Well it has been a few months since I have posted. I guess life has just gotten busy. My wife is finishing her Master's degree and my daughter learned to crawl so I have been chasing after one while supporting the other as best I can. With all of that my chess playing has taken a hit. I have only played in a few tournaments this year but at the Land of the Sky, one of the largest tournaments in North Carolina, I was able to pull out just enough wins to break 1600, the low end of the Class B. Of course, I had a few losses which dropped me back to the Class C mark, but I have tasted the next level and I think I can move back up soon.
In January I made some very drastic changes to my chess playing to see if I can advance my level of play. The first, and most drastic change, is that I no longer play 1.e4 as white. That is right, I'm now a d4 player. I don't know all of the theory behind that move so I'm just fumbling my way through but developing normally seems to work. With e4 there is so much theory that I just don't have the time or books to research 20 lines deep in every one that is out there. It is strange for me to change over but I'm doing much better now that I'm starting to see how other people play against d4.
As Black, I have settled on two defenses. I'm playing the French against 1. e4 and the King's Indian Defense against 1.d4. The French is pretty solid and the one that I have been spending the most amount of time on while the KID is one of those exciting but difficult positions to play as Black. I'm doing well so far in both. In fact, one of my favorite games I have ever played was done at a recent tournament and was a KID game. I'm going to post that here in the next week after I finish adding the rest of my annotations to it. I didn't play it perfectly, but I had such great attacking options that it is worth looking at.
I'm not sure if anyone out there is even reading this, but if so, have fun and good luck in your own games!!!
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