Duckfest Digest 10 My 1 year review

Duckfest Digest 10

My 1 year review

Printing Press

This will be blog post #10. For this achievement chess.com will give me a badge called ‘Printing Press’, complemented with the encouraging words “10 blog posts - keep it up!” . As rewards go, it’s not easy to find a reward that’s more underwhelming than this one. I’m fairly sure the marketing department can do a better job on this one. But, that’s not the point. This badge was one of my main goals in the past year. Not because it’s difficult to achieve, it’s actually ridiculously easy. You can speedrun this achievement in under 1 minute if you want to. I’ve seen multiple members posting 10 posts in a row, each of them considerate enough to make the body of the article state: “This is just for the blogger achievement”.

My goal wasn’t just to achieve a total number of blog posts. My goal was to create 10 blog posts that are interesting and high quality. This is of course subjective and, because I’m not a writer, I had no intention of holding myself to impossible standards regarding the end result. The commitment I made to myself was to create posts that I could be proud of. And I am. It’s been an effort, much bigger than I anticipated and much bigger than most people realize. But I did it. And I’ve gotten some amazing feedback, even made a few friends in the process.

I’m working on an article called “Organizing my openings: Part 2. Conceptual considerations” as a sequel to Part 1 Practical Progress, which will go into more detail about the whole decision making process when studying openings. At the same time, I’m working on a sequel to Developing with Daily. But every article takes more effort and consumes more time than I planned, so I’m behind schedule a couple of weeks at this point. Which is fine. The only problem is that I can’t postpone my 1-year review indefinitely. I started my journey at the beginning of December 2020, so my journey is 14 months long by now. It’s about time to look back on the past year.

My year of online chess
It feels right to dedicate my #10 blog posts milestone to looking back on my one year of progress. Overall, I’m more than satisfied with how I’ve done. Though my progress has not been entirely consistent, in some areas I did better than in others. Broadly speaking my progress can be divided into three main groups

• My successes, areas of great progress and/or performance
• My stagnation, areas that show a total lack of progress
• Invisible progress, where I improved ‘under the hood’

My plan was to create three separate chapters, one about the areas that showed the most improvement, one about areas of stagnation, ending with a chapter about things I learned that will help me improve in the future but are not yet visible to the outside. But it’s all three in all areas.

My main time format is a Rapid 10 minute game without increment. Not just because I’ve played this the most, but it’s also the time format I use to determine my strength in comparison to others. Shorter time formats are not my priority, because focusing on better performance will not improve my chess understanding in the long run. I will not play longer live games purely for practical reasons, as they don’t really fit my schedule. I do value longer time controls, that’s why I play Daily games. But Daily games are a different beast entirely, so I attach less value to ratings in Daily games.

Rapid success
My overall performance in Rapid games is good. With white I played 462 games and won 246 of them with 7 draws, giving me a 54.2% winrate overall, a fraction higher when I eliminate e4 and only look at my d4 results. In my 480 games playing black, I have an overall winrate of 50.6%, with an unimpressive 49.8% winrate against e4, a winrate of 52.0% against d4 and 52.3% in the 43 games I played against various other lines. All 942 Rapid games combined, I have a 52.4% winrate. I’m fairly satisfied with that result.
The problem is that an overall winrate is a fairly meaningless statistic. In my first two months of playing I gained over 300 rating points, going from 1122 to 1445. Facing better opponents, I didn’t do as well. Over the next 6 months, my rating dipped a little to 1382, then got back to 1442, only to slowly decline back to 1226. It took me months and a lot of games to get back to 1411, where it is now.

I’ve shown a lot of progress in my first couple of months, but it’s very apparent that I’ve reached a ceiling I need to break through. The clearest evidence is offered by the Insights tool, offered by chess.com.

