Duckfest Digest 02 Man on a Mission

Man on a Mission

In this blog article, I'm talking about my mission in chess and explain what is currently my main goal. I'll talk about my early results playing rapid and where I stand right now. I'll give some insights into my motivation and share what was an influential video that served as my inspiration. This is an updated and revised version of my original article from 2021. 

Rising Rapidly

In the end of 2020, I've joined chess.com and started on my chess journey. Technically I already had a chess.com account years ago, but back then I had only played for one month and I never made an effort to improve. That's why I consider December 2020 to be the actual starting point of my chess journey. The live games I played were both Rapid and Blitz, though I preferred the 10 minute format over having just 5 minutes. I hadn’t played in a long time. It helped me to get a little bit more time, so I had enough thinking time to play moves deliberately (not just mindlessly blitzing them).

Besides playing games, I also went through all the basic chess.com lessons, even the beginner ones. Just to make sure I had no unnecessary gaps in my knowledge. And I also started doing puzzles.

My rapid rating after the first couple of days was around 1100 and went up to about 1300 after playing almost 300 games in the first month. This was primarily driven by my rating still adjusting to more accurately reflect my actual skill level. I did make some changes to the way I played that were an improvement. For example, I would no longer automatically take my opponent’s pieces whenever I could, but instead keep the tension and let them take me first. 

A 1300 rating felt like a suitable rating for me, which gave me a 1400 rating to strive for as my next milestone. As my rating went up and I was paired against stronger opponents, I felt more outclassed with each new matchup. Despite that I kept on winning games and in just five weeks I had already passed a 1450 rating. 

Undeserved wins

This wasn’t a reflection of my rating any longer, this was just me being lucky game after game. In my game vs ChanhTranUK I gave away a pawn on move 8, then on move 12 and again on move 17. Clearly I was slowly getting worse against a better opponent. But my luck changed dramatically. On move 18 my opponent blundered a clean Bishop. Back to equal. Two moves later my opponent blundered a full Rook. To wrap up the game my opponent blundered a full Queen on move 27. 

This wasn’t a sustainable rating for me. I estimated my real rating to be somewhere between 1350 and 1400. 

Northernlion

As I wrote earlier, it was the Netflix series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ that had started this whole journey for me. I think it started because I went looking online for more information and background on her. I was curious if she was a real player or a fictional character. Among other videos, one that I found was a video called “I played Beth Harmon 7 times” by GothamChess, an unknown YouTuber to me at the time. It confused the hell out of me. I ended up with more questions than answers and that was where I ended my search.

About a month later there appeared a GothamChess video in my recommendations featuring another streamer and content creator called NorthernLion. I wasn’t subscribed to NorthernLion, but I did recognize him and had seen some of his videos. I still don’t remember what content of his I had watched, I guess it’s something like Hearthstone or Slay the Spire.

That video was a key influence for me. It opened my eyes to some valuable ideas on trading and evaluating positions. It also convinced me that Levy Rozman was great at explaining chess concepts and he was worth following. 
In my opinion, this is a valuable lesson containing some relevant chess concepts. For players in the 1000-1500 range it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Years later, after I watched it again, I still think it’s a great educational video. That’s why I decided to dedicate a separate blog article to it.

My Mission

The other thing the video made me understand is what differentiates a 1500 rated player from a 1300-1400 rated player like me. 

In this video they are discussing a couple of Northernlion’s games. At around 1550, his rating was higher than mine. Tactically, there wasn’t much difference to the way I played. Any time he made a tactical mistake I spotted it practically instantly. He wasn’t better than I was tactically. 

His positional play on the other hand was completely different from mine, as was his reasoning that accompanied his decisions. Noticing this difference gave me a clear sense of where I had to improve to get to 1550. Using the words of Savielly Tartakower on tactics vs strategy: I was doing well in positions when there is something to do, however I wasn’t doing as well in positions when there wasn’t anything to do.

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do".                     

Savielly Tartakower

To get to that level will require some structural improvements to my chess, but it feels attainable. That’s my goal for now: to get to a 1500 rating and be able to sustain it. Briefly touching 1500 after a streak of lucky wins won’t count, I want to be able to play at that level consistently.

Developing a system

After every game I did a quick analysis of the game and sometimes a more thorough analysis. To store all my discoveries, I started making notes. But I don’t always know how to organize that information. Most of my findings went into Google Docs but they quickly grew into a clutter of random fragments, with useful ideas mixed with irrelevant ones.

That’s why I’m working on the development of a new system to track my progress and collect my findings.

Wrap-up

That's all. Thanks for reading!