5 is created

Tactics Trainer is my Friend! A Generous Friend!

I just bumped my All Time High at the Chess.com Tactics Trainer a bit. It is a Great Site but all ratings seem to be bloated. My personal best at the tactics Trainer is 2000+ and I am nowhere near that good OTB.

Endgames!

Will I ever get those simple endgames into my head? I saw this one at www.beginchess.com and it is rather frustrating! "Distant Opposition" as in "the kings forming a square on the board where all corners have the same color" is just alien to me. What am I missing?