25 years old & learning chess - my practice blog

I'm doing things that almost every master is advocating (play, analyze, study, tactics, chess books), so I'm going to trust their judgement. I know that I should be playing more, but I want to play only when I have enough time. And it takes at least hour to play a proper game. Where as you can complete one tactic while waiting a bus, one while queuing in the store and so on. But I'll take on your advice and try to play more games.

I'm not a fan of 3D fighting games,besides I grew up with Street Fighter but thanks for the suggestion lol xD

3D chess is difficult!

Yesterday I had a friend come over for a couple of drinks, and upon seeing my chessboard he wanted to play couple games. He is not a chess enthuasist like me, so I destroyed him in couple games with ease. However, what I noticed is that I played absolutely awfully myself, when playing on an actual board. I'm so used to seeing everything in 2D, that it completely threw my mind off, trying to picture what every piece is doing from 3D perspective. Of course, I could easily win the games with basic chess theory and simple tactics. But I noticed that there were couple instances where I would've dropped a pawn or an exchange, by missing that some squares were controlled by a bishop on the opposite flank. Something that practically never happens in 2D online chess.

I have a plan of starting to play OTB chess at some point, so I really need a lot of practice with visualizing the board in 3D. Since I don't have anyone to play with OTB, I decided to play some games against the computer using 3D pieces here.

Here is my game against a level 7 offline computer. Not too bad, but it really hurt my head trying to understand what was going on at different times. I guess I'm going to do these practices every now and then and try to sit down with my chess board and just play some random games against myself, to get more accustomed with the 3D visualization.

Glad your going to be playing OTB soon. I'd advice to do most (not necessarily all) of your studying with a physical board... also, when you play standard, you can set up the position on a board as the game progresses. Just takes some practice and getting used to. Good luck!

I've had a bit of a bad run with chess recently. I'm dropping pieces left and right, missing obvious moves and what not. I have had some real life issues I've had to take care of, doing long hours at work and stuff like that really takes it's toll. I've been trying to play chess to unwind a bit from all of that, but it doesn't really work. My mind is just not there when I'm playing. Playing chess, when you aren't feeling focused is only going to lead to stupid losses and anger.

I guess I'm going to try to take a small break from chess, and play one game a day at most for a while.

We've all got that sort of chess time... Wishing you well!

Very true,Chess can definitely be a frustrating game that's for sure,it reminds me of Street Fighter,it's like you play well some days and some days you play awful.  I mean don't get me wrong that happens to me in Chess as well,which I'm probably more rusty then you are,I haven't played in a while.  Yeah you might want to take a break and try not to push too hard to get better and also basic tactics helps to keep you from dropping pieces,just a bit of advice. 

You should totally take a brake, in my experience (I reference you to my occasional huge rating drops), one's chess ability (and online games for that matter Chesslover0_0) is very very VERY linked to your frame of mind.

Chess requires total concentration and a sometimes inhuman ability to see things objectively, you see this even in grandmaster level competitions, how many winning positions did Grischuck fail to win in the Saint Louis Rapid and Blitz 2018 (including being a piece up vs Carlsen)??. Psychology in chess is as important as ability.

I strongly advise you NOT to play chess when you're mad/sad/frustated as it will just make you play and feel worse. Do something more relaxing, spend time with friends maybe.

Regarding the subject of OTB play:

Best expierence you will ever had, i have meet some interesting folkes on my university thanks to it. AND analysing on a real chessboard has that special something, pieces become alive if you will, great fun.  

I hope you can sort things up in your life soon Taskinen!

@ op Which you find harder to get better at, chess or guitar?

I haven't actively tried to get better at playing guitar for years, so my memories are already a bit faded on that. I do remember that starting out with guitar for someone with zero musical experience was not the easiest task. However, there were tons of guides already out there on YouTube and a lot of free tabulatures / chords on the internet. So starting with basics and learning simple songs happened pretty fast.

I do think that getting "good" is easier with guitar than it is with chess. The main difference is that you can practice one song over and over again, until you hit all the right notes - and after that it's basically just repetition until you master it. You can play a song just like it was played on the record after enough time spent practicing. Of course, there is a huge variety with songs for all difficulty levels, and there are a lot of songs I still couldn't play after 10 years of playing guitar. But that's not really because I couldn't - but because I just haven't spent enough time practicing.

