The Biggest Secret to Gaining Rating

Thanks, just played this to guard my weak pawn.

And it's good that you did! That pawn was very delicate, and you would have likely lost the game had you not played Re7. Now you have no problems!

I understand. However, with my advice, you will gain back the rating points you lost, and hopefully recover from the trauma.

This would likely accelerate my loss of rating. A win against a player 500 rating points below mine will earn me 1 rating point, while a loss against the same player will cost me 15 rating points. A total of 15 wins against such players can all be undone with a single loss.

I haven't even considered rating losses due to draws yet, so the pressure is on me to win them - and it's difficult to win consistently every time.

Another testament to the greatness of Re7:

The power of Re7 is what gave Black a 10 times higher rating than White!

This is very true, and the pressure will likely lead to more blunders.

It's probably just a one-off event.

Such thoughts happen from time to time because we tend to think that

- the e8 square is almost always defended in the preceding turns

- the e8 square still remains defended after the rook moves (which is no longer the case in reality)

- the squares around it are defended (giving us the false impression of the safety of the position)

It's really hard to gain rating points by farming. In fact, I would suggest doing the opposite! Play players 200-300 points higher, if you get the occasional draw or win, your rating will skyrocket, and you'll learn a lot!

Probably, not to mention the fact that the queen and rook are so close, leading to a false sense of security, and at the level where you basically never blunder back-rank, it's easy to assume you have it defended already.

I would suggest sandbagging. Get your rating really low and you will find that gaining rating points suddenly gets a lot easier.

simple spell yet unbreakable

Yeah, there's just the teensy problem that it might get you banned.

Yeah, all the best players have used that trick. Except Stockfish, who's been getting away with using an engine for years.

I'm surprised nobody caught this.

I did, but I decided not to comment on it.

Good tip, IMO.

Bit it's hard to check opponents' rating in all time controls before the game gets aborted. But if you can, it's good advice.

Ah. I see. I thought you would reply for sure if you caught that I was horsing around.

Yeah, it was kind of joking advice, but I'm glad you found it helpful!