25 years old & learning chess - my practice blog

Greetings from the apartment next to yours (Finland memes never die) - quite a fancy looking blog and certainly useful in many aspects. I am not sure if you are looking for a practise partner of any sort, but personally (as I do love talking about chess, positions, combinations as much as I do love to play the game itself) I'd be happy to make you an acquaintance.

You should never expect to win on time. You caught a good break. Now FINNISH your supper!

You got that right. However I think that there is always a learning possibilities when playing with a lost position. I know a lot of people get angry when people don't resign on a lost position, but I feel like as long as there is a chance to improve it's worth playing. Obviously being down 2 pieces, few pawns and zero counter-play doesn't really make for a good fight. However, in a situation like that there is some problem with the player in winning position as well if he is unable to finish the game with a checkmate.

Create your blog on chess.com....

https://www.chess.com/settings/blog

Play longer time controls...

https://www.chess.com/article/view/longer-time-controls-are-more-instructive

Hello, I was not aware a personal blog like stated by RussBell existed. I need to take a closer look to what that looks like, so thanks for that. Talking about "crap": How is objectifying chess playing women with an article of "hottest woman chess players" contributing to the chess community more than my continuing insight of chess from a newcomers perspective?

Wow this thread is actually pretty interesting, keep up with it!  Nice tactics improvement!  Your ratings will bounce around a lot but every 2000 tactics or so they should go up (probably 50-250pts at your level, if you are doing the puzzles right, taking your time, analyzing afterwards etc) 

Thanks for the feedback Antonio! I'm doing a lot of tactics every day, because they are less time consuming than playing a full game. I mostly play only 15|10 setting, so it requires me to have at least 1 hour of free time to start a game. With tactics you can just do few in a few minutes.

My goal is to become a consistent 1400-1500 player before I have played chess for a year. Currently I'm around 1200 depending on the time control (faster the games, the lower my rating is) and if your estimation is correct (about the 2000 tactics measuring to 50-250 points) I should be able to reach that in 7 months.

It's very nice to get much stronger players than I am to stop by and give me feedback every now and then. It is very much appreciated!

For example, my blog....

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell

I'm not sure what you base your estimations on, but I don't think it's really that much about the time spent studying but the way you are doing it. I might be a low rated chess player but I have practiced various other skills enough to know that quality of the studying is just as important as the quantity, probably even more so. I believe that with chess (or any other skill for that matter) you can improve very rapidly even with just 1-2 hours of practice a day. As long as you are systematic with your approach and try to spend those couple hours really focusing on the subject at hand. What are you trying to achieve, what is the thing that really causes you trouble and so forth.

I personally believe that trying to practice too much might actually be counterproductive to your learning. Your brain needs enough time to handle all the new information and let's be honest - most people are unable to absorb new information efficiently for more than couple hours at a time. Pushing yourself too hard might also be detrimental to your motivation, eventually leading to a situation where you simply get too tired from the whole subject.

Of course we will see what the future holds for me. It might take me three years, four years, ten years or I might never reach 1800. It's hard to say at this point, so I'm just taking a day at a time and trying break my goals in small pieces. I think I've paid too much attention to ELO numbers at this point (even though they are probably the easiest ways to measure learning) and should just focus on increasing my knowledge. ELO will follow if I succeed in that. :-)

I do believe you that not many people starting chess as adult have gotten to a very high level, but saying that no one ever was capable of doing that is screaming for some sort of source. That being said, if anyone knows any high rated players who have started playing chess as adults, that would be interesting to see!

I have read many stories of players starting over 30 years old and reaching national master level. So it is really possible for you to reach 1800 or 2000 rating.

the more replies Stauntonmaster receives, the more he will continue to post.....better to ignore him...

Thanks for the comments jambyvedar and RussBell! Do you happen to know if there are any of these stories readable somewhere online, jambyvedar? :-)

I've been lately just messing around in the tactics trainer. One shouldn't do that when a bit tired, since I took a nice 150 point drop in my rating. Oh well, one can always climb back up on a better day!

I think I played my strongest game (10 minute blitz) so far against a much stronger opponent naniswamy4. 

