100Hour Challenge - Chess

I used chess.com to improve my blitz rating (10min games) from 1220 to 1450, with 100 hours of study (plus a lot of playing).

If you are interested in reading about my experience, I wrote an article about it on medium:

https://medium.com/@hamre_erik/100hour-challenge-chess-8cc347479613 

Let me know if any of you find it interesting or helpful

Erik

Your progress appears much more gradual in a long term graph. 

You listed a breakdown of general categories of study, like endgames (30%) but you didn't list anything in particular you studied in those 30 hours. There was a list of recommended chess books at the end of the article.

Recommended Chess books:

• Logical Chess — Move by move
• Play Winning Chess
• Winning Chess Strategies
• The Amateur’s Mind
• Silman’s complete Endgame Course
• Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess

Is that what you studied? Did you spend 30 hours studying Silman's Endgame course?

Your 100 hour challenge reminded me of another posting in 2017 by a guy who challenged himself to beat Magnus Carlsen in a game after a month (and also developed other fairly impressive skills in a year long challenge).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-novice-challenged-magnus-carlsen-1510866214

https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch

Hi!

Thanks for the comment!

This graph doesn't say anything about whether I'm playing blitz games or not  

You will for example see several places that it is dead flat for over half a year.

And any graph will of course also look flatter the longer you stretch it out. It also doesn't say anything about whether I'm studying chess on the side or not.

I therefore took my own notes of how much I improved after each hour of study. Then I played 50 games right after I had studied 100 hours. Then I played 20 games 3 months later. You will see that there are some jumps in rating some places (this means I also sometimes played a few more games in between. But I didn't study more in-between.

When I say I spent 100 hours on this, I mean 100 hours of active study. Playing games comes on the side, and also took up a considerable amount of time. Probably just as much time in total.

I'm not in anyway trying to sound impressive, Im much more interested in finding out how skill development actually works. 

I didn't explain in detail what I studied because the article was getting way too long, and I still think it is too long. But Im glad a few people have already managed to read through it

I studied endgames mainly through the endgame section on chess.com, some youtube-videos and a couple of other endgame tactics sites.

I added the books, because I wanted to learn how to set up affiliate-links, I have own and have mostly read through number 1,4,5 and 6 at some point, but not during this challenge.

It is possible that my blitz rating was a bit underrated to start with, but I did play 100 games to find my average. However, some of the improvement may have been because I adjusted to playing faster games. But thats part of what counts as being good in blitz isn't it?  

Let me know if you have any other questions  thanks for the interest

Erik

And yes, I recently dropped 50 points again, because I started playing some 3min blitz games  and it goes on the same rating

We will talk to you again when you go back to your previous  1220.

Nothing special.I increased from 800 to almost 1400 just by solving tactics in ct art and chess.com.

Nice article @PajaroCarpintero! You actually have a much better study plan than I do ;D Good luck on your chess growth!

Well, exactly, what Im trying to write about is the typical process of how we learn and develop skills

But it is meaningless to compare yourself against others over a month or a year, because different people put in different amount of effort and hours.

So, always compare against yourself and take notes of what works.

I will probably try to bring the rating from 1450 to 1600 in my next 100hour project (which I expect to be more difficult, but doable). Maybe I will try around december or something. I will be occupied with learning others skills until then.

Thanks! Most importantly, do things you enjoy, or you will get tired of it pretty fast

I read your article,you have done a good job explaining the process of skill development in chess.I would recommend anyone trying improve in chess to read it.

In my view for any new player the fastest way to improve is to just solve tactics ,especially from well organized source.

thanks! 

yes, any well organised source will do. But I think online chess puzzles are especially good, as they let you get a lot of repetitions in seeing patterns.

Offline work, say with a book, may lead you to think deeper about a problem however, so both can be useful.

I think it is possible to improve both faster and slower than I did, but the key to improve is to actually put in quality practice hours. 

My progress wasn't that compact in time, as I was also working on improving several other skills at the time