25 years old & learning chess - my practice blog

Almost 6 months since I started learning chess and playing here on chess.com.

Here is an Excel spreadsheet I made about my progress so far!

Definitely seeing some improvement. Surprised actually how gradually my ratings seem to go up every month. I'm sure it won't get any easier from now on. Then again I feel like 1200 to 1300 avg. rating on bullet, blitz, rapid and daily is a good place to move forward from, so I'm not too worried about my rating progress slowing down. It's a good start for just 6 months of practice!

Of course ratings deviate, that's why I posted my starting rating every month. Within every month there have been hundreds of games, good days, bad days, good games and bad games. On my worst day I went down hundred points, mostly because I was tired and refused to give up playing. As a result I started to get tilted, less focused and simply played badly. Lesson learned from that was not to play too many games in a day and stop as soon as I'm feeling tired/tilted and unable to focus properly. This blog here has a lot of numbers and rating progress reports, but it's only the tip of iceberg of my chess practice. 

If you read some of the previous pages, you can see that I do a lot of analyses of my games. I write notations, I make videos of my analyses and try to always spot the things I did wrong/well and what I could've done differently. I spend much more time with chess than the number of games would suggest. For example I have set myself a limit to play only three games in a day at most. This way I can analyse every game afterwards. I think that chess.com ratings are the most accurate representation of my playing strength, since I mostly play here only when I feel like I'm focused and can give my best. If I just feel like moving pieces and play some blitz, I usually go to lichess and play a tournament instead.

I also play a lot of games against the computer on my phone, watch masters play on YouTube, do tactics training every day here (also sometimes on chesstempo) and try to complete some lessons every now and then.

On the post #54 you can see what I consider as "serious practice". Only games with time control of 15 minutes or more, tactics training and lessons. I don't consider playing bullet or blitz a practice, more of a pastime to do something I enjoy.

I do understand your point and it's a good point indeed. Focusing on the ratings alone is not good or healthy thing to think about ones improvement, but in a game like chess it's the most objective way to measure progress. Of course I know myself that I have improved massively during these 6 months, and I feel like my general understanding and knowledge of the game improves every day.

Here is my latest video analysis of a correspondence game I played a while ago, perhaps that ought to give some insight on my chess thinking?

i disagree. with good size of games, rating can represent your current strength.

Hi there ! (currently binge-reading your blog) I'm so glad to know that i'm not the only one challenging the "to old for chess" paradigm.

I´m a 22 years old math student and, like you, i started taking chess seriously a few months ago. The key is grit, train every day and try Artur Yusupov's book series, it did wonders for my game.

Keep up the good work and best of luck !! 

I see you are doing very nicely for having played seriously just a few months! Thank you for kind words and I wish you the same.

I have personally read only one chess book, which was some fairly old complete chess tutorial from some russian guy, I don't have the book here right now, so I don't remember who wrote it (russian names are tough!). Regardless all I can say is that even though reading that book probably helped some, I think that it was a bit too tedious book to follow. I'm not sure if complete beginners should start their chess playing by reading books anyways. For example this chess.com site has tons of great lessons and drills (like basic checkmates, basic endgames) that will definitely be more fun and interactive way to learn than reading it from a book.

There are also two video series that I definitely recommend. John Bartholomews chess fundamentals and beginner to chessmaster by ChessNetwork.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying reading books would be bad for you. I just think that chess books are kind of heavy and it might be hard to focus on them. For a beginner the best thing is just to immerse in chess using all of your senses, learning by trying yourself, watching videos, listening and seeing the pieces move on the board. Of course for example the chess.com lessons have often very well written instructions behind the ideas on them.

Once you are starting to feel more comfortable with the basic chess understanding and are able to read notation without looking at the board, I think that's when reading books by masters becomes much more better training tool.

Nice tactical sequence

I wanted to show you guys a game I just played on 30|0 time control. It's not particularly great game in terms of good chess, but I don't think I have ever played a game this accurately. My opponent helped me tremendously by making some questionable moves and one big blunder, after which I could just deliver a tactical blow of pretty much forcing moves. This was only a 13 mover which shows how fast a game can go wrong, if you make one big mistake.

