25 years old & learning chess - my practice blog

Here are  good videos by GM Smirnov. It will increase your positional pattern understanding.

The most common mistake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmJcUI_wSy8

Breaking stereotypes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_zWJHYWWJs

I have never played a single tournament game OTB. As you can see I started playing chess less than six months ago, so I'm only practicing yet. I also wrote earlier that I would like to play some OTB games eventually, but haven't had the time to get in touch with local OTB chess community. I will do so in the future. For the time being I quite enjoy practicing this game online, and will aspire to play some OTB chess in the future.

Chess is complex!

The funny thing about learning chess is realizing how complex game it is. Every time you learn something new, you also become aware of 10 new things that you don't know. But with every single game you play, every game you watch and every game you study, you pick something new and it goes somewhere in the back of your head. And with these fragments of knowledge you always pick something up and try to use them in your game. Today was a good example of this, when I was playing a 30 minute rapid time control game with the black pieces. It's probably good to mention, that I always feel a bit troubled playing with the black pieces. Usually my opponent gets all the initiative and instead of creating threats, I'm usually just spending all my time trying to prevent my opponents threats. Today - however - I got a chance to create some threats myself. Here is the annotated game:

Milestone reached!

Today I passed my 2000th tactic on chess.com tactics trainer. In total I have attempted 3394 tactic puzzles, from which I've passed exactly 2000 at the moment of writing this. This makes my success rate 59% on the tactic puzzles. At the same time I also reached my so far highest tactics rating of 1863. In total I've spent 66 hours with the tactics trainer, and I have a feeling that my tactic awareness has increased notably during this time. I'm much quicker to spot possible hanging pieces (both mine and opponents), combinations and positions leading to tactical opportunities than before. Obviously I still have a lot to learn, and will therefor continue practicing with playing games, doing lessons and more tactic puzzles in the future. I would really like to increase my success rate on the tactics trainer, but I'm a bit too lazy sometimes to calculate multiple possible variations and simply go for the most promising looking move. Doing less tactics per day would help with that, but then again doing few puzzles here and there feels pretty relaxing, instead of trying to try-hard through it.

I really recommend other newbies to pick up the chess.com tactics trainer and hone their chess skills fun and simple way!

I'll chip in here a bit from now on - this is a nice thread.

After 12... Qe6?! 13. Bxf6 gxf6 14. g4! Bg6 15. Nh4 White would gain a clear advantage by grabbing the weak f5 square for a Knight and removing Black's Bishop from play. (An important tactical point: if Black tries to attack White's weakened Kingside structure with 15... h5 White plays 16. Nf5! when 16... Bxf5 trading off the bad bishop on g6 is impossible due to 17. gxf5 and Black has no good way to defend f6, and Black has to be very careful not to drop something to Ng7.

Your opponent played right into your hands after 12... Qe6?! by opening the centre with 13. c3?! Rg8 14. d4?! which, even if it didn't lose to 14... Qxh3! 15. Nf6+ Ke7! 16. Nxg8+ Rxg8, a motif I didn't even see that quickly, would still be bad because it opens the position for your two bishops.

Here I would suggest 12... g5! 13. Bg3 O-O-O when the tables have turned: White's bishop is out of play and White will face a rather scary attack after maneuvers like ... Rg8 and ... g4 or ... Nh5-f4 after a bishop move.

13... Rg8! was a good move - g8 is the best square for the Rook, and with it there White already has to worry about tactics on the kingside: for example, on the attempt to grab the f5 square with 14. g4 you could try 14... f5!? 15. exf5 Qxf5 when your Bh5 now has a better future in both a good diagonal (the b1-h7 diagonal) and a target (the d3 pawn). (The g4-pawn can't take your Queen: it's pinned.)

The finish was very well-played, but you didn't have to wait so long to play it: with the immediate 17... Qxh3! 18. g3 Rxg3+! 19. fxg3 Qxg3+ 20. Kf1 Bxf3 21. Qc2 Rg8 you could have done everything you did with a hanging piece. (P.S. There are many different wins after 17... Qxh3! and the faster 15... Qxh3! - try to find them all!)

Final P.S.: He was lost after 22. Re2 Rg8! 23. Rxc7+ Kb8 24. Rxb7+ Ka8 anyway.

Practicing endgames

After watching John Bartholomews good analysis on some of Bobby Fischer's endgame techniques, I decided to play a rapid 15|10 game, with my intention to get to a good endgame and excel at it. I know I'm no Fischer, but I think that watching Fischer's way of controlling the board with his rooks on open files really contributed on my thinking on the game I played. What do you guys think? I wrote a full annotation of my thoughts on the game, enjoy!

Milestone reached!

Been a while since I last wrote here, but I haven't stopped playing chess, no! Actually I have been playing quite a bit of blitz and rapid. And today is the first time that I managed to break 1300 rating on both game modes! Pretty cool that I reached it exactly 6 months after I started playing chess here. :-)

Blitz: 1303 (323/237/21) 
Rapid: 1347 (90/43/8)

At this point it feels like every point increase is getting increasingly more difficult. I feel like getting to 1200 (after getting the basic idea of my training plan down) went pretty easily, but right now the pace of development has slowed down notably. Of course this was to be expected, since 1300 rating is already on the 85th percentile.

