Hi,

I've been training on chess puzzles for quite a while now, all though
I found myself improving
initially, it isn't paying of now. Reason is simple: When presented
with a puzzle I find myself
instantaneously looking for sacrificies to make. A few months back, an
even more alarming
trend seemed to emerge, my skills seem to be going on a downward
slope, this again due
to the fact that now when playing over the board I tend to keep
looking for sacrifices and examining
a given line for too much of time and seem to be completely missing to
see simple threats
from my opponents (which I believe I would've normally seen before all
this training with puzzles
started).

Has anyone else had similar experiences? If so how do you tackle it.

I've now convinced myself that spending more time on puzzles would
probably
take me furthur down this track and I should take a break from this.
Instead I intend to spend more time on actually playing games to
completion starting from a
positions where I already have an material advantage.



Yet another question, I've several games of mine stored in a PGN file.
I'd now like
to know if there is a chess database program that would allow me to
import this and
search for positions based on a score evaluation done by a chess
program.

Ex: I'd like to basically search and get positions from the several
games in the PGN where a
given side has a greater score of say 5 points as evaluated by a chess
program. (All though
material may be the same on either side. I'm aware that there are
several databases that
would allow me to search for positions based on material imbalance
alone). I might want
to combine this search capability with other normal clauses such as
say: A position with
a score of 5 and atleast 10 moves remaining in the game.)

Thanks,
Kumar.