Entry One

Howdy, for those stumbling by accidentally this is the blog of Thomas Johansson. A common name in Sweden,  I'm the one who's written three chess books over the years: The King's Gambit for the Creative Aggressor (Kania 1998), The Fascinating King's Gambit (Trafford 2005) and The Fascinating Reti Gambit (Lulu 2006).

In January 2010, I tried correspondence chess for the first time, and surprisingly it went so well that I thought I'd share the games and experience here. Partly for the benefit of those chess players who have never tried corr before but might like to try - and partly to show off of course! ;)

I'm playing 2nd board for the chesspub team (Champions League 2010 Group C), as I'm been hanging at the chesspub forum for years. Before the tournament I thought 50% would be a reasonable aim, as I thought it must be extremely difficult to win even a single game in corr, with both players having access to books, databases, engines, and whatever else that might help them...

But to my surprise, corr chess has turned out to be not too different from an over the board tournament, except that the games are played over a longer time frame and tactical blunders, time trouble errors and forgotten theory are not as important as in OTB (or why not simply call it "blunder chess"?). There are still mistakes to be made - it's impossible to win without them, but they are usually easier to see after you've seen what happened in the game...

I've had a homepage at hem.passagen.se/tjmisha for more than ten years by now (it's still there, no need to check). But it has a lot of pop-ups from the hostdomain and the last few years I've hardly updated it.

Hopefully, this blog will be easier to maintain once I get the hang of it. And if so I might write about other chess stuff as well. But for starters I will begin with my first twelve corr games ever, one at a time in the order they became decided. A couple of  them are quite long, so I might leave off at an important decision and give you a week to start your engines and see if you arrive at the same move I did or at a different solution.

I'll try to add a new game every Sunday evening (which is the time my broadband seems to work best) - until I run out of games. And then we'll see what else I might write about...