Duckfest Digest 04 Developing with Daily

Despite my rapid rating appearing close to 1500, my personal estimate of my playing ability would be around 1350-1400. My rapid rating was inflated due to recent wins. But my rating felt inflated (see game below). As mentioned I wanted to structurally grow to a 1500 rating. Maybe I could get to 1500 on a lucky streak, but in order to stay at that level, I knew I had to make structural changes to my play. I decided that playing Daily would help me develop my chess in a real way.

For beginners it’s better to play longer time formats and I figured it might also work well for players with  some background in chess that are trying to get back in the game. 

My thoughts on Daily

Develop real understanding

Long time format allows you to really think about your positions. As long as you take your time and remain focused you play your best game. Using game analysis afterwards gives you relevant feedback on your play. Much more so than on Blitz games. The value of Stockfish is very little when it shows you blundered under time pressure, when you would spot said blunder if you had spent more than 10 seconds on your move. When confronted with a blunder under time pressure, you get feedback on your fast play, but you learn very little about your overall play. On the other hand, when you have looked at a position for as long as you need, calculated all the lines you thought relevant, THEN engine feedback becomes really valuable. You get a chance to develop actual chess understanding.

Train to be Thorough

As an additional feature, Daily games allow you to take notes. For a while, I chose to write down all candidate moves I could think of. To make sure I considered all possible angles. It’s not a guarantee for success. Maybe I plan a suboptimal move, because I miscalculate or maybe I overlook some of my opponents moves, which can happen, especially in more complex positions. But it shouldn't happen that I completely overlook the best move available to me, because I simply didn’t consider it.  So, I forced myself to write down all candidate moves that were reasonable, or that were not reasonable. It’s remarkable how much this improves your play immediately.

Exercise in evaluation

Additionally I chose to use Daily games to implement an idea provided by Levy called How To Evaluate ANY Chess Position

Any position could be analyzed based on material, king safety, piece activity and pawn structure/space. At random intervals, I took time to write down my evaluation of the position. The challenge for me was to see how close I could get to the engine evaluation. During the game, it turned out to be an excellent guide to determine which areas need improvement.

Example

Just for the purpose of communicating the idea, my evaluation for a position might look something like this.

The values given are random, just as an example. Afterwards I would check with the actual evaluation. I’m not even going to say I’m good at evaluating positions. I will say, however, that taking time to evaluate a position like this, does help with coming up with ideas for your next couple of moves,

Don’t play different time formats simultaneously

Every move you play in Daily, you have 24-72 hours to make a move. You get to stare at a position for as long as you want and calculate whatever line pops into your head. When you switch back to Blitz, you can't spend more than 20 seconds on a move. Playing daily games messed up my time management in Blitz, it sort of enforces the idea that you can look at a position for 20-30 seconds. Forgetting the clock like that once or twice per game will cost you a lot of games. In Blitz, selecting a move in a few seconds is preferred. 

If you combine these formats, you will either waste time in your Blitz games or blitz out moves in your Daily games. I recommend choosing one and going for it. You can alternate which game type you play, but never both.

Wrap up

So there you have it, my thoughts on Daily games. I believe I made a pretty compelling case for playing Daily. My Daily rating went up from around 900 to 1385 in just two months. And my progress was earned and structural. I really believed I had  improved. Why would I switch back to Blitz? That’s a story for my next blog post.

Update: this blog post was updated in June '23, most of the changes made were only to the layout of the article. In an earlier version it also contained a Rapid game to show that I won more games than I deserved. The game can still be accessed here. I've removed the game because it had no relation at all to my ideas about playing Daily. 

Thank you all for reading!