The Ball Is Still Rolling (and small review of Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual)

Haven't posted in a bit.

Back to back OTB tournaments coming... I'll be posting games and results here. My time currently had been occupied working and basically in this time with the economy this bad, trying to be a chessmaster can arguably be digging your own grave!

I purchased Mark Dvoretsky's Analytical Manual, and this book is sheer self esteem killer. It is a very difficult book not only by its sheer analytical content, but the work on the reader's part is very demanding. If your skills in analysis are weak, then trying to analyze deeply will take much time on your part, but that is the purpose of this book really - to highlight your analytical weaknesses and fine tune your intuition.

 Just from the first article, it is easy to get lost in the complications and spend hours analyzing over 100 variations maybe 15 moves long each. A lot of the earlier games are like this - looking for a true verdict of the game because the computer often cannot. Much of that content isn't too practical if you were to take the whole game as a training method (perhaps if you are already IM/GM this might be different), but each segment of analysis can be treated as a training exercise, which the author himself duly suggests.

The more practical material of this book is in the middle of the book, where you can simply take the moves and stop at the diagrams and try to think along the lines of the titled players. This is a superb training method advocated by Mark himself and certainly much more practical. But most of this book are gems you have to unearth yourself, lazy/busy quick fix readers should try to find something else that has much more practical content, because this book does not mess around. 

To sum it up, you don't read the book, the book reads YOU.

I digress, I'll post my games this weekend.