Day 21

If I finish Circle 1 early, I plan on studying some openings/endings/positional concepts and play a good set of games on Pogo, Yahoo, or GameKnot. Today I did 10 problems from "365 Ways to Checkmate." I also might just take a break from my 6-Circles training and just do some separate studying and chess playing. Hopefully, this will keep me fresh, improve other aspects of my game, and give me a break from tactics.

Like many of my fellow de la Mazan bloggers, I feel that Maza's system isn't perfect and needs some tweaking by its users. This belief was backed up by some messages on Yahoo's Chess Improvement Forum. I plan on looking at the USCF records to see if it is true that de la Maza only made small rating gains in the 20 to 30 tournaments he participated in one year. A message on the site also asserted that de la Maza had 3 or 4 chess teachers as a teenager, which helped him gain a base of chess knowledge and asseses (correctly) that his weakness was tactics. It is becoming clearer that de la Maza might not be the saint that many think he is, and that much of the truth has been obscured or untold in many aspects of this situation.

75 days left
1 hr. completed, 19 total
815 out of 1533, 718 left