Blitz 2200!

[I will try to write 2200 words in this blog.]

YES THE PATZER X FINALLY BROKE 2200!!!

It was harder than usual and took 4 whole months (rather than the expected 3) for the mighty X to break 2200!

So what about our all-sucky fiend @I-I_I-I? How is he doing? See for yourself:

And yes, he is so upset that I reached 2200 he even tried to claim he is 1400!

And later he tried to bash me like this:

May god bless him!

Ok now let's throw @I-I_I-I aside for a while (though I may still mention him seconds later) and I will talk a bit about my journey to 2200 (so I could write 2200 words).

Referring to my rating curve above, you can see that at first I was doing quite well and went to 2135. BUT THEN I started to experience a series of tilting... As a simple exercise for those of you who are having troubles with math (e.g. @I-I_I-I), you can try to count how many times I have tilted as inferred from the curve.

For answer: the great X has tilted a total of 8 times.

That doesn't sound too good, eh? But whatever happens, X is X, and he will always strike (and whatever happens, @I-I_I-I is @I-I_I-I, and he will always go doooooooown).

Ok, for the first game for this blog, I will share the game that brought me to 2200, in which I have to play against a Nasty Master and I won with a nice tactics!

Also it's very important that no matter what you do, you should NEVER resign. For example, here is how I won a dead lost game (and this game played an important role to my road to 2200), by not resigning!

To bring the word count up, I will (again) go off-topic and talk more about my blitz experiences. On my way to 2200 I noticed something unusual: previously my skill has been stable so the rating curve looks more "linear", but for 2100+, strange things occur... Somehow at times I would feel rather confused and play confusingly, so confusing that I could make stupid blunders (hanging pieces...), overlook simple tactics and simply get outplayed. While at other times (e.g. today) I would feel rather powerful, I can see through the positions clearly and totally crush my opponents. Moreover, this behavior appears to be excellently periodic and yes, all these cause the terrible suffering of tilting I mentioned earlier. I guess this is because I am facing stronger opponents ever and the periodic features of human mental begin to manifest themselves (this is normal however, unlike @I-I_I-I's chaotic mental): Now to win a game, I need to be fully concentrated for the whole game, but it's a hard thing to do everyday so I would play in a confusing/powerful manner periodically.

This, of course, does not imply my "true" skill still hovers at 2100. I am still improving, and dealing with my opponents feels easier everyday as I improved. That said, I may (obviously) be a bit overrated at 2200 and I will suffer much more tilting later, but (unlike @I-I_I-I) I wouldn't give up, I would keep playing, to see what my true limit skill is (hopefully 2800+). On the contrary, our fiend @I-I_I-I is overrated in an illicit manner: look at him, most of the time he only plays unrated; and even if he plays rated, he will play robot; AND even if he plays rated and human, he would play variants. How sad! (It feels so good to bash @I-I_I-I in my blog, by the way)

But now @I-I_I-I has to taste a bit of suffering: recently he got addicted to tactics and he thought he is on fire and would get to tactics 2000 easily and write a blog about it (so X can bash him in his own blog):

But truth is always contrary to belief:

To someone who tilted all his way to 2200, this is hardly surprising; but for the confused and dumb @I-I_I-I, of course, he will never figure out what's happening to him so he will always go doooooooown (to the bottom limit of zero).

(Only 700+ words so far, I still need to work hard to reach 2200 words...)

Ok. Many of you are probably still wondering how did I reach 2200. This is only my third year to playing chess after all! And there is some random patzer like @I-I_I-I who is so anxious to know my secrets that he has been harassing me for a long time. So for those of you who are patient enough to read to this middle point I will share (only) a bit of my secrets:

In one of my blogs (go read all my blogs to find out which one, as the author is clearly too lazy to figure it out), I mentioned that endgame is rather important to good play, and I still agree with that (i.e. agree with myself, which is consistent and logical, unlike @I-I_I-I's illogic): for slow time control you can aim for quiet endgame positions and outplay your opponent; for blitz you can play both fast and accurately in endgame and save countless losing (or win countless drawing) endgames. And this still helps me from time to time.

But of course endgame alone is never enough (unless you are playing ancient games like Makruk), tactics also matters (tactics is the only stuff @I-I_I-I is reasonably good at, by the way): fortunately there is a good training system on chess.com, and I have been practicing tactics (both in puzzles and puzzle rush) here so I am reasonably good at it and often come up with nice tactics in my own games.

