I am sitting at 188 games in the classical control so I need 12 more to get to my magical yet arbitrarily-chosen 200th game. It's perfectly divisible by one hundred so it must be important!
I'm going to pledge to get to 200 and try to get a winning score from it. I'll treat it like the world championship match (that coincidentally lasts 12 games in recent years) and analyze them all carefully using some of the knowledge I've picked up in the first several chapters of The Amateur's Mind.
Today, I'll try to mix in some tactics while at work and prep for a game tonight after work before I go on my bike ride. I've been throwing in some chess.com puzzles--the five free ones per day--but I'll work with chesstempo some if I can.
Tonight, I'll play game one of my world championship match and analyze afterwards. If it's instructive, maybe I can post the analysis here.
I'll be honest and say that I can get nervous when playing. I don't want to lose 9 ratings points when I'm so close to my goal because then that means two more wins before I can make it up and get back to the rating I would have been if I had just won that first game! That's not the right way to think, though. I've always said to look at each game as an opportunity to learn something, not as an opportunity to gain or lose some number of rating points. I actually need to practice what I preach.
Overall, that hesitation to take the time to play another game plus the emerging beautiful spring weather makes it harder to fire up lichess on my laptop and take an hour or two out of every evening to play. But if I focus on a simple intermediate goal of just playing games and analyzing, that should help me. So this is a committment to complete that simple task by May 1.
