Fall Cleaning

Went through my links and moved some folks to the M.I.A. spot due to either 404 or inactivity.
Added a few new players to the list of Knights Errant, Smith-Morra, Phorku, and DutchDefence, Welcome to family, and have fun!
I even played around with some font and color settings trying to make things easier to see. The color changes will probably continue to happen until I find a nice even balance.


My opening training is paying off in unexpected ways. Even in openings that I haven't studied I'm beginning to find myself reaching favorable positions on a more frequent basis. I seem to have lost that tendency to saddle myself with structural weaknesses and inactive pieces. At the club this past Thursday I would even go as far as saying that I played my best "positional" games ever.
There weren't any tactical fireworks, because my opponent tried his best to play openings that are about as exciting as watching paint dry, which is his usual approach during our games. He tries to keep things as quiet as possible and I normally try to drag him into the deep end of the tactics pool. I'm always joking with him telling him that he would rather push a pawn than mate someone. Typically I try to blow things apart, but this time I decided to give him all the rope he wanted. I allowed him to over extend his position, all the while maneuvering my pieces into locations that allowed me create multiple attack points simply by shifting threats until his pieces literally tripped over each other. As soon as they stumbled I would pounce and win a key pawn and grind him off the board. Honestly it was as satisfying if not more so than crushing someone tactically.