Nova Daily - 30 April 2025: What 100 rapid games have taught me about myself
Hi!
With April almost over, it's time to step back and reflect on my work.
7. We make the longest journey through a series of little steps.
A small note on improvement
The first four months
100 games
Where I stand now
How to proceed from here
Conclusion
New Year is traditionally a time when we make resolutions. Or, we should be making resolutions, i.e.: being resolute in our intentions. What we tend to do is make wish-lists.
- Iain Abernethy
From the very start of my journey I've decided to take things slowly: no more than one rapid game per day. The idea would be to immerse myself in the entire process, and get accustomed to the sensation of the slow drudgery that the process is. I didn't want to rush through it, because that would mean that I might miss something.
At the start of 2025 I made a set of New Year's resolutions for the very first time in my life. In that blog I posted a few lines that I've repeated over and over again throughout my blogs. It's a bit like the Woodpecker method, but with ideas:
There are no substitutes for the work. There are no shortcuts to mastery. Elbow grease, the drudgery of the grind.
- Nova Stone
This is completely in line with the seventh point of Iain Abernethy's seventh point of "10 things the martial arts should have taught you about life."
7. We make the longest journey through a series of little steps.
This point should be very obvious, but it's still very much worth reading. A marathon is 26.219 miles, or 42.195 kilometres. The only way to travel that distance is by first one step, then another, and then another, and so on. Every single one of those steps counts: after having played incredibly well for 54 moves, you can spoil the win in one:
That painful 55th move also counts. Had I pushed my other pawn forward, I would've won very easily, as my opponent couldn't resist to point out during the game. And they were completely right, of course.
The main thing about the "little steps" is that it's worth putting in the work to do the small tasks, even if the positive effects aren't immediately apparent. You can't expect a diet to drop you two stone worth of body mass within the first week; it requires consistent effort over a longer period of time if you want the result to manifest. Sporadic efforts will not help much. If you take a baby step forward, it won't look like you've moved much. However, if you move 100 baby steps and then look back at the distance that you've bridged, you'll be able to see the distance you travelled. And that's the same with the chores that you have to do in chess.
The following story, taken literally from the podcast, is a perfect illustration of this:
A prospective student visits a master and asks, "How long will it take for me to become the best fighter in the area?"
The master tells the would-be student: "It'll take at least 10 years."
Thinking that 10 years is a long time, the prospective student asks, "Okay, well, I'll train twice as hard as all the other students. Now how long will it take?"
The master says: "It will take 20 years."
Confused, the would-be student asks, "How long will it take me to be the best fighter in the region if I only stop training to eat and sleep?"
The master replies: "Well, in that case it'll take 30 years."
The student asks the master to explain why he increases the number of years every time he tells him he'll work harder. The master tells him that the more the student is fixating and obsessing on the destination, the less he will be able to concentrate on the immediate tasks that will take him to that destination. So as a student's fixation on the goal intensifies, his ability to concentrate on the day-to-day tasks required to achieve that goal decrease.
Hence the extra time needed.
If you're attentive and/or have followed my journey for a longer period of time, you can already figure out where I'm going with this. My approach had been too lazy for my liking for a very long time, and I wanted to increase my work ethic. I did this publically so that I'd instill a bit of unseen peer pressure to force myself to actively engage with my game on a day-to-day basis.
Yesterday I was approached by a fellow BlogChamps member who sought my advice. They wanted to get some pointers for becoming a better chess-player. And while I don't do coaching, I do like to think that I can give some valuable bits of advice here and there.
The simple tips that anyone with two minutes of Googling can give you are to play more games, analyse your games, and do more puzzles. And while those things are very true, they hardly scratch the surface.
I presented my fellow improver with the following message:
Do you play tired?
Do you play too hastily and neglect to do your calculations properly?
Do you simply not look for tactics?
Does your board visualisation leave much to be desired?
Do you rush through the opening and play too quickly afterwards?
Are you missing the resources of your opponents when you're better?
Do you miss knight forks more often?
Do you leave pieces undefended too often and get hit by double attacks?
Do you get nervous when your opponent plays out their own plan?
Blunders rarely happen in isolation. There's always a reason. I can't look inside your head, so you're much better able to find out why this is than I am. If you're lazy with your calculation training, there's the solution. If you don't know the middlegame plans after your book moves are up, there's the issue. If you have irrational time-use, you know what to work on. If you choke or flinch, your mental toughness might need an upgrade.
There's enough to work with, but it's up to you to do the work. Just be brutally honest with yourself.
The reason I share this excerpt here (with permission of the other person, even though I wrote and sent this myself) is because it fits perfectly with the topic of small steps. Much of improvement is to get rid of the things that are holding you back: bad habits, self-defeating beliefs, ineffective training routines. It's important to identify and deal with these, and that process requires consistent effort over a long period of time.