It all started with him playing questionable Qb3 on move 5, trying to go after my b7 pawn. These are typical threats in blitz and bullet games, where you hope your opponent doesn't see it. However in a 30 minute classical/rapid game, it doesn't work. I played simple Nc5, blocking the light squared bishops view and developing a piece. He makes a second questionable move in row by going in already with Nd5. I guess his idea was that I would capture with my knight, he would hit my other knight on c6 with his pawn, forcing me to relocate my knight. Of course this wouldn't be a big issue, because I could just play Nd4 with a tempo on his queen. Instead of capturing the knight, I played Nd4 right away.

Here my opponent plays a good move Qa4+, forcing my hand to play either c6 or Bd7. I spent couple minutes with this decision and decided to counter-punch the queen with Bd7. I figured that he doesn't have time to go pawn-grabbing after Rxf6+, because I'm still on the queen. And the queen is at the same time getting very short on squares to go to. Here my opponent should've just returned with the queen to d1 and it would've been a playable game. Instead my opponent makes a huge blunder with Rxf6+. The issue here is that once I capture with my queen, he still has to move his queen and I have a very big threat of Nc2+, opening a discovery with my queen and bishop against f2. So once the queen goes back home, I still played the nice Nc2+ forcing my opponent to capture (otherwise Qf2#). After capture Qf2+ wins the whole house, first picking the bishop, then the rook, and finally pinning the knight to the king. Bf2 at the end seals the deal, since there is no defense against coming Qe1 mate. Opponent resigns.

I know my opponent helped me tremendously by making the big mistake by capturing on f6, but I'm still happy with how accurately I played the end (and spotting the powerful tactical sequence, and finishing the game with surgical precision). After checking the game with computer analysis, every move I made after move 5 was the best move! Wow, that doesn't happen very often, if ever. 13 moves, out of which 11 were excellent, 2 were good (no mistakes, inaccuracies or blunders for me). Feels nice to have games like these in midst of all the stupid blunders I keep making. :-)

Very nice game Taskinen, you are much stronger now (compared to 6 months ago),  and still, there is a lot of room for improvement, that's what makes this game so beautiful !.

I'm amazed by how different our training regime is, instead of watching videos and doing lessons and tactics here on chess.com i have focused heavily on Artur Yusupov's "Build up your chess 1(The fundamentals)" even tough it doesn't have a lot of pages, trying to understand the theme and working trough each diagram in a real chess board and going trough  every variation takes a LOT of time easily 2-3 days for each lesson. And that´s all my training, very different from yours, and yet both seem to be pretty effective.

Anyways, i hope to hear more from you soon, stay strong !!!

PS. meet Martin Weteschnik http://empiricalrabbit.blogspot.com/2012/11/martin-weteschnik.html author of the next book i will be tackling "Understanding chess tactics" and he also learned to chess proper at 25 years of age, nevertheless  he achieved the FIDE Master norm ;-)  

Thank you for the inspiring words and nice examples Jhonlock! Your perspective on training seems to work for you, which is the main thing. I can see how one could improve training like this, since you are spending a lot of time to fully understand the lessons you are going through. I'm not spending nearly as much time on one lesson, but I'm doing more lessons and tactics. I guess it's debatable which approach is the better one, but I have so far had good results with my approach. The main thing for me is that learning chess has to be fun. I don't want it to feel like school, where I'm forced to follow fundamental study plan from a book. As effective as it might be, there is always the chance that it will suck out the joy from learning. And if that happens, I for sure am not going to be getting better.

However, I have decided to give chess books a better look, and ordered an actual chess board and these two books:
The Complete Manual of Positional Chess
The Complete Manual of Positional Chess (Volume 2)

Not sure why I decided to pick exactly these two books, other than I liked the PDF-example I checked and they were sold as a package deal. They also had good reviews by chess masters, critics and readers alike, and have a lot of content to go through. So these should keep me occupied for a long time to come.

Even thought I have not read these books, i believe The Complete Manual of Chess 1 and 2 will improve your game tremendously. Once the book arrive kindly give your impression  about the contents of the book. 

