Greetings, and welcome to 10,000 Hour Chess! The goal of this site is to chronicle my path of improvement in the game of chess from the perspective of a beginning player. I've been playing off and on for about 3 months, but have just started to to take the game "seriously." To give you an idea of where I'm at, I'm a 1328 Standard player on Chess.com, and have a USCF Quick Rating (no regular rating yet) of 1300P3 (I've played 3 games). That USCF rating is probably GREATLY exagerated, as I will discuss in a later post!

The format of this blog is going to be that I play a game on Chess.com or at the St. Louis Chess & Scholastic Center (assuming I can write the damn moves down correctly!). I will then self annotate the game, run it through a computer (Fritz 13), and then post the game using the embed function on Chess.com. I will also randomly post other musings, i.e. what books I'm reading to improve, online tools, and whatever else I think might be interesting! So without further ado, here is the first game!

Opponent (1192) vs. Carde99 (1328)

Live Chess Chess.com August 15, 2012

So there we go.  Please feel free to comment below if you saw something I did not, or if you want to play a game or anything of the like.

Chess Books I'm Reading:
Winning Chess Strategy for Kids by Jeff Coakley
A First Book of Morphy by Frisco Del Rosario

Chess Tools I'm Currently Using:
Chesstempo.com (great tactical programs, and 2 endgames for free a day)
Chess Tactics Server (factors "time" in your answers for practicing quick recognition)
Fritz 13
Chess.com