Best of luck with your goals. Looking forward to watching the progess!
Matti's Intermediate Rapid & Classical Plan
Sort:
05/09/21
So I got off to a bit of a false start with my study plan, turns out life doesn't stop just becuase you want to study chess! I've finished the first week now and hopefully should be able to stick to the schedule better now.
My first 'week' went really well I'd like to think! I've increased my ratings in all 3 time controls and broke 1300 blitz rating for the first time. There's no particular regular games I want to go over, but I have annotated my game in the chessgoals simul from yesterday below (Spoiler: I won!).
I've had two LoneWolf games since my last post. My first opponent unfortunately didn't show up, so I got a default win, and my second was an easy win against a player much lower rated than me. Hopefully things will get more interesting in the next few weeks.
As far as studying goes, I've worked through the first chapter of the first Yusupov book, scored 14/16 on the test, so I'm pretty happy with that. Next week I'm going to do some open repertoire work, most likely using Hanging Pawns' videos on YouTube.
As promised, here's my game from the simul yesterday. I went into the game fully expecting to get utterly demolished, Matt's by far the highest rated player I've ever played, so the result was an extremely unexpected one! I'm really proud of this game, I love very strategic, positional games and I really want to get better at playing them. I don't feel like I played any bad moves either; Lichess computer analysis says I made one blunder (17.Rad1) but even that move 'only' gives up my advantage (+1.7 to -0.6), and even then Black only has one move to keep it like that.
I was genuinely exhausted after this game! It lasted almost two hours which is much longer than I've ever spent on a game before. If I hadn't been so hungry afterwards I think I would have just gone straight to sleep, even though it was only about 6pm!
Thanks for reading, I'll see you again next week!
Current ratings (Lichess)
Blitz: 1337
Rapid: 1621
Classical: 1616
LoneWolf Score: 2/3
I've been trying to improve in longer games for a while and the start of a new uni year seemed like a good time to start working on my chess properly. I'm starting out at 1609 Lichess Rapid & 1583 Lichess Classical and these are the ratings I want to improve. I'm also planning on joining my uni's chess society (or a local one if that clashes with other things) and hope to be able to enter some OTB tournaments before next summer. I've signed up for the Lichess Lonewolf league (U1800), and played my first game yesterday (an unfortunate loss). Hopefully I can bounce back and reach my goal of scoring 5.5/11.
I plan on playing most of my games on Lichess (I just prefer the UI!) and I'll be using Scid Vs Pc for my analysis becuase I've found that the act of downloading the PGN and using different software somehow makes me do more serious analysis (maybe becuase I'm not distracted by just wanting to play another game).
My goals for the next 12 weeks are:
Increase my Lichess rapid rating to 1675
Score 5.5/11 in the Lichess Lonewolf league
Current ratings (Lichess)
Blitz: 1274
Rapid: 1609
Classical: 1583