Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Red-Letter Day

My geometry teacher would often called exceptionally good days "red-letter-days."  Today was a red-letter-day for me.  In fact, it may become the an official RockyRook holiday - to be celebrated from today hence-forth!

After over 17,700 blitz attempts on ChessTempo, for the first time, I crossed the 1700 threshold.  Ok ... I may have crossed it a long, long time ago at some point when my rating deviation was fluctuating like bull-rider, but in recent memory and for as long as I've been consistently solving tactics, I've never crossed this threshold.  I've come oh-so-close before ... flirting with it while getting into the 1690's, but I'd always plummet back down to 1660 or lower.

But today ... I smashed through!  In fact, last week at this time, after I had done my daily 20 problems, I was sitting at 1645.  Then I went on some kind of rampage busting all the way up to 1687 by Sunday.  Monday January 9 was a busy day and I didn't have time at night since we went to a BCS party (way to go Alabama!!) So today, I had to do my 20 for yesterday plus my 20 for today.  I went 36-4 and broke through that glass ceiling and then managed to stay above 1700 for a few problems.  After tonight's session, I'm sitting at 1705.

The lucky problem was number 55162.



*UPDATE*

So I got a little curious ... it just seemed to me that this couldn't have been my first time over 1700 (actively speaking) ... and so I bought a Gold Membership to see the full history (I had bought a membership before, but I had let it expire ... I figured it was time to pay up again anyway ... I really love the site).  Sure enough, I was over 1700 a few times.  In fact, the most recent time was just last year ... around the May/June time period.  That must have been several hundred problems ago.

Oh well ... so I get a little enthusiastic about my rating ...

Let's see if I can maintain it above 1700 a bit longer this time.

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