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My new hobby: harrasing queens on a chess board

Brief introduction

"Who is Dragos? He is supposed to be Romanian. Some say his father was Moldavian. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Dragos. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone."

This is a quote from my favorite movie, The Usual Suspects. Also, my favorite way of introducing myself (don't ask why). As mentioned above, I'm from Romania, pretty soon I'll be 29 and besides chess I love watching quality rugby (sometimes even playing) and reading good books. I work as a consultant in a software company so my study time is limited.

How I've discovered that I enjoy harrasing queens on a chess board?

Here's a picture with my father. This was taken on the day when the chess bug caught me, 1st of July, 2012. I'm pretty sure that I'll remember this day for a long time.

I have invited my parents to spend a weekend together, in the mountains. In the evening my father kicked my ass at chess for several times. Being a very competitive person I have decided that I'll become a chess student in the next months and pretty soon I'll be able to take my rematch. This is how I've discovered chess.com and this is how I've discovered that I enjoy harrasing queens on a chess board. 

The main problem after a few days was that I didn't know how to build a study plan. I went to /r/chess on reddit and I've started a thread asking for help. This is how I divide my study time at the moment:

- 1 hour/day chess tactics on chesstempo.com

- 1 hour/day playing chess or analyzing my losses. I prefer to select oponents from the following range: 30 points weaker/70 points stronger

I go through this routine each day and the results are showing up


My results after 1 month of training:

Stats for standard tactics

Rating: 1213.8 (RD: 34.52) (Best Active Rating: 1217 Worst Active Rating: 862)
Active Rank: 8777/10595 (Better than: 17.16% Best Active: 8759 Worst Active: 10477)
Problems Done: 1446 (Correct: 969 Failed: 477)
Percentage correct: 67.01%
Average recent per problem time spent 68 seconds
FIDE Estimated Rating based on standard tactics: 1211

 

Summing up and my goals for august:

- I have increased my live chess rating with 369 points from my lowest point (597)

- I have increased my tactics rating on chesstempo.com with 351 points

- My goals for august are: 1100 rating at live chess (134 points difference) and 1350 tactics rating on chess tempo (137 points difference)

Best regards,

Dragos

Comments

  • 10 months ago

    KeyserSzoze

    Thanks for the link mate but I prefer rugby I/O of golf :)

  • 10 months ago

    chessgolf

    For your non-study-time chess enlightenment: chessgolf.webs.com

  • 10 months ago

    KeyserSzoze

    Ryan, thanks for posting, I'm a result oriented oriented, I need some indicators to follow. You're right, the rating increase shouldn't be the final objective, should be a consequence of getting better. But it's nice to have some goals to aim for. 

    I'll take a look at CM GM edition, I'll have it on my other laptop. Cheers!

  • 10 months ago

    Ryan390

    Your approaching the learning process in a self-paralyzing notion. Getting wrapped up in seeing results so early on will actually not do you any favours in terms of growth. 

    With Chess Master it doesn't just teach you chess, but it humanizes the learning proccess, and teaches you how to learn.

  • 10 months ago

    Ryan390

    Chess Master Grandmaster edition Laughing - Academy Lessons.

  • 10 months ago

    KeyserSzoze

    hicetnunc, thanks for your comment.

    To be honest I was a little bit worried about my accuracy rate and I wanted to ask on the forums which is a good one.

    In the first weeks I was focused to get 60 tactics problems/day (I made a calculus that doing 60/day will take me to 10.000 by the end of the year) but now I realize that I can learn much more if I spend more time on a problem and try to udnerstand it. I guess it's not the quantity but the quality.

    On the next month I'll focus also on bringing up this statistic. And I have some aces in my sleeve that can help: sleeping 8 hours/night (now I average around 5 poor quality hours), going to the gym (now I'm sedentary as it gets) and cut the junk from my diet.

    Again, thanks for your input, it really helped me to see things on a new perspective

  • 10 months ago

    hicetnunc

    Hi Dragos,

    On Chesstempo, you're using an average of ~1 min/move to solve standard problems with a 68% success rate. In a real OTB long game, you would have ~3 mins to spend on a difficult move.

    So I think you should maybe take a little more time on ChessTempo and try to improve your accuracy (ie. solve %). You should aim for 75% if your difficulty setting is set on 'average'.

    Good luck with your training, and beating your father Wink

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