To accompany this visualization, here are my winrates for each opponent rating
Under 800:            100% 1 game
Rating 800-899       75% 4 games.
Rating 900-999       80% 10 games
Rating 1000-1099   73% 41 games
Rating 1100-1199   54.9% 153 games
Rating 1200-1299   53.6% 197 games
Rating 1300-1399   54.7% 379 games
Rating 1400-1499   32.6% 144 games
Rating 1500+          37.5% 4 games

My performance against 1200 and even 1300 rated players gives me confidence that I’m definitely in the 1400 range, but my performance against other 1400s is humbling. Like I mentioned before in Man on a Mission, this is not something I can solve by grinding more games. To achieve a sustainable 1500 rating, I need to become a better player.

Blitz
My article Boosting My Blitz covers most of what needs to be said. My performance in Blitz is hundreds of rating points lower than my Rapid. At first I thought it was just a fluke, some bad luck and statistical variance. But as the sample size got bigger, the realization set in that I’m significantly worse in Blitz, by a wide margin (300 rating points). As much as I’d like to fix that, it’s not my priority right now. I’ll just have to live with being (barely) an 1100 in shorter time controls.

Daily
My performance in Daily games is roughly similar to my performance in Rapid games.

A simplified table of my performance

Under 1300:              80.0%  140 games
Rating 1300-1399     63.4%   86 games
Rating 1400+            30.0%   65 games

Again the data shows: I’m crushing at the below 1300 rating, I’m convincingly stronger than players rated between 1300 and 1400, while I’m even more convincingly getting obliterated by players rated 1400 and higher.

Puzzles
My most tangible results have been in puzzles.

The graph shows clear progress. What makes me particularly happy is the way my progress happened. It was not a slow grind upwards. I’ve hit multiple plateaus, especially in puzzle rush. Results (scores) that seemed unattainable earlier this year, are easy for me now. I’m seeing tactics now that I was unable to see before. And that’s what gives me confidence!

Openings
One of my main priorities last year was studying openings. For reasons. To create structure. And to get results.

The Chess Boom
The Netflix series ‘Queen’s Gambit’ in combination with a global lockdown sparked an enormous growth in chess interest. The increased attention in chess and everything chess related created an explosion in chess content, coverage, chess resources and chess entertainment. Streamers and YouTubers like Levy Rozman, Eric Rosen, Alexandra and Andrea Botez and Hikaru provide amazing content and have been a huge factor reinvigorating my interest in the game. Pog Champs was fantastic. It’s fun to watch beginners in their early chess development struggle with the complexity of chess, while at the same time watching them fall in love with the game was great. And the timing was perfect, because it was not unlike what I was going through.

Tata Steel
In January 2021, for the first time in my life, I watched coverage of the Tata Steel Tournament. In hindsight, it’s pretty weird that I never did before. The tournament, formerly known as the Hoogovens tournament, held in Wijk aan Zee is one of the most famous chess tournaments in the world. Wijk aan Zee is also located 25 kms (16 miles) from my house! If I jump on my bike now, I’ll be there in an hour. Taking the Uber to Wijk aan Zee costs less than 50 euro. Yet, I had ignored it for decades. Now that it got my attention, I was hooked. And I got to witness a final round between two Dutch players, Anish Giri and Jorden van Foreest. Both of them I had not heard of the year before that. Watching the tournament closely again this year made me realize how invested in the community I have become. Now almost all players are familiar faces and for many of them I even know their playing style.

My love for chess is back
My love for chess is back. My appreciation for the game was never gone, I have always liked chess, and I have never made a conscious decision to stop playing chess. But, somewhere along the way, chess faded to the background and went from an active hobby at age 11 to a hobby in hibernation at age 39.

I’m satisfied with my chess progress last year and I’m very motivated to keep improving. I’ve laid the foundation for the next level for me. In the next two months, I’ll continue playing Daily and work on my opening repertoire. Next Spring, I’m going back to live games and see how far I can push my rating up.

With an end to the Covid pandemic in sight, my priorities will probably shift from online entertainment back to more social activities away from my laptop. But even if I’ll have less time for chess, I doubt my chess hobby will go back to hibernation any time soon.