In chess your evaluation of skill is much more closely related to the level of opponents you play. It's much more difficult to objectively evaluate how good you are, and what are the mistakes you make. When playing an instrument you know it immediately if you hit the wrong note, and then you can just repeat it over and over again, until you hit the right ones. In chess such repetition only works to some extent, but since every game is different, repetition only gets you so far.

I would say that learning to play chess and learning guitar are equally difficult at the beginning, but guitar is easier to learn on the long run. You can just always pick up new songs to learn and play, and you will gradually improve. In chess you can practice a lot, yet it might take a long time, before a situation you have practiced actually happens on the board (and then you have to recognize it too). No matter how good you are at chess, you can always have a bad day, or just overlook simple things, that causes you to lose against "less skilled" players than you. Things like that don't really happen with something like guitar. Once you learn a song well enough, you could nail it with your eyes shut every time.

I believe that practically anyone can learn to master guitar with enough practice, but not everyone is capable of mastering chess. That is mostly due to the competitive nature, where your skill is always compared to your opponent. If everyone could "master" chess, then you would need to find a new name for those at the top of the ratings. Of course everyone can't be high level players in a game, where ratings are measured with your success against other players. Anyone can learn how to play almost any song perfectly with a guitar, if they just practice hard enough.

Wow, that was quite a long ramble, but hope it answers to your question. :-D

Finally a good game

I wrote not so long ago, that I have been having a bit of a bad run with chess lately. This is true, but there have been some glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel. I finally managed to play focused a complete game (30 minutes, rapid), without making stupid mistakes, and even came up with a pretty tricky move to win the game. Obviously, my opponent blundered, not finding the best continuation, but that is a natural part of chess. Only thing you can do is to create challenges for your opponent, improve your position and sometimes you get to take advantage of their mistakes. After all, if no one ever made mistakes in chess, all of the games would probably end up being draws. I'm really happy about the game as a whole, since I played only excellent or good moves, with 89 CAPS and 0.12 avg. difference. That is some really solid chess compared to most of the blunder-fests I have had recently. Regardless, here is the game fully annotated!

Hope you're all having a nice and relaxing weekend!

Start of the month - progress update

Hello all! It's the first of October, so it's time to update my rating progress table. Despite having a slightly difficult month (a lot of real life pressure) affecting my chess, I managed to continue my (slow) steady climb with the ratings. I increased all of my ratings at least a bit (which feels always nice), with most noticeable increase happening to my daily rating (going from 1634 -> 1713). I focused heavily on daily games this month, mostly because of time constraints to play actual live games, but also because last month I actually decreased my daily rating a bit. I wanted to fix that issue, and I did. I still played quite a few rapid games, but in the end I managed to end the month being only 10 points higher than at the start.

I'm really happy about the fact, that I managed to cross 1500 avg. play* rating for the first time, giving me confidence that I should be able to push all my live ratings towards 1500 in the following months.

Stay tuned for future updates. :-)


Avg. Play* = Average from Bullet, Blitz, Rapid and Daily

why do you post always here instead of create a blog section in your chess.com profile? I'd like to start my own "chess blog" to share my progress but I do not where is the right place to do that.

I didn't know that existed when I created this topic. And when I learned that feature exists, I had already written here for quite a while and a lot of people were already commenting here. So I figured I might as well leave it as is. This thread has existed for over half a year, so I guess the mods let it slip. :-D

But yeah, if I would start from a scratch now, I would definitely use the blogging feature on this site!

greatest on all of the whole internets

Start of the month - progress update

October was a month of pretty much "everything else but chess" for me. I did a lot of stuff in real life, but didn't play all that much chess. I think I played and studied a bit too much chess for the first part of the year that I got a bit exhausted with it all. I have been playing occasional games (mostly daily games), doing some tactics and keep my Chessable streak going, but other than that not too much chess. I keep watching new agadmator, Chess Network and John Bartholomew videos to keep up to date with tournaments though (and good games played in them). Anyways, I did manage to make slight progress rating wise, regardless of "taking a break" from chess.


I will continue playing chess more occasionally in the future, instead of spending 2-4 hours practicing every day. I've come to the conclusion, that spending hours practicing chess is not a worthwhile endeavor for me - the value of time investment is not on par with the sacrifice required for faster progress. I want to do so many other things in life, and chess is and will remain just a dear hobby.

Anyways, I will still continue updating my blog and ratings, so feel free to drop a message and continue following my path. :-)

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What is your club about,what do ya'll do? 

In my profile is address on my blog.