Nova Daily - 6 March 2025

Hi!

The quiet day is almost over. I must say I've quite enjoyed not worrying about playing a game today. I also decided against doing analytical work today. There'll be other opportunities for this.

Ultimately I can afford an occasional day off, even for the strict training schedule I've decided to subject myself to. I indicated at the start of the year that I'd want to play and annotate 300 rapid games this year. Playing daily while taking the Sundays off, I'd still have room for 13 free days. On average that's once a month, but I tend to want to keep going. I guess I'll save them for when I'll be travelling.

The fact that I didn't play a rapid game today doesn't mean that I did nothing. Quite the contrary. I did write, but I wrote on something else that has nothing to do with chess, and it's not suited for sharing here on my blog.

But other than spending a lot of time away from the board, I did work on my chess today. I looked into a recommendation by Kevin about the Caro-Kann, and I'll be adding this to my studies. I've solved some of my rated puzzles correctly and managed to get my puzzle rating up a few points. I won my Puzzle Battle, and had an okay score in my 3-minute Rush.

After that, I spent most of my chessing day playing 3+0 blitz. I did end up playing more games than I had initially told myself I'd do. Instead of keeping it to 7 games, I played 13 simply because I was chasing a new peak at 2250. The worst I did was lose two games in a row, so I didn't experience too much tilt. And I managed to restrain myself and stopped playing when I got to 2250.

Blitz tactics

Blitz is 99% tactics, so it's always a good thing to do a set of simple tactics (double attacks, pins, elimination of the defence, mate in a few) before you sit down to play. A set of 15-30 tactics is a good size, but you can do as many as you see fit. Rush and Battle included, I solved about 80 puzzles  correctly before I started to play my blitz session.

I'll post 10 of the tactics that came by as puzzles here. Sometimes it was my turn, sometimes it was my opponent's turn, and in one of the positions I adjusted the board a little to enable the tactic. None of the tactics are of excruciating difficulty.

The order is a loose and completely arbitrary combination of chronological order and progressively increasing difficulty. I won't be giving any hints: during the game you don't get hints either.

Most of these tactics were missed, by the way. To add an extra layer of fun, feel free to guess which ones were missed.

Puzzle 1:

Puzzle 2:

Puzzle 3:

Puzzle 4:

Puzzle 5:

Puzzle 6:

Puzzle 7:

Puzzle 8:

Puzzle 9:

Puzzle 10:

How well did you do? Let me know your score in the comments.