How to achieve a 2100 rating
As of the writing of this post, my rapid rating is 2102. In this post I'm going to focus to how to move from a rating of 2000 to a rating of 2100. If you wish to learn my thoughts on achieving a rating of 2000, I have a blog post regarding that on my profile. A quick summary of that post would be play a lot of games, analyze those games, don't obsess over openings, train your tactics from both the attacker and the defender's perspective, train your prophylaxis, and learn the basic endgames. In chess, there is knowledge and skill. For many people, their knowledge of chess exceeds their skill in playing chess. For these people, improving their knowledge will not give them the ability to play better chess. Their knowledge is not the bottleneck that holds them back.
Moving on the thesis of this post, in my experience the thing that separates a 2000 from a 2100 is the ability to fight back from a worse position. There have been many occasions where I've been up a significant amount of material, and I end up drawing or losing the game. The engine is screaming that I'm completely winning but I'm unable to convert. 2100s launch counterattacks, set traps, diffuse my threats etc. This ability to fight back is even more exaggerated the higher in rating you go. GM Hikaru Nakamura once did a blitz speedrun where he intentionally sacrifices a queen at the beginning of every game. He managed to achieve a rating over 2400.
The core skill that underlies the ability to fight back is the ability to predict what your opponent wants to play. If you don't know your opponent's threat/idea you will probably walk into a tactic and quickly lose. When you know what your opponent wants to do there are 3 main ways to respond. 1. Directly prevent their move from happening (defend the square, block the piece that wants to move, etc.) 2. You can counterattack elsewhere (your opponent doesn't have time to execute their idea). 3. You can tactically sabotage their move (their desired move would allow you a winning tactic). A game doesn't end when one side has a significant material or positional advantage. The winning side somehow needs to use their advantage to achieve victory. If you can prevent them from creating threats and carrying out their ideas, they can't win.
My recommendations for training are 1. During a game, (if you have time), ask yourself the questions a. what does my opponent want? b. if they play their desired move, where do I want my pieces to be? 2. When you go over master games, try to predict what both sides are going to play before they actually play it. Playing 'Guess the Move' will enhance your instincts tremendously.
When I achieve a rating of 2200, I'll write a follow-up post.