I've got the books and I've read about 20 pages of the first one so far. I really enjoyed the introduction and there were already some good tips regarding psychological and physical aspects. I have gone through the annotation of first two games (both played by Mikhail Tal) and decided that in order to learn as much as possible, I wrote both of them down on an analysis board. This way I can return to these games and notations any time on my computer, where I can go through all the written variations (as well as try new ones) easily. It takes quite a bit of time to go through one game this way, but it feels a bit difficult to understand the actual positions and ideas from written notation (and occasional picture) alone. I also tried to go through them with actual chessboard, but I quickly got lost in what variation I was following with the author going through so many different ones with every game.

I do think that the books are meant for a bit higher level players than me, but if I just go through the annotations slowly, make a database of the games and annotations on my computer and try to explore the ideas myself, I think that it will still be really helpful to my game. Just trying to read through the games as bedtime reading wouldn't do me any good.

So far the annotations and examples have been superbly clear and the book is well written. The diagrams are very clear and it's much finer read than the previous chess book (Nikolai Zuravljov's Chess Book) I went through. 20 pages down, I can already recommend it. But they are quite tough books so I would only recommend to stronger players than me, others only if they are willing to do some serious reading and practice, going through every chapter and game very slowly.

I have read a review that these book are meant for 2000 and above rated players. But i am not sure at the accuracy of this review.

 Man, was that punishing a mistake! bravo

Thank you, I really appreciate comments like these from much stronger players than I am. :-)

I made an account on Chessable yesterday and started to go through some online books there. I started with Ruy Lopez Masterclass (because it's my go-to opening) and John Bartholomew's Scandinavian repertoire. I have really enjoyed the way Chessable works and I have already learned a lot in just two days. I like the fact that once I have finished these two books, I have two openings I should be able to play even more comfortably than now. Not to mention that e4 is already my go-to starting move and it also happens to be the most common move I face as black. So having a solid repertoire for white and black for e4 games will help me a lot in becoming a better player.

There are so many great books in Chessable I just can't wait to get my hands on. I went through my own game database to see which openings I've faced the most, and which I've struggled against. Based on this data I have the most difficult time when opponent decides to play either the French or the Philidor. Luckily there are books in Chessable for playing against both! I'll get my hands on those once I'm done with these first two.

Here is a list of other books on Chessable I would like to go through eventually:
100 Endgames You Must Know (by New In Chess)
Mastering Chess Middlegames (by New In Chess)
Chess Calculation Training (by Thinkers Publishing)

Currently I've put my The Complete Manual of Positional Chess on hold, because I find it a bit too difficult to follow. I like the learning concept of Chessable with the interactive board and spaced repetition to work much better, than trying to go through the same concepts with an actual book in your hand. I'll get back to it at some point though.

100th Rapid win & why you should study endgames

Today I managed to get my 100th win (100 W / 46 L / 8 D) on Rapid time controls (15|10) playing the white pieces against agrivkov. Since I had been studying the Ruy Lopez more thoroughly with the Chessable Ruy Lopez Masterclass book, I decided to opt for the Closed Ruy Lopez. I almost always play the exchange variation with bishop takes knight to double opponents pawns, so I wanted to try the closed variation this time. I like the exchange variation because it's generally much easier to play for white than it is for black. It gives easy target in opponents structure with doubled pawns, and sometimes you even get a free pawn, if your opponent captures the bishop with the wrong pawn. However, since I want to improve my chess, I decided to try another variation, which is probably generally considered to be the better one for white to play. Long story short, here is the game:

I was a bit surprised that my opponent seemed to be pretty well booked up in the opening, and we got a very nice game, both aiming to get small advantage in the positional play. In the middlegame I got my central pawns moving and managed to win a piece with a tactic, that was a result from this central push. Unluckily for me, I missed a nice tactic soon after, where my opponent managed to win the piece back and was up a pawn. However, I managed to equalize the game in a few moves, winning the pawn back due to my opponents too eager pawn push. At this point my opponent offered a draw and I was thinking about taking it for a while. However, since I felt the position was equal, but my opponent had only 2 minutes left on the clock (against my 7 minutes), I decided I might as well play on for a bit more. I was confident that I can hold the position to at least a draw and I was the side with better winning chances.

