Road to 2000

Now the day has come, it feels underwhelming, but I'm still happy to share I broke 2000 rapid. It's a milestone for sure. 

I played black here and it was not the best game, my opponent was already a bit worn down from losing before, and I lost a pawn early, but recovered  

Thousands of games, hours of solving puzzles, picking up on new opening lines now and then and improving my current ones from experience, as well as having started to coach and teach chess to lower rated players have been important factors to get here. I think overall my chess understanding can be summarized as follows:

- Good openings in many lines after e4 with white, and some lines with black like Kings Gambit Accepted, Austrian Defense vs the QG, good Italian game etc. Overall good understanding of opening principles and applying them for an active position

- Improved concentration and resilience, I can now turn a uncomfortable position into something that will at least give me chances, instead of just trading into a losing endgame

- Good tactical skills; forks, pins, deflections, seeing pinned pawns almost always, using discovered attacks and setting them up

- Playing for space on the board with pawns

- Understanding good and bad knights/bishops. I still use the knight a lot and love playing with the bishop + knight combo, even though I can also see in some situations why GM's generally prefer bishops, I still get lots of knight forks and tricks in my rapid games vs 2000 players

- Decent endgame basics. Actually I should refresh on opposition and zugzwang tactics, but I know a rook is good on the 7th, cutting off the enemy king, activating my king, pushing pawns etc

And ofcourse all the basic checkmates mastered to perfection. This would be the first thing I advise any <1200 player looking to improve, just basic checkmates. Anyways, here is the game that brought me over 2000, and I hope my story as a 29 yo guy who only got serious about chess in my twenties, and still has been mostly just playing on and off with some periods of more intense focus with studying bits and pieces, and playing 20-30 games daily, can inspire some of the others that aren't like child talents, but still want to reach a ' good ' rating. Cheers!

congratulations man, good work

I'll be trying to do one myself one day , want to have GM title at some point seems like load of work ahead of me