So far here is my pace of climbing, when I finally started climbing (from 671 blitz which was my lowest rating at 21st of December 2017):

1st month: 1200 to 671 = 529 points decrease
2nd month: 671 to 795 = 124 points increase
3rd month: 795 to 1011 = 216 points increase
4th month 1011 to 996 = 15 points decrease
5th month 996 to 1196 = 200 points increase
6th month 1196 to 1270 = 74 points increase
7th month 1270 to (still uncertain!) = ???

So based on these values, we can estimate that my actual starting rating should've been something around 600 to 700. Which makes it reasonable, that new players now start with 800 rating instead of 1200. It's not much fun for a beginner to get stomped every game against people who have played hundreds or even thousands of games of chess.

Now towards the another half of my first year of chess! I'm interested in seeing how far I can push my rating with the remaining 6 months. Perhaps that could also give some sort of estimation for other people as well, what kind of rating they might be expecting after a year of daily practice.

Hello. I started to study hard chess few years ago, before that i was very low level but knew fundamentals. What made big progress is to study tactics, then tons of blitz, and tons of videos watching masters no books but some lessons here.

If you wish we can play several training games to point your mistakes.

My advice is first play a lot, getfamilar with openings and choose pet line. All this for blitz. For longer time control study endgames.

Hello. I started to study hard chess few years ago, before that i was very low level but knew fundamentals. What made big progress is to study tactics, then tons of blitz, and tons of videos watching masters no books but some lessons here.

If you wish we can play several training games to point your mistakes.

My advice is first play a lot, getfamilar with openings and choose pet line. All this for blitz. For longer time control study endgames.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. I'll take your offer and we can play some practice games when you're up for it. I watch a lot of videos of much better players than me playing and that has helped tremendously. I have also tried to do some research and analysis myself, especially on my own games to see the mistakes I make. You can see few of them here, but I'm trying to do the analysis every time that I'm not sure where things went wrong. Sometimes even when I win I try to see if there were some things that would've been better. The computer analysis is great place to start, but more importantly I try to understand myself what the mistake was. Sometimes the computer lines for inaccuracies and mistakes is a bit hard to follow.

I'll just continue playing more. :-)

Im on live chess add me and challenge me.

I beated 1950 FIDE rated OTB in official fide rated slow tournamen 60 plus 30 min in just 6 moves or so. Played surprise line and he hang up his knight.

Hire me as trainer!

Lol you are terrible for a trainer.

Wow...think less

Aside from that, have you beaten other over 1900 players in 60 plus time control?

Yes. But i can lose to underrated kids 1450 or so.

Here is a game I just played that I wanted to show you guys, because I'm very proud of it. I lost, yes, but I managed to keep the game even (and even had +0,63 advantage according to computer on move 30) against a much much stronger opponent. I got to play my favorite opening (Ruy Lopez), and I think it really shows on the game. Since I managed to avoid any obvious blunders for a long time, but eventually I got in a time trouble and things started collapsing. Still, I resigned with only a +5 advantage for opponent, after move 45. 

Perhaps I'll do an analysis of the game when I have more time, but for me this was almost like a victory. I didn't think that I would stand any chance against a 1900+ player, but the fact that the game was even for a long time makes me really proud. And I only made 1 blunder (and 3 mistakes)! That was enough to lose the game, but honestly I was expecting worse against a strong player. :-)

I think that I'm playing much above my 1250+ blitz rating if I get to play white with either Spanish or Italian game.

Endgames are tricky!

I've started playing some daily games for a change of pace on my normal routine of blitz and rapid. So far I've really enjoyed the games, which have been of much better quality (obviously) than games with only few minutes per side. When you have 3 days to make a move, you really can spend as much time as you'd like to analyse a position and try to come up with a good move. This next game as a whole is definitely not my best one, but it probably is the best endgame that I have ever played. I made a calculation error on move 11 and made an unsound knight sacrifice, resulting for a winning edge for my opponent. My opponent managed to maintain the advantage for 33 moves, before making two crucial mistakes in a row. Analysing the game with engine afterwards, my opponent had +4,41 advantage at highest and to be honest at times I was thinking about resigning the game. However, I decided to see if I could hold it for a draw and decided to take it as a learning experience for my endgame skills. If we forget about the bad early game, and go to the moment when my opponent had this +4,41 advantage at move 20, I'm really proud of the way I played after this moment. It was not perfect, but for me coming back from that and winning the game was a huge victory. Especially since my opponent also played a good game all the way until move 45, when he probably wrongly evaluated the position, and thought he had more time for grabbing material than he really did.

After move 20 I played 31 more moves, out of which (according to the computer) 24 were excellent moves, 5 were okay moves and only 2 were inaccuracies. Reason why I consider this really good is that I was in very tough position and I was playing a piece down against two knights! Those tricky knights can jump everywhere and it's really hard trying to see all the reasonable variations with so much empty space on the board. Had it been a blitz or rapid game, I would've blundered something many times, but checking and re-checking every move at least a dozen times I somehow managed to keep it all together. It was a really tough but great game, and I feel like it was perfect learning opportunity for trying to come up with something in a really tough position.

Here is the whole game for you all to see. Thanks for the game CiscoRed709!

I decided to analyse one of my correspondence games through a video. What do you guys think about the video? :-) Any feedback?