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My Improvers Journey!!!!! (April 2025)

My Improvers Journey!!!!! (April 2025)

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Welcome back to my Improvers Journey! This series is dedicated to following my chess journey through the Chess.com Improvers club, a movement that is helping over 30,000 members find coaching, helpful tips and growth. In this post, I will be showing you what I have been doing throughout April, what I've been learning, some games and some puzzles, and some thoughts going forward. 

What's included in this post:

  • Openings I studied. (featuring the Nimzo-Larsen)
  • Fantastic and amazing games from this month.
  • Achievements and accomplishments from this month.
  • What's happening next?

Openings I studied this month. 

I have a very haphazard way of studying openings. What usually happens is that I see a cool opening in Hikaru's stream, in some other game, wherever it may be...and then I play it hundreds of times in blitz and bullet until I've mastered all of the nuances and mysteries behind it. That is exactly what happened here! I watched Hikaru play Titled Tuesday, and he played an interesting line of the Nimzowitsch-Larsen that I had never seen before.  

The idea of the position is to play g3 and Bg2 and then play for e4. Often, I'll end up with a White position that looks something like this.

And from then it's quite simple for a plan forward, play for f4 and maybe f5, and attack on the kingside. Here's an example of a game that played out like that.

The other thing I've focused on this month is working through a chess book by International Master Jeremy Silman. This book is titled, The Amateur's Mind, and it's really helping me to work through some issues with my mindset and games. 

Fantastic and amazing games from this month.

I played some terrible games this month, losing in as few as ten moves. But I countered that with some beautiful sacrifices and wonderous attacks!

This was a neat attack from a blitz game played in the pool.

Up next is a attacking game, but not a kingside attack. An attack on every single front.

Here I had to do some trolling. This completes my goal of wnning with the WrongCloud in every single time control: bullet, blitz, rapid and classical!

Achievements and accomplishments from this month.

Over the course of April, I achieved some incredible results in my online play. The most amazing of these was a huge soar in my blitz and bullet ratings, in which I scored new peak ratings. First off is blitz. I had previously scored a peak blitz rating of 2395, one win away from 2400. But I was never able to get that win and I sunk down to 2100. Well this month I went on a grind of playing blitz, not just playing, but thinking about my game and playing with purpose. The result? After playing 25 blitz games on the final day of April, I played this game to cross 2400 blitz.

2400 blitz! Finally! My next goal is to make this my floor.

But the most impressive feat of April is my bullet rating. That's right. Even though I hit some rough patches and dropped 150 points in one day (courtesy of a hyper event I was playing), I never dropped below 2300 and quickly made it back into the 2400-2500 range. I'm a 2500 rated bullet player and I'm here to stay.

What's happening next?

We're almost into summer! A third of a year has gone by and I've made some incredible steps towards my year-long goals. In May I am going to grind my rapid and blitz ratings, and attempt for the amazing bullet rating of 2600. Thank you for following my Improvers Journey, and have a great day!

Past Improvers Journey 2025 Blog Posts