The endgame was a good example why one should practice endgames. I got to a better endgame because my opponent was starting to crack under the time pressure and mistakenly put himself in a difficult pin. I was able to use this pin to get my pawns moving and my king closer to the action. Eventually with few checks, I managed to trade our light pieces in a way where I also won a pawn. So it was 3 vs. 2 pawns and rooks endgame, which was probably still a draw with perfect play. Of course you can't expect a perfect play at this level on a time pressure. So eventually I got to a place where my opponent offered a bad rook trade, and managed to put my opponent in a zugzwang. I pushed my opponents king in the corner using opposition and must-move-rule with a little help from my trusty pawns. My opponent resigned the moment his king was pushed to the corner and I was ready to go grab the remaining pawns.

It was not a perfect game by any means, but I'm happy with how I handled the endgame. I also did pretty well on the opening, but I have to give credit to my opponent for keeping the game very even for a long time and finding that nice combination to equalize before endgame. Unfortunately the time pressure probably got the best of him, and I managed to grab my 100th win.

Statistics time!

I wanted to try some other way in measuring my progress as a player. I decided to go through some of my games with computer analysis, and check what kind of results it gave. I went through games with either 10 to 15 minutes time control. I checked about 50 (15 in each rating range) of my randomly selected games (approximately as many games with white and black) with analysis tool on different ratings, and found some pretty interesting results:

800-1000:

Excellent: 245 - 54,9%
Good: 73 - 16,3%
Inaccuracy: 53 - 11,8%
Mistake: 32 - 7,2%
Blunder: 43 - 9,6%

446 moves inspected

1000-1200:

Excellent: 300 - 62,4%
Good: 106 - 22,1%
Inaccuracy: 35 - 7,2%
Mistake: 15 - 3,1%
Blunder: 25 - 5,2%

481 moves inspected

1200-1400:

Excellent: 288 - 70,5%
Good: 62 - 15,2%
Inaccuracy: 32 - 7,8%
Mistake: 16 - 3,9%
Blunder: 11 - 2,6%

409 moves inspected

I know every game is at least somewhat unique, and it's hard to compare computer analysis with closed positional games and open tactical games. In latter ones you are much more likely to have oversights and make mistakes or blunders that cause loss of material. In positional games you can fairly easily get excellent and good moves by developing your pieces to nice squares. It's also worth mentioning, that the level of gameplay also affects. When I was sub 1000 rated player, I was playing against other sub 1000 rated players. So simply staring at the numbers won't alone tell you much. However, since I checked about 15 games in each rating range, it is big enough sample size to make some notes.

Obviously, when we look at the first rating range, when I was sub 1000 rated player, the first thing you'll notice is that almost every third move I made was a bad one: Either inaccurate, mistake or complete blunder. Within those 15 games I inspected, I made on average three blunders every game. There was even one game where I made 6 blunders in one game (talk about having a bad game, heh). Of course there were even some pretty good games in the mix too.

In the second rating range, you can see that 85% of my moves were already pretty good ones, either considered as excellent or good by the engine. So that being said, players around 1000-1200 rating range can already play some pretty decent chess (at least occasionally). The biggest issue for players on that rating range is still the amount of blunders in a game. I personally made still on average almost 2 blunders per game. However, the difference towards the 200 points lower rating range is already noticeable, as the amount of blunders got already halved. 

The biggest notable difference towards my current rating range and my latest games is that I have been able to halve the amount of blunders again. Currently I make less than one blunder per game. It's also noticeable that the amount of excellent moves has increased about 8% with every 200 points rating increase. I'm actually pretty surprised about the results, since I wasn't expecting quite this good results. However, it's also sort of soothing to know, that there are still easily noticeable issues with my basic chess. If I want to become a +1400 rated player (which I almost am!), I need to simply reduce the amount of stupid blunders. So a bit of more care and cautiousness should get me there. After that we can start figuