Richie on the Rise

Richie has been scoring well in his recent tournaments, bringing his rating up to around 1200. Interestingly it had fallen to around 1000, after incorporating some different openings into his play. We spent most of our effort over the summer in understanding middle game concepts better and actually did almost no tactics practice. The shift in focus seems to have taken awhile to adjust to but it seems that he's gradually assimilating the new knowledge.

Interestingly, when I ask if he thinks about the concepts we've studied during his games he says he's "not sure" which indicates that at this age (nearly 7) there is still not much of an "internal dialogue" going on in his mind about longer term plans or positional considerations. His move choices are largely based on direct calculation of lines or some kind of application of rules/guidelines that he's internalized to a subconscious level.

As a side benefit of our studies over the summer, I seem to have improved around 150 points or so on ICC at blitz. Since I went many years without any significant blitz improvement I can only speculate the recent studies were directly responsible for the improvement.