Introduce Yourself and Your Goals!

Hi Jeff @JMGMiles. Glad to have fellow Improver here. I'm William, and I aim to pass 1000 elo this year. I'm really close for Daily, while Rapid may take another couple of months. 1500 elo would be my goal next year. You have tried hiring chess coach? A good one would help you identify your weakness, and focus your process to better yourself as chess player. Just dm me if you are interested, I could recommend you coach I've used from this site.

I've seen some of your games, and I noticed that you just played 10+5 all the times. It won't work. Unless you really identify your weakness and what went wrong during honest review with more competent players -and learn how to fix that- you just merely reinforce your bad habits. And playing hundreds of games in even faster timeframe would only make things worse. I suggest instead of playing faster, you actually have to player slower. Classical chess. Or Daily chess to the rescue. I play mostly Daily and 30 minutes now, and the quality of my games are better there than the faster chess I used to play. Does that mean I will avoid blitz and bullet for the rest of my life? No, of course not. I just want to ensure I got my skill solid first, than I'll work on my speed. I think once I'm solidly within intermediate level (say ~1500 rating at Daily and Rapid), I could adapt to playing faster chess easily.

Also, by all means, you should limit yourself to play with even more difficult opponents. You could set that up in your setting.

You will need to swallow your ego and suffer a lot, but you will reach a number which shows your real skill after all. I once dropped to 200 when I applied this setting. So what. That was my real ability back then. And from there, the real work began. I now believe in myself I will pass 1000 this year.

@LordLuck-WM Thank you. I already have my challenge rating setting set to that. Mainly because When I play better people that stick to an actual opening and not someone playing crazy moves that pull me out of my prep and developing my pieces properly, or that I don't know how to punish, it throws me off. I'm too impatient for the longer timed games, and don't have a lot of time already to play chess in general with work and kids.

i want to be a good chess player

Don't mention it @JMGMiles. If time is really limited, at the very least you need to review your games after playing them. That's the real secret of improvement. Not by playing many more games but never reviewing it, but by playing just few games but with your best effort and then qualitative reviews afterwards. So not just 'hey I moved this, and suddenly engine dropped from -0.8 into -5.3' nonsense, but more like 'hmm, I moved this I just overlooked skewer tactics. Son of a... now his queen is taking control f-file, and his rook is going to harass my king side'.

I'm a human and I want to be a GM

Hello everyone! Even though this account is new, I'm not new to Chess.com or the Improvers Club; many of you may know me as @Str0n6h0LD. I created this new account after my original account was falsely accused of cheating, so I just wanted to reintroduce myself to you all. Looking forward to another great year of improvement!

Hi everyone, I'm from Belgium and I want to improve some part of my game, especially e4 openings (I'm a d4 & e6 player for the most part). So I'll hit the numbers to get t right. I want also improve my Fide rating in classical games (1h30 time) - that's not much but anyway the least. Don't hesitate to challenge me but before ask me to be in your list of in your friends. thx in advance.

N;B. ; you can challenge me In any form you want when I'm connected but for the daily's only on 960 game and maximum 3 day's play.

Hi everyone,

I'm from Belgium and I started playing chess on this site at the end of March after around 14 years without playing serious games. My goal is to reach a rating of at least 1400 in slow games before the end of the year. (1600 would be better.) At some point, I want to join a physical chess club again.

I created a  chess book curriculum for getting back into chess just over two weeks ago and I'm still going through the first book on that list, The Soviet Chess Primer by Ilya Maizelis.

I also plan to join some of the club events here, once I've figured out what time zone "9:00 AM" and "6:00 PM" refer to here.

Welcome to the club.

Welcome, Kit! That was a good list of books. I know of a blog post with a very detailed list depending on where you are in your chess journey. I highly recommend it! Unfortunately, I thought I had it bookmarked, but I cannot find it.

There are probably several lists like that.

• Just yesterday, I found the article "Our Grandmasters Recommend" on ChessMood, which recommends books for four different levels: 0-1000, 1000-1500, 1500-2000 and 2000+.
• "Best Chess Books By Rating Bracket (Including Sections Like Tactics, Attacking, Endgame, and More)" on Chessjournal dot com.
• "Recommended Chess Books by Rating" on BeginChess dot com.
• There's also Chess Books by Rating by chessbuzz from August 2009. (I don't know whether the rating brackets are Chess.com ratings or Elo ratings. Except for the lowest level, those may very well be Elo ratings.)

Since this is strictly speaking a thread for people to introduce themselves, we should perhaps continue this in a different thread.

There is a forum in this club dedicated to resources, including books.