Is progress usually smooth?

Hi All,

I had a thought tonight about how I am progressing (yes it hurt and I am regretting it).  So I have had pretty smooth progress over the last 6 months, with swings of around 100 points a few times, but the trend line is quite uniform.  I've gone from about 600 to 1300 and am wondering if people can keep progressing, with effort, through the ratings to say 1800?  I have a little system of playing the 10 minute games to learn a bit then go into the 3 minute games to practice catching blunders.  I am currently working on my standard thought process pre move. Also, where have people found progress to be very challenging personally?  

Thanks and i look forward to your views.

regards

Mr Who

Your progress rate is impressive. What to you do other than play- take lessons, study independently?

Talking to your Blitz improvements here, as I can see that is your primary mode of choice. You've improved a lot over the last few months and should be very pleased with that. Whatever you are doing, it is clearly working. However, to keep improving you need to be pragmatic and ready for things to get more difficult in the months ahead. This is because of two factors.

1) You (probably) haven't actually improved as much as you think you have. When I see fairly linear improvemet what it suggests to me is a rating catching up to a true rating. If your 'true rating' in it's pure form is the 100% accurate assessment of how good you are and your rating is always gravitating towards that, it will take time to catch up. To demonstrate, I've taken your Blitz rating graph and added two lines. A red smoothed line of your improvement and a blue line which I'd suggest is probably closer to your true strength throughout that time.

2) Things are going to get harder. It gets increasingly difficult to improve as you get better. Speaking from my own experience in Daily Chess I gained 300 points in 5 months and have gained a further 130 in the subsequent six months, and that's despite starting to play OTB and increasing my training time. There just isn't as much low hanging fruit as you go.

I wouldn't expect your progress to be Linear, as the challenge you're facing isn't Linear in difficulty. I had Linear progress and then since then I've had a series of 'steps' where something has just clicked or my brain has made sense of information it already had but hadn't processed, my last big rating boost came after a 2-week hiatus on Holiday, barely played Chess and came back and was suddenly around 50 points stronger.

Can only talk to my experience and observations I've made, but I'd say enjoy the Linear progress whilst it lasts!

 notmtwain, I usually watch a video from John Bartholomew or the st Louis Chess Club each day and go over maybe 1 in 5 games usually the games where I realise I missed tactics or made a blunder and try to figure out why.

LEBisho, thanks for the input yeh I thought the first 2 months was probably not a good representation.  I have started to notice the jumps your talking about happen at funny times.  I was was sort of hoping that someone would say "yeh just keep going and you'll keep rising" but that was just a hope.

You didn't have a thought. That's a contradiction.

Thanks for resurrecting this thread.

It looks like bigdaddywho stopped progressing right after having the thought.

/ I wonder what changed?

Its very easy to progress till 1400 after that it becomes difficult.