Won my game last night.

Finally, a victory. Unfortunately, it was against much weaker opposition. I didn't use even 10 minutes of my time. We played the Dragon - he didn't play it quite right and I had a little room for improvement, but that much didn't take too long. Then he made a mistake that dropped a pawn with a second pawn falling soon after (no thought for those, very simple calculation), but he had a little counterplay that got him a pawn back. We were, at that point, simplified down to a two rooks vs two rooks endgame with my rooks a bit more active, but that is still fairly drawish. I was preparing to burn through a lot of time grinding it out. But... my opponent agreed to trade off one of the rooks and it left him in the unenviable position of either leaving me free to terrorize the 7th rank with my rook - he'd get his rook over to my side as well, though I'd get the best of the situation - or trade the last pair of rooks into a dead lost pawn endgame. If I were him, I'd choose to keep the rooks on the board even though it doesn't look pretty at all. He chose to trade rooks into the pawn endgame either of us could probably play in our sleep. So I ended up not having to think much. I could tell by the way he went into the pawn endgame that he definitely thought he had better chances there than in the rook endgame. 3+2 vs 2+2 just isn't going to work, though.

BONUS: I delivered a pawn checkmate.

That was a rather horrible game.

I played the other day. It was a terrible game. I walked into a well-telegraphed trap which lost an exchange. Prior to that, I had made a few rather unhelpful positional moves, but I would have had easy equality as Black if I hadn't dropped the exchange. Oh well. Next time. I will try to play in a tournament next month, as I'll be free every Sunday and might have some spare change.

I'm getting back into the swing of things a little now that I'm done with statistics/applied math grad school applications. I just have to wait for results. I presume I may have less time for chess if I get in. Or more. Hard to tell.

In other news, I'm also playing skat a little bit again. Not in person, though, which is unfortunate. I've never played in person. I'm also a rather indifferent player, but it's fun to do on the Ipod.

I have not been playing much lately.

I have been busy. I'm allegedly working a lot and I've decided that I might go back to school for a PhD in statistics (at a good school, of course) rather than stopping at a masters from this crummy school, so I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple months researching stuff, filling out applications, etc. And then there were the holidays and then some travel to a school. It's been a good time, though I do regret not playing much chess. Still, I did manage to play a little over the holidays. I've also been low on money, which makes going to tournaments a little tougher. Well, it's easy enough to justify spending $20 on a tournament once per month, really, so that's lowest on my list of excuses.

I think once I am done with applications - next week - I will have time to start playing again. I (or, rather, my wife) got an Ipod Touch, which means I have an easy way to play on the train now, too. I think the difficulties in playing on the train was the biggest thing.