I got to play the white pieces and went for my usual e4 opening, while naniswamy4 opened with d5 Scandinavian defense. I have actually seen this line at least few first moves so felt comfortable playing this opening. First 12 moves were pretty much just developing and setting the pieces nicely. We traded knights on move 14 and then went on to battle on the queenside. My first (and actually only) inaccuracy came on move 20 when I decided to go pawn grabbing with my bishop. According to the computer the best move would've been moving rook to c1 to protect the c4 pawn. Regardless, the inaccuracy was only +0,18 difference to best move, so not a big mistake by any means. After that I was trying to find for some sort of way to find a tactic, but naniswamy4 was also playing very accurately and removing every chance for a tactic to appear. Eventually we ended up trading all the pieces with a 4 against 4 pawn endgame. I was one move short from queening and realizing draw is the best I can get from the position I went for that. I managed to gobble enough pawns to transfer it to a pawn and king against pawn and king endgame. Having practiced these one pawn endgames I quickly realized there was no chance for a win (even though I had my king closer to action) so we ended the game in a draw.

It was very interesting to play opponent over 300 rating points higher than me and felt like I got to play much more accurate chess than usually. Computer analysis shows that I played the strongest move 62,8% of the time with centipawn loss of 0.08! Wow! This is my best game by far! So thanks for the game naniswamy4 and let's play again some another time. If there are other people who would like to play a 30 minute, 15|10 or 10 minute game, feel free to challenge me. If you are much higher rated player than me, I would be very happy for constructive feedback after the game!

We also played another game where I got the black pieces, but I blundered a piece early and it all crumbled soon after. So not much to analyze from that game, this is the difference between 300 rating points. I can hold on to draw with slight chance of win when I bring my A-game, mistakes will cost me the game.

Chess is a funny game in a sense that simply playing a lot won't necessarily improve your playing much. I just won 4 bullet games in a row against someone who has played over 28 000 bullet games. Yes, that's twenty-eight-thousand. Not to mention that he has 250 points higher blitz rating than I do.

about the game, yeah protecting the c4 pawn is probably correct to maintain the nice central control with pawns. in middle game usually a central pawn is more important the side pawn. but overall a nice game with no major tactical blunder. bullet chess ,most of the time,won't really improve a beginner and would just harm his chess.

I played my first ever chess tournament here on chess.com in a >1200 rated 5 minute blitz. It had I think 90 players at the start and I ended up finishing third with 5.5/7 score! I'm very satisfied to the result considering it was the first time ever I played a chess tournament (online tournament, but anyways). The winner with a perfect 7/7 score was a player starting with 700 rating and 25% win percentage in blitz, so I checked his games with analyzer and in every game his first 7-10 were 100% best moves according to computer. So I have a feeling he used an engine, sent an abuse report to chess.com support and consider myself as the moral 2nd place finisher.

That tournament was a ton of fun, so I will sure play more tournaments in the future! This tournament also almost got me to 1200 rating, perhaps I'll hold from playing blitz so I can play another under 1200 tournament again in the near future.

I doubt using engine can be that tricky in 5 minute blitz. For example if I'm analyzing positions after the game or checking the openings it usually takes 2-3 seconds to find the best move. It is even faster than that if you use lichess.org analyzing tool, because you can have those arrows showing the best moves. Let's imagine you would have this lichess.org tool open while playing, you could see the best engine move to anything in less than 5 seconds. If you have 5 minutes of time (300 seconds), you can make over 60 moves like this. But let's be honest, games don't last 60 moves at my level if another person is using engine.

Reason why I suspected he might be cheating is because he started with 700 rating and won easily multiple players 400 to 500 points higher rated than him. When checking his games with analyzer, he never made even a "good" move in first 7-10 moves of every game. He always had the 100% best move and then proceeded to win fairly easily usually having much better position and like 4-5 points lead, after which the opponents structure completely collapsed. Let me tell you that on my level people playing 5 minute blitz don't play like that. 100% sure it was either a cheat or someone much much higher rated was playing the tournament with his account.