We're four months in, and this is a good time to reflect on the goals that I had set for this year.
Much has changed since 1 January. Following the invitation of Vanessa, I joined BlogChamps (a team of blogging enthusiasts) halfway January. Through BlogChamps I've made some online friends in the process, I've learned a fair bit about blogging, and I've read and engaged with many very interesting blogs. I also changed up my own blogs. When I compare my blog of January 1 with my blog of 21 April, the differences are too numerous to list. But judge for yourself.
One thing I've added to my blogs is introduction text, and a great deal of it. Sometimes I've rediscovered how much I actually love writing.
In reading a lot of blogs by other people, I have frequently been inspired to write a bit of text of my own about one of their ideas. Naturally I'd always credit the person who gave me the idea, unless it came about more organically in one of the notes discussions.
However, much as I love writing text, I have to acknowledge that the time I've spent on making my blogs a better read are also the things that in a way have decoyed my attention away from my game analyses, and that means that these acts of writing, fun as it might be to do, get in the way of the primary goal that I've set for myself. I need to change that.
So the first point to consider is this: I should write a flavour text only after I've done the rest of my work on the game. Not before.
My own game analyses are usually much more elaborate than just running the chesscom game review and seeing where I made mistakes. I want to delve deeper into my games and tear the veil off the issues that I'm facing. This is important if I want to improve (which I do).
In my Resolutions I indicated that I wanted to play 300 rapid games this year. With ⅓ of the year gone, I've played exactly 100 rapid games. As such I've gathered a wealth of information about myself and my play.
I must be honest with myself. I didn't get the benefits of these games that I wanted. Yes I've done a lot of work, yes I've written a lot of text, yes I've dramatically improved my opening play. However, because of the Daily format of my blog that I've decided upon, I have to keep the pace. If I want to provide something to my public journal daily, I feel the need to continue with the next game, often before I've managed to do the work on my previous game. You'll find numerous interesting games that I've left abandoned throughout my blog.
Since my offline life is taking place at the same time, the format of what I do has become a hindrance. I don't have the time to read back what I wrote throughout the days. I have even less time to let the takeaway points from my own games sink in. This means that my current method is overly ambitious and to a significant part ineffective, as I'm not able to get the most out of my games and analyses.
I have to change my approach.
Whatever I mentioned above, I'm currently at a great point in my online chess career. All of my live ratings have reached levels at which any further increase will require much effort. Wins can and do still come, but they are no longer obvious and will increasingly require me to work hard on my game.
As of 30 April 2025, my online peak ratings are as follows:
- Rapid: 2222
- Blitz: 2432
- Bullet: 2623
- Puzzle Rush Survival: 62
- Puzzles: 3643
- Daily: 1830
In most cases my rating is either on this score, or close to it. In terms of measurable results I'm playing my best game, so my training up to this point has been effective in many respects.
I can see a lot more room for growth. I'm after mastery, so I see 2500 rapid rating and 2600 blitz rating as achievable levels. However, one thing hasn't changed: I will be taking this process slowly. If I want to progress further up the rating ladder (which I see not as a goal on its own but rather as a side-effect of playing good chess and doing my work properly), I need to take my work even more seriously. And at this point, that comes with a change of my training regime.
I'll reduce the amount of rapid games that I play to two games per week. I'll spend one day on playing the game and writing down my thoughts and preliminary analysis, and on the second day I'll be working with my resources (opening databases, online courses, YouTube videos, written literature) and the engine. Light analysis of model games is also part of this. I hope that this way I'll be able to keep my workload more evenly distributed.
On the two other days I'll be playing a set of blitz games in pursuit of fine-tuning my opening play and my Fingerspitzengefühl with the openings, as well as to train some practical tactics. This way I can enjoy blitz while still making it useful for my training schedule.
One rule I'll have to instill (and if I recall correctly it was @RookMindset who brought the idea to my attention in this blog) is that I shouldn't start a new project before I've finished the previous one. I shouldn't start a new rapid game unless I've completed my work for the one before it. This is the greatest point that playing and writing about 100 daily rapid games has taught me: the format is ambitious but gets in the way.
My training schedule for the last 100 rapid games has been too ambitious and intensive for me to keep the pace. It has produced very good results so far, but I haven't taken full benefit of my work yet. The overload of unfinished work is largely a product of my desire to send something new into the world on a daily basis, and the form has been a hindrance for the goals I've set out to achieve. I've been clinging too much to the idea to get 300 rapid games in this year.
I had to deliberate honestly on my work, and I needed to revise my methods so as to enable me to work more effectively.
To recapitulate, my plans for the following four months:
- Two rapid games per week, with preliminary analysis.
- Two days of resource analysis and model games.
- The storytelling comes after the rest of the work has been done.
- Don't start a new game unless the previous game has been covered properly.
- Leave time to read back and reflect on previous work.
- Weekly recaps on Sunday.
