Online Training: First session - marathon

Online Training: First session - marathon

Originally uploaded by gilachess.
I played exclusively bullet chess yesterday night at WCN.
That’s 2 minutes for each player. Well it’s not really conscious chess training. More like making reflex moves as fast as your mind can translate into mouse movements by your hands. I know many people feel that playing this is totally rubbish and will hurt your chess. I don’t believe so. Went to the queitest cyber cafe in OUG..
My aim : Improve my clock handling.
I’ve been losing too many games in the allegros because I just couldn’t automatically switch from 1st gear to 3rd gear when the clock runs down to about 5 minutes. In a few totally winning positions I just sat and thought and thought till my flag dropped. What a waste! After the game there’s no point saying “I could have won but lost on time”.
How many times have you heard players say that? Whether you got checkmated or whether your flag falls, it’s still a loss. A big zero!
However at the cyber cafe, I got greedy and added a second agenda to my plan:
To push my rating from lowly 1333 to 1500.
I was doing pretty well after an hour winning games and pushing my rating to over 1450. It didn’t help that Friday was Gold Members’s day - which meant everybody can play unlimited rated games for that night. The “Silver” account that I bought for one month only entitled me 12 rated games per day. So without a limitation in the number of games, I continued to play more than 12 rated games…
Of course you can guess what happened next. I started losing and my rating started to fall. When it reached below 1400, I had already spent well over 3 hours at the cyber cafe. I felt very unsatisfied.
Now I know how gamblers feel when they lose. I acted like one and gambled away another 3 hours of bullet chess. Of course the rating went up and down like a yo yo. In the end, I just gave up chasing for the elusive 1500 mark.My rating was below 1400 and it was 3.30 am in the morning!! I had spent 6 and a half hours in the cyber cafe!! What was I thinking?? Being a computer programmer, I had already spent a 10 hours at the office staring at the computer screen. I’m going to go blind or at least it felt like that leaving the cyber cafe 
I now have a better understanding why so many teenagers are addicted to online games. These kids that were there with me in the cyber cafe at 3 am were playing some form of counter strike games where they run around shooting at each other. There was also some multiplayer strategy games like WarCraft which was very popular (which I was also addicted to some time back)
In the midst of sounds bullets and explosions, there’s this one person playing chess. But the addiction is all the same and it is a big danger I must avoid. So now I have to limit myself to just an hour every session.
One thing I wasn’t happy was I didn’t copy the archived games back home.
Back to the results. I can now quickly switch to this mode of playing almost mindless and half decent reflex moves. Will it help in any way?
Well we’ll have to wait and see when I play in future allegros.
Tomorrow is the Seremban Parade Open
Today is the Kuala Kubu Open but I won’t be playing or even reporting on it as I’ll be recovering from last night’s excursion at home.
Hopefully the organisers will send us the results.
See you guys in Seremban Parade tomorrow. Or if you are not playing see you here on this blog where I will be reporting on that event.
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