Journey to a title
I have always believed that planning is the key to successful excecution.
I'm writing this blog to (hopefully) to detail my journey from lowly not-even-master-level to the highest rank of chess.I believe this is something I can achieve in my lifetime.I took inspiration for this Blog post from Geordie, a can-do National master who revisited chess after many years.I believe it's something I can acheieve and I will give you some backgroound information into my beliefs.
I'm 16 years old, born and raised in Northampton, United Kingdom. I first learned about Chess I was about 9 but didn't play more than once a year until my first school team tournament when I was 12. Somehow I managed to win 4.5/5 games (tieing for first!) It was then I was starting to show symtopns of Chess mania(not recognised by the World Health Ogranisation)
The next year, I moved onto secondary school and work came raining down. In the following year, I ranked third in a junior tournement at my local community centre and contiuned to play chess on online and just play with friends. At 14, I attended a boys-only prepartory school and this is where I first discovered my inner passion to play Chess, in contrast to the childhood infatuation.That was probably the highlight of my chess career. The chance I got to play students much older and more able than me really gave me something to gof for. Eventually, I could beat some of them!
Currently, I'm doing my A-levels, so time is scarce but I try to squeeze in as much practise as I can over summer holidays and other vaction periods..
I tend to practise a lot of tactics but I know I must really devise some sort of regmie to move forward in my chess development. Moving on, I played the occasional tournament since then, but I didn't study much and so I improved rather slowly to where I am now part of a local chess club. In addition, I organise regular cmeetings for chesspoint( a local chess group)
To make this goal less daunting, I've broken it into mini-goals, which I'll adjust as I go.
Each interval jump in rating will become progressively more difficult, hence the bigger jump in early stages.
FIDE rating goals
(to be achieved by the beginning of each calendar year)
Current, February 2013
2013: 1800 (CM title)
2014: 2300
2015: 2375 (NM title)
2016: 2425
2017: 2450(FM Title)
2018: 2475
2019: 2500 (IM title)
2020 :2600 (GM title)
I'm going to stick to this plan, devised by Geordie
My study regimen consists of reading about 1 chess book/week, playing over GM analysis from megabase, & about half an hour of tactics trainer / chesstempo per day. To play a lot of 5-min on ICC and I'll be doing more of that when I work on openings. I also have an IM friend who's willing to help me out a bit (although he thinks I'm crazy to want to be a GM). If anyone has any advice or book recommendations, I'd love to hear them!
