Practice Games and Coaching

If any beginners want to do practice games I am 1150 rated rapid and around 1000 in blitz and bullet. I also have a very high puzzle rating of 2,530 (top 1% of chess.com). Rated or unrated, no more than 15|10. I will also use game review on your games and I can coach you through your mistakes during the game (must be rapid for me to have enough time).

I would recommend you are at least 150+ below my rating. Reply on this forum or send a message directly, please don’t challenge me spontaneously I probably won’t accept.

Thanks,

Mason

not sure how to tell you this but

this club died a very long time ago

Oof

Yeah no one is really active here @MasonMirabile (for the most part anyway; for example, I'm still here even though I limited most club notifs).

Also, your puzzle rating is pretty high for your game rating (congrats!), but puzzles rating on chess.com is inflated by several hundred points compared to game ratings and just because you can solve puzzles well, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll find similar moves in your own games.

A few reasons for this are:

- chess games require positional knowledge, or some other ability, to win games.

- the puzzles have some winning "solution" and you know this, so you might spend longer looking compared to a real game where you don't know if any moves are winning for you (could be a losing position), so you might not spend as long on the position

- puzzles show you have a good sense of converting tactics if they are there, but in a real game, you also must first gain an advantage to reach those positions to make tactics like in the puzzles possible.

Just some thoughts of mine, but your puzzles rating is still super high, so congratulations on that!

Yeah I totally agree about the puzzle ratings - you have a pretty high one too!

you just lack application of those tactics and principles to your games, perhaps some outside factors are affecting your performance?

Maybe time management?

Could be, I do tend to play on the faster side and switch time controls frequently. Do you think I would do better if I stuck to one and worked on my time management in that control?

I recommend having one "main" time control (preferably a longer time control like rapid) and then having at least one time control which you don't care about as much, but still play fairly often (like bullet or blitz). The main time control is to give you time to think and play games for experience and the other time control is to mix up the time control a little bit to prevent conditioning your mind into moving at exactly a specific pace.

It is common for people (usually beginners not knowing any better) to play bullet/blitz and condition their mind into moving quickly, but this habit becomes harmful when they can't patiently sit there and slow down in longer time control games; you also don't want to be in the habit of moving too quickly and getting lazy with calculating deeper, or with neglecting to take a little extra time to do a blunder check before moving, or to consider other candidate moves and other plans.

The same problem can sometimes go the other way too though. Some people only play really long time controls (like 30 or longer per player for each game) and condition themselves into spending longer to think (less harmful than thinking too fast, but can still become problematic) and this can hurt them when their time starts to get lower because then they panic due to lack of experience and they begin blundering even if they still have many minutes on their clock.

By playing at least 2 different time controls fairly often, you help prevent you from getting used to only one pace of speed and this helps you develop more awareness of the chess clock and develop better time management skills.