Progress Update Q2

It's been a while since my last progress update, mainly because not much has happened. I found inspiration to write a new edition by my new successes in puzzle rush, especially because it was mirrored beautifully by a lack of success in rapid chess.

In this article I'll write about:

• My puzzle rush performance in survival has gone up (and up and up).
• My performance in daily games has gone up (well up-ish...).
• My performance in rapid was too slow (well, way too slow).

Puzzle Rush (Survival)

The breaking news is my new record for puzzle rush survival 55!

A new personal best that is well above my previous best. It's also an insanely high score, period. When I checked the profiles of players in my friend list with similar scores (ranging from 54 to 56), they are all so much better than I am. I obviously don't belong to be listed among them.

Yet, my performance has been steadily improving. Continuous improvement year over year will add up to significant better performances.

Puzzle Rush Scores

This graph shows distribution of my scores for each puzzle rush. Where I scored between 10 to 19 or between 20 to 29 in most of my earlier attempts, nowadays that only represents a small portion of my scores. 

To illustrate how big the difference is: The first time I scored above 30 was after 130 attempts (on 18 February ‘21).  By the end of ‘21 I had played around 200 puzzle rushes, but only on half of them I scored 20 or higher. And only 5 times I scored higher than 30, that’s less than 3% of games. with 34 as my highest score. 
What used to be very hard to achieve for me, is a score I get almost every time now (16 times out of 17 attempts this month).

Puzzle Performance

Puzzles will help you go through tactical position after tactical position, reinforcing pattern-recognition so that they will "jump out" when they appear in your own games!

My improved performance is mainly driven by a better performance on these three skills: pattern recognition, puzzle recognition and calculation.

Pattern recognition

This is the main reason to do puzzles. Actually, the main reason that I do them is because I like them, they’re fun to play. Better pattern recognition is the reason they help you become a better chess player. 

By doing puzzles I’m training my brain to recognize typical patterns and better understand what the opportunities and threats are in a position. All puzzles are taken from real games, to ensure they are relevant. It's also my experience that they are beneficial for me in my own games.

Puzzle recognition

I’m also training my brain to be better at recognizing puzzles, which adds no value in real games. By puzzle recognition I mean that there’s information on a meta level regarding puzzles that help you solve the puzzle that’s not available in real games. 

Just the fact that a position is presented as a puzzle is the most obvious information that changes the nature of the position. Knowing there is something to find changes the way you look at a position. That’s why trappy moves work in real games, even though no one would fall for it when presented as a puzzle.

As a tangent, the same goes for “super hard to find checkmate”-puzzles. They are almost always easy to solve as long as they are presented as a  “super hard to find checkmate”-puzzle. Yet, in a real game they are impossible to find, not even with all the time in the world available.

Playing more puzzle rushes trains me to recognize what kind of solution is right for each rating. 

Calculation

Higher level puzzles require more calculation. The key to performing better is to spend more time making sure you’ve considered all possible lines. 
Lower rated puzzles are easier to solve. Typically, the first solution you see is the correct solution. As the rating of each puzzle goes up it becomes more ambiguous what the correct answer is.  Solving them immediately becomes harder because of this.  Intuitive solutions work less for higher rated puzzles, applying calculation becomes a necessity. The time to solve them jumps up exponentially.

I’m performing better at calculating positions, comparing all possible outcomes for each of my candidate moves. Part of the reason is that I’ve become more skilled. But another big factor is that I’m more willing to put in the effort of deep calculation.

I’ve really become much better at finding the best moves, which is a direct result of my efforts trying to become much better at finding the best moves.

An effort that pays off. Resisting the urge to play the move I intuitively predict to be the best move, but instead making an additional effort to calculate all candidate moves leads to a higher chance of  finding the right move. It’s the winning strategy for survival puzzle rush, when you know there is one move that’s better than all others and you have unlimited time available.

Rapid games

Rapid games had a low priority for a while, but recently I’ve picked it up again. And the first results were painful. Discerning. Illuminating.

My first rapid game in June I lost on time. Despite having the better position most of the game. The second game I lost on time as well. Despite having an overwhelmingly better position. In my third game I was lucky enough to have my opponent resign, not realizing he could probably win by running down my clock.

Game 4 Duckfest Luckfest

This game I needed a dose of luck to avoid a lose of Duck. I had squandered my advantage and the position was 0.00 for every candidate move.  My opponent only needed to grind me down. They had more than 4 minutes left, while I was down to 54 seconds. 

As it turned out 54 seconds was more than enough. I only needed 6 seconds.

Game 7 Duckfest Luckfest (another)

In my first six games, I had already lost two of them on time and a third game I was lucky, even though I should have lost on time. 

In game number 7 my opponent made a mistake in the middle game and from that moment I was winning (+ 5 position). I was winning on the board.. But just like in the previous games I was losing on the clock. 

My opponent resigned because they were beaten, unaware that I was 5.9 seconds away from being beaten. There's no way I could have converted this position into a win that fast!

In my first 10-min rapid games I lost two one time and I got lucky two other times. Time to work on speed more.

Daily games

Daily games have always been the format I preferred to help me get better at chess strategy, positional play and making plans. In a future article I'll share an elaborate update on my lessons learned.

But playing daily games also enforces the principle of taking more time for each move. And it leads to slower decision making too, which is most notable in 10-min rapid games. 

Because Daily tournament take so long, I won't start new ones, except for themed tournament that are useful for learning new openings.

Freezing up

The strategy that was winning for me in puzzle rush, and also in daily games, was disastrous for me when playing 10-min rapid games.

Because of my efforts to become better at finding the best moves, I’ve become much worse at not finding the best moves.

Resisting the urge to play the move I predict to be the best, intuitively, but instead making an additional calculation effort to find the correct move, is the wrong approach in rapid.

This isn't working in rapid for two reasons:

• Time isn’t an unlimited resource in rapid games
• Positions in real games don’t have a specific solution

My ambition to keep looking for the best move back fires when there isn’t a best move to find, when none of the moves are obviously better than the rest.

Example

In this position I played a move after 64 seconds, because none of my candidate moves appealed enough to me.  It annoys me that after such a time investment I didn't even find the best move. But the relevant lesson is that many moves were fine, even my move. It was the time lost that cost me the game.

Obviously, it's not too hard for me to find a reasonable move in this position in less time. It's because I tend to forget to move faster. Sometimes I lose my sense of urgency and get lost in over-calculation. 

Next steps

It's time to focus again on faster time formats and reduce focus on unlimited time formats (like daily games and survival puzzle rush).

Second priority is to publish more, beginning with finishing all my half completed articles.

Anyway, thanks all for reading!