Chess Study Tools: Status Report

I am writing some programs to help me study chess. In the last few months I have been working steadily on creating a program to write out an ebook based on an input pgn file. This was to allow the bulk of writing of chess books in a chess program by annotating moves and exporting the games to a pgn file, and also to create an means to easily review a set of games filtered from a chess database.

I have completed a prototype and have ironed out the most egregious bugs. The idea was to present each game as a chapter and each move as a position.  In an ebook a chess diagram using a chess font does not take up a lot of space, unlike a paper book. The font needs a lot of work.

I successfully used this on a recent vacation to review a bunch of games without using a chess set, just my tablet.

Here is a sample of Ruy Lopez games filtered on Kaufman's Repertoire for Black (2012) as I understand it.

US Open 2013

I did alright with a score of 5 out of 9 (3+2-4=). I basically played at my rated strength with a gain of 11 points. The field was very full of class A and Expert players. There were lots of young players. I ran into better opening preparation in two games. I did not take proper advantage of an inexact move order with one of my opponents, but gathered a better understanding of some King's Indian structures from that game.

I have a lot of material to go through. Two of my wins were against much lower rated players, and the other seven games were against experts. I think there is a lot of good learning material in those games.

As usual, I was head down in my games, and did not get too look at the top boards.