Been doing some thinking about the upcoming "Best of" Chess Carnival for January 2012, with my intended submissions arranged from the easiest to hardest category to decide on.
1. Best Game?
I'll go with my final round game from the Denker Tournament of Champions. Several reasons: the tournament result mattered personally (by winning I achieved a 50% score for the tournament); the overall game quality is high (for someone at the Class level); and I was able to find an original, winning idea while also calculating how to avoid a series of threats from my opponent which could have turned the game around. Accurately calculating and evaluating my opponent's potential moves has been a traditional weak point in my thought process, so this game is an example of what I am capable of on a good day (with the idea of emulating it in the future to create more such good days).
2. Best Post?
This is of course highly subjective; objectively speaking, this would best be determined by the readership's opinion, if that were really possible. That said, the "best" post in terms of it being the most meaningful/useful one for me was in fact the first blog post, Setting the Scene. The creation of this blog and its inaugural post both signified and manifested a new commitment to a serious program of chess training. We'll see where it leads.
Separately, from the potentially meaningless statistics department: the most read post as of today is Openings Selection - Initial Considerations, which is also in a multiple-way tie for the most commented post.
3. Best Post on Another Blog?
(Also known as the "Best Post EVAH" category)
Gotta go with the largest pseudo-flame war ever on chess improvement blogs: Shy Guest Blogger (from Elizabeth Vicary's blog). Note the ironic post title.
Plenty of other internet wackiness and mayhem of course exists on blogs/sites devoted to chess politics and other controversial developments involving the sport/game/art. The chess improvement community isn't usually a good match for this sort of thing - there really aren't very many things to potentially argue forcefully about and everybody agrees that improvement is a good thing. Nonetheless, a wide range of interesting folks showed up to the above highly entertaining and sometimes informative exchange (90 comments as of today).
These are all very good choices ChessAdmin. Personally, I think that your Blundercats post is my absolute favorite from these pages but that just betrays my preferences for creative writing and humour :)
ReplyDeleteIt is a good thing that I do not attempt to inflict my humor upon the chess community on a regular basis.
ReplyDeletei like your blog. i am limited in how far i can go here, or dig deep, but as an intuitive person, it all smells good. peripatetically at a glance, its clear to me you are up to good stuff. thank you.
ReplyDeletea word to the wise. please if i might humbly suggest, go into your dashboard, to settings, its not too hard to find, set up your blog so the last twenty or one hundred, forget what it allows, but shown. no one wants to click, click into history, but rather, page down and see the last year or dozen posts, etc. my advise is maximal.
if you go to my blog, you will see how this works.
i wish you god bless.
dk
ps, forgot to mention, i have been actively running my club blog, in a real way, but this is a practical matter, less artistic, but you will nevertheless see the same familiar touch:
sorry, no time or patience to embed now, but simply:
http://westorangechessclub.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the comment. I've looked at your personal chess blog periodically in the past, good to hear that the club blog is being actively maintained, I'll plan to go check it out.
ReplyDeleteRe: the blog display, whenever an Aquarium-generated game is posted, it for whatever reason causes all posts beneath it to vanish from the main page. I haven't posted one of those in a while, though, so maybe I'll bump up the initial page post display number a bit. That said, my personal preference is to not have a huge chain of posts to scroll through.
Hi again Chess Admin,
ReplyDeleteThanks much for posting this! I have put up the post to place the links for the "Best of!" at The Best Of! Chess Blogging Carnival. Deadline is January 27. Hit the link for more details.
Also, let's play another game soon!
Best regards,
RP