Road to the International Master (IM) Title
Hello my dear chess.com friends! I am Aditya Mittal, a 12-year old chess player from India. Since I was first introduced to the game at roughly 5 years of age, I have been mesmerized by it and have been working hard to achieve my goal of becoming World Champion.
Currently, my live FIDE rating is 2457 and just a couple of days back I completed my IM (International Master) title requirements. I would like to share this journey with my amazing chess.com readers, whose feedbacks always inspire me!
December 2018. I had a rating of 2251 with no norms. After that I scored three back-to-back norms at the IIFLW International 2018-2019, Parsvnath International 2019 and the Aeroflot Open 2019.
IIFLW International 2018-2019
This tournament was in Mumbai, the city where I live. I played in the 2100+ category, scoring 5.5/9. My best results were wins against GM Andrei Deviatkin (2464) and IM Muhammed Khusenkhojaev (2455), and drawing with GM Aleksej Alexandrov (2590). My only loss in the event came against GM Abhimanyu Puranik (2544).
I increased 113.2 rating points and scored my maiden IM norm. Here is my favourite game from the event. I think it was a very nice positional squeeze and showing some ideas about the knight vs bishop endgame:
Parsvnath International 2019
After Mumbai, I immediately traveled to Delhi to play in another GM Open (Category A). In this tournament, I won 6 games, drew 2 and lost 2, en-route to an increase of 112.8 rating points and my second IM norm.
My best results included wins against IM Nguyen Van Huy (2450), GM Swapnil Dhopade (2487) and IM Girish Koushik (2411) and a draw with GM Ivan Popov (2588).
Here is my favourite game from the event. Not a very clean game, but I was very happy with some of my ideas:
Aeroflot Open 2019
This tournament took place in Moscow, Russia. I participated in Category A. The tournament was so strong that it had an average rating of 2565 (!) My rating had updated to 2454, and I was among the final seeds of the tournament.
I scored 3.5/9 against an average rating opposition of 2554, making my final norm, and with that my IM title. I got some great experience from the tournament, playing with 2700, 2600 rated players..
I won two games, against IM Lomasov Semyon (2559) and IM Tahbaz Arash (2484). I drew three games, against GM Tigran Petrosian L. (2595), GM Aram Hakobyan (2545) and GM Gukesh D. (2508). (I take this opportunity to congratulate Kulaots Kaido for an amazing victory at this tournament!)
Here is my favourite game of the event, also probably one of my best games so far, with my annotations:
https://twitter.com/chesscom_in/status/1100874955548311552
Next up is GM Title!
See you guys soon with another post...
(side note: the game which you see on the thumbnail of this blog, you can read more about it here: https://www.chessbase.in/news/kiit-open-r05plus06/
you can also read more about my norms here: https://chessbase.in/news/Aditya-Mittal-and-Sreeshwan-Maralakshikari-score-two-IM-norms
https://chessbase.in/news/Five-norms-for-India-at-the-Aeroflot-Open-2019 )
