Yearly improvement goals

Lol, you think that is why it is weird??

no it isnt weird, it is the nose of your dreams, the big, gigantic nose that makes you feel jealous and that make you wanna have also such a fantastic monstrous nose. Got that Glurak? ;)

My yearly improvement goal is to take some free and random chess mentor lessons.

You calling it fantastic is frighting...

Are you sick? I hope not..No tissue can handle that nose

Thank You Sir...youre ok in my book too.

You can't read either than.

He is crazy!

Well, in this past year my USCF went from 962 (August 2013) to 1555 (after the Atlantic Open, which happened the weekend of August 23-24). My goal for my chess career is NM, which is 2200, but to do that I need to make a lot of progress now while I'm still young lest I run out of time and hit a plateau once I'm older, since it's obviously much easier for young players to improve (and aditionally I won't have as much time when I am older). I am a junior in high school. I think after the Atlantic Open next year, I would like to have a USCF rating of at least 1755, which would be a 200 point improvement. By the time I am done with high school, I think I might need to be above 1900 probably, maybe even 2000, in order to have a chance at my goal.

Good luck with your goals dpnorman, you will do it! :)

(1) What did you do to improve that much? Specific books you care to mention? A coach? Etc?

(2) Besides the free time factor, why is it a lot easier for younger people to improve as you say?

Too many issues to list?

The yearly goal is to win most of your games

I assume you are asking me this. I do have a coach who is trying to become NM (2150ish), and he has been very useful for sure. But I think there are a couple things even more important than that:

1) Playing opponents that are better than you: In my last six chess tournaments, 19 of the 26 opponents I played were higher-rated than I was. I think playing against tough opponents is a great way to learn from them and improve your chess. Often, this might mean playing up in a tournament or challenging the best guys in your chess club even if the chances are that you will lose.

2) Analyzing your own games. I think aww-rats is right in that if you are going to spend a lot of time on analysis, analyzing your own games makes sense. You can easily determine your own weaknesses, you can find recurring themes, and you can improve your practical results by analyzing your own games. I, for instance, realized upon analysis of my games that I had a major problem with endgames, and I am now working on that to improve my endgame play.

3) Simply playing a lot of chess. I played a lot more chess in the past year than ever before in my life, and it is simply a good way to improve your game, since there are a lot of people who study chess a ton but don't play it often enough.

4) Finally, my tactical ability improved a lot and this is something that a lot of people (correctly) say is important for improving at chess. Tactics puzzles are often useful, and definitely calculate the whole way through even if it means you won't get as many points on the tactics trainer or the chesstempo site.

About your second question, I think it's similar to learning a language. When people get older, their minds become maybe less flexible or less open to understanding new concepts. I'm not saying you can't improve at chess when you're older, but I think it is much harder. There are a lot of people I know who were improving at chess rapidly when they were kids, and then became adults with, say, 1900 rating, and then never kept going, despite playing in tournaments very frequently. Many of them can't even stay above their rating floors, which means they actually got worse over time. Michael de la Maza's book Rapid Chess Improvement, which I don't really use but have read through, is a good demonstration that adults can improve at chess, but if you've read the book, you'll know the amount of work that it took for him- he was spending about two hours a day on chess puzzles and exercises alone, let alone actually playing the game. I don't want to get to a point where I have to ruin the enjoyment of the game by doing that...

What do you mean by that statement?

I mean don't just figure that the queen check looks winning and enter it as quickly as possible to gain as many T.T. points as possible; calculate the whole thing, even if it takes a while. Tactics Trainer rating, in the end, doesn't matter, since it's just a trainer.

You have a point. Or you could do the TT fast and go through some tactics books slowly, that have explanations. I'll leave that for the chess coaches to explain? I'm curious about the age issue. Languages are readily learned by those who are very, very young. I'm not sure the same holds true for language learning when one is a teenager or older. I'm not sure about chess, either. What age are you where you can improve so quickly at chess? If you are at least a teenager then I'm not sure that you would learn chess more quickly than an older person. Chess experts, what say you? I assume you are not six where one learns languages very rapidly. If you are six, you are the future Magnus...or should I say Fabio...

Fabio?

Hahahaha. I think I need to edit my post. It was getting late, and I'm reading one of those romance novels where he comes riding on a white horse (Knight) to rescue the woman on the beach.

@Chicken_Monster I think from my experience there is definitely something different about the chess improvement of a kid or teenager such as myself (15 years old, 16 in October) compared to an adult over, say, 30 years old. If a 30 year old did what I did in the past year, it would be very unusual. But for a 15 year old? Maybe it's impressive, but it's not unheard of at all. I do think that people are definitely more able to learn and improve at chess at a young age than an older age. If they weren't, then why are many of the adults that I am playing against hitting their rating floors, while the kids and teens I am playing against are often at their peak rating (myself included)? I did not mean to say that chess was the same as a language; I meant that, like learning a language, there is an age where it seems to get a lot harder for most people than it was before. Perhaps it has to do with the brain's development; people say that after 25 years old, the brain is more or less fully developed.