But the new things which help me to break 2200 have something to do with openings. Admittedly, I didn't study openings too systematically when I was 2000+ or so, but now I am beginning to appreciate its importance: in some sense, openings play is most important since if you can hardly survive openings other knowledge will not help you too much. Now playing against 2100+ opponents I began to feel that I lagged behind in openings (for example, when I play French Defense as Black, I tend to castle kingside and lose, later I learnt that that's a faulty idea. Also I couldn't come up with effective ways to deal with French and Sicilian as White). To remedy this I had to study more openings, studying openings is basically about memorizing lines (don't believe those who said you can master openings without memorizing anything) so I simply memorized a lot of lines and plans and this helps: now I won't get knocked out early in openings and sometimes I could crush my opponents right in openings and win!

A recent example:

Now you may still ask me: what about strategy? I mentioned in one of my blogs (again go read all my blogs to find out which) that strategy isn't all that helpful for fast to rapid time control and I still agree with myself. For me, strategy in blitz is nothing more than a kind of "experience": if you are experienced, you can find good plans/tricky moves easily; if you are not experienced, you will have troubles finding good tricky moves. For blitz this is enough, there is no needs to find subtle plan in a subtle positional position (you don't get the time to do that anyway). So for blitz strategy is more about experience, or rather, as X likes to call it, "mental perplexing". And X is good enough at it so he can save countless of totally losing games. (Just in case you don't see, "X" refers to the same person who wrote this, and @I-I_I-I likes to call me that in "admirations" (or for that matter, in a "trolling mode"))

(Still only 1300+ words so far, so hard to get to 2200.. sigh...)

So what nonsense shall I talk now? To bring the word count up even more, I guess I will talk more about @I-I_I-I. For those of you who have read my blogs, you might still be wondering exactly who this @I-I_I-I is. As you can see, I have been mentioning him in almost all my blogs beginning from last year. "Who is @I-I_I-I?", that is a deep philosophical question, as deep as asking "who am I?". So to answer that question can help me to bring my word count up to 2200, which is what all I care about.

Some spoiler first for those of you who have read to this point: In June 2200 (*2020) I will be writing a very special blog, so special it will be unlike any (nonsensical) blogs I have written so far. You may have already guessed it: I am going to write a blog for @I-I_I-I! Yes, just for our evil fiend @I-I_I-I! So far in my blogs I have only mentioned him, but I never write a blog devoting entirely to an insightful discussion of @I-I_I-I. Why I choose to write it in June may be revealed later, but now let's still return to my earlier question: "Who is @I-I_I-I?".

That was a hard question, and hundreds of blogs may be devoted to it, without yielding a definite answer. To be frank, X himself is trying to understand who this mysterious, legendary, genuine, ingenious, etc, etc, @etc @I-I_I-I is. But to force his word count up, he is forced to answer that question...

First let me quote one of @I-I_I-I most famous, most mysterious, most unfathomable quote: (quote, rather than screenshot, to increase word count effectively):

"I dunno much about rating systems, but I did use a couple of famous programming contest websites, and I'll simply put their doc for ratings here for ref:

Codeforces: Blog
Atcoder: Dropbox
I believe the 1st one is just Elo, not sure about the 2nd. They are capable of holding contests with thousands (or even 10k+) participants, but idk if their systems are good for 4PC.." --- Legendary @I-I_I-I

And if you go to the links @I-I_I-I provided in the above quote, you will get some ideas how unfathomable the very @I-I_I-I himself is!

The word "genius" is more of an insult rather than praise to our @I-I_I-I! He is so much more than that! He may very well be the future of chess, vid games, the world and even the vast universe itself! So right now, at this time, learn to be mediocre: in the face of @I-I_I-I you are less than an atom, and of course, learn to respect our @I-I_I-I, learn to learn @I-I_I-I because the more you learn about him, the more you learn. (Confusing? Good)

Unfortunately I could not put too much about @I-I_I-I here, the discussion of @I-I_I-I require several blogs at the very least! This is merely an introduction, no, merely a preclude, to our great @I-I_I-I. More information about @I-I_I-I may be obtained if you follow my later blogs in June.

Looks like the word count is still a bit away from 2200, so I shall emphasize another great "feature" about @I-I_I-I: that is he is everywhere. Of course @I-I_I-I isn't only on chess.com, he's on github, discord, slack, etc, etc, @etc. On the other places, he's known famously as "backontrack" or "backontruck" (if he doesn't want to be too famous). The name "backontrack" is so famous that GM Sam Shankland wrote a whole blog about it and it became Blog of the Month: https://www.chess.com/blog/Shankland/back-on-track-1. Also @I-I_I-I is leaving his tracks everywhere: in github he has created the famous "Gallery Editorial" repository, on slack he has become head for 4PC channel and etc... So we are all humble in the face of great @I-I_I-I.

ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I ALL HAIL @I-I_I-I

And yes, @I-I_I-I is so powerful that he even helped me to finally bring my word count to 2200+!!!

Ok I went completely off-topic but anyway thanks for your readings!