Homeskool's beginner plan

Hey everyone, I'm homeskool! I'm starting the beginner 1 plan and looking forward to improving. I haven't played a lot of chess in the past, just some here and there, so I'm hoping that having a structured plan will help me focus and improve my understanding of the game.

hey ! am far from being the best, but if you ever wanna call on discord and play some educative chess or study theory, gimme me a message )

Week 1 Update:

I've noticed in the plan that it doesn't mention worry about rating progress until a couple weeks down the road, so I'm not going to worry about that for this update. I've really enjoyed the first week of the plan, and I've benefitted a lot from have this structured approach to the game. I was dreading the day of blitz games in the first week, but I actually had a lot of fun with the 5+5 control.

For the daily games, I've been pretty successful with find accurate moves so far because I treat them sort of like puzzles, with the added dimension of trying to plan a strategy around what I think are the best moves. In the past I used to just do puzzles and I've watched guides on how to think about puzzles, but I don't reinforce those patterns in a game environment, and the daily games have helped to bring those two things together. This may not be the optimal way to use the daily games, but that's what I've been doing so far.

For rapid, I've been trying to find the right balance of using my time and moving quickly to conserve time. The balance of trusting my instincts, which I think are developing better now that I'm giving myself a practical environment to train the concepts I've drilled in puzzles, versus taking the time to figure out a sequence, evaluate the outcome, and compare it to a second or third candidate move/sequence has been incredibly fun and I always look forward to my rapid games.

In blitz, I'm low rated enough that most of my games are a masterclass in minimal disaster. I still have trouble taking in the whole board and remember which pieces see what. In other words, I still tunnel vision. I think that's to be expected at my rating though. Once I finished my last blitz game, I found I kind of enjoyed the chaos and I see why a lot of people just play blitz online. Even though I prefer rapid since I like to think, I'm looking forward to this week of blitz.

This has gone on a lot longer than I thought it would, but after my first week I'm more motivated than ever to improve and learn more about the game. I can definitely feel the benefit of just playing the game instead of trying to learn everything before you even touch a piece, which was my problem when I first started getting back into chess. I was so afraid to be bad that I wanted to try to cram all the chess knowledge I could into my brain before I started playing. Now that I'm playing regularly, I've realized that it's basically impossible to learn the game by not playing the game. The best way to learn how to defend against silly checkmate attempts in the Italian is to play against them, possibly lose to them, and then go into the analysis and figure it out there. Experience is the best teacher, and I'm having a blast so far learning from it.

If you took the time to read all this, I appreciate it, and I look forward to updating again (hopefully with fewer words) next week!

Week 2 Update:

This week of mostly Blitz games was pretty rough. I have difficulty with fast chess, mostly because I've avoided whenever I do play chess, and I've gotten the sense that opening familiarity is much more beneficial in blitz versus where rapid where you have more time to think through moves and piece interactions. I've enjoyed going through the Chernev book, playing through moves on a physical chess set is nice and I would often take time before moving on from a pivotal point in a game to try and visualize some candidate moves for myself just to work on my vision and visualization in 3D.

I felt like I wasn't able to implement a lot of the kingside attacking ideas from the Chernev book in my blitz games as I was more worried about blundering pieces and not getting mated in less than 6 moves (I got Wayward Queen attacked and forgot Nf6 after defending my pawn and kicking the Queen out). I think longer time controls will help my incorporate the ideas into my play better, and I'm looking forward to the next week.