There is a few bloggers around (like Stratedy Fiend or DeepGreen) who has published their chess goals for the next year. I am going to play ape and here are my chess goals for 2010.

The most important one is to train chess regularly. Now I am in a stage when I train chess only if a) I have a free time (hard to find when you have a family, job and try to start your own business) and b) I overcome my laziness. Which is really not good. I will find some fix time, which will be dedicated to chess only. There is no chance to improve my game significantly without a serious training.

One thing is connected to chess training. It is a training log. Until now I don’t have any. But as a sub-goal I have a task to create and keep my training log.

Improve my endings. Was not said a lot about the importance of this stage of a chess game? Remember about it next time when you blunder in ending after 4 hours battle…

Finishing extending my opening repertoire. It is important to be able to play more than one-two openings. Firstly, you will learn new schemes and you will be able to understand chess better and secondly, the opponents will have harder task to prepare themselves for a game with you.

Play an official tournament where one game will be played each day. I have never attended such a tournament, all “my” tournaments so far were about one games weekly or so. I believe playing one game per day 9 days in a row is a complete different experience and I want to try it.

And regarding my ELO rating. No matter of what my rating will be in January 2010, I would  like to add another 50 points during the next year.

As the last goal I have something secret at the moment. But you, readers of my blog, will reveal it as soon as I complete it ;)

OK, these are my goals. Do you have your own chess goals for 2010?

White to move.

White to move

White to move.

Last few days I was pretty busy at my work and also with another project, which I run, so I did not have too much time to play chess. The only game, which I played, was the ninth round of our club tournament. My opponent was a bit weaker (about 40 ELO points less than me), but tough old man. I like him because of his stubbornness, although it is very hard to play against him.

And the course of our games was exactly like that. Very very touhg game. At the beginning I gained an advantage in development of pieces, but as the position was closed and I was not able to find the right way how to open it, the opponent equalized.

Then I got an exchange, but it was a double-edged profit. Opponent’s bishop pair became very active and he created a passed b-pawn. I was able to exchange one his bishop and to fix another one to guard the pawn. And still having an extra exchange I was looking for winning the game.

At the position below my opponent’s flag fell down. Although he told me after the game that it should be a draw, I think that white can daringly hope for a win. What is your opinion? How would you evaluate the final position? BTW: Black to move.