About this Blog

Hello, Welcome to my Chess Blog.

My real name is Nicolas Croad and I live in Wellington, New Zealand. My FIDE rating at the time of writing is a little over 2300. Because of this it would be insulting to many for me to espouse false modesty and describe myself as a weak player. I hope that I don't go too far the other way however and describe myself as a great player, I am not.

During this blog I will annotate my chess games. Of course the thing that annotation requires most is an audience which is why I am making my analysis public on this forum. If you enjoy reading autobiographical games collections then perhaps this is the blog for you.

Though it would be wrong for me to describe myself as a weak player I wish to improve. I have read lots of chess literature especially describing training, strategy and improvement and the common thread throughout is the process of analysis of your own games.

I intend not to use a computer at all, even before adding my analysis here for a couple of reasons. First because using a computer to annotate games will encourage me to be lazy in my annotations and second I want to keep this site interesting for you, the reader. Inevitably despite my best efforts there will be mistakes in lots of the analysis which I publish here. I hope that the reader will read with a critical eye the analysis I post and find mistakes (please add comments at the end). Bearing this in mind I hope that the audience finds this a challenging and interesting activity in it's own right and so interacts with the material at a deeper level than they would otherwise have done so. Later I may correct the analysis given on the main page from comments however I will give reference to the name of the poster who made the correction.

If you prefer you can correct and add comments with the help of a computer program. I certainly don't object to this at all. Feel free to give the source of the correction as either the name of the program or your own as you see fit. The only times I am likely to violate my rule about computer analysis is when I feel there is an interesting point to be made about computer chess and analysis.

I apologise if my analysis of the opening is somewhat limited here. This is because I am still an active player and so I would hardly be helping myself by giving away opening knowledge here. With the state of chess preparation this has simply become the reality of the game.

I can't be certain how often I will post here but hopefully around once a week I will have prepared something new.

Enjoy!