Personal update July 2023

Hi everyone,

In July I resumed my puzzle solving on Chesstempo site. And I found out that I like to solve checkmate in two puzzles for fun and as brain gym. Yesterday I solved 100 of these, pretty quickly, and just to relax. Other people maybe go watch Netfl*x or use their game console to relax, or go for a walk (which I sometimes do as well, and like to do more often) but now I found puzzle solving as a kind of new mini hobby. So that is a kind of fun discovery. This is apart from my Lichess puzzle streak and puzzles on blitztactics.com

I started to donate to 365chess site again [1]. Now as donating member I can search on position, which is quite useful for me, as I like chess history and chess curiosity (I used it for the two blog sites where the GMs missed a win).

I joined a team on Lichess which is about simuls for everyone. The idea is that no matter what strength you have as a chess player, you will be able to hold a simul and be in the spotlight for an audience. Nice idea.

I decided to have a look at the Woodpecker method at Chessable again. It was a difficult journey last time I went through all the puzzles, but I remember that it helped me with my speed of spotting certain tactics.

And I think about claiming the rights on the quote "Rating is overrated". I used that already in 2015 or earlier, see here :
https://www.ficsgames.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?player=achja&action=Finger (And sorry. Please ignore the chess dot com links)

There is a lot more updates but I will stick to the chess matters only here for now :)

[1]
I know that there is chessgames dot com with some more games but I have a few issues with them.
One of them is that they block access from Tor and from some VPN providers (I do not like all the ads and tracking of websites, which is why I sometimes use Tor or VPN for some sites).
They also posted a win by Karjakin over Ivanchuk as game of the day on a memorable day for Ukraine, weird.
Comments from their staff in their forums also were not a pleasant memory for me.
Their website design is also not the most pleasant to use.

365chess dot com seem small, they manually apply changes to use settings after a donation, which can take up 24 hours. I like to donate to small groups who do good things.