Yet another chess improvement blog

I had a very short and uneventful chess career about 20 years ago.  I learned the moves as a kid and played occasionally but nothing serious until I got to high school where I joined our chess club.  I had pretty mediocre results and finished with about 20 rated games as a Class E player.  Like a lot of new players, I pretty much had no idea what I was doing or how to learn what I was doing.  The strongest player on our team was about 1600 strength.

We had a copy of Modern Chess Openings so I set out to memorize that since I was terribly afraid of going wrong in the opening and losing.  To choose my opening repertoire, I did the most logical thing possible; looked at what current World Champ Garry Kasparov was playing.  He was the champ so they had to be the best openings right?  So I set out to memorize the Ruy Lopez, King's Indian and Sicilian Defense.  This worked out about as well as you would expect.

After HS, I bought a few chess books and tried to study.  The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, Pandolfini's Endgame Course, Winning Chess Tactics, Winning Chess Strategy & Comprehensive Chess Course Vol I & II.  The Alburt books was were I learned I should be concentrating on tactics and endgames, not memorizing openings.  So I had a better idea of what I should be studying, but not how to study and retain the information I had learned.  After another tournament of mediocre results against other Class E players, I stopped playing.

So here I am.  For those who don't know, the blog name is a reference to the classic Saturday Night Live skit featuring Jim Belushi doing the Bobby Knight version of a chess coach.  Unfortunately the entire clip doesn't seem to be available online, but you get a good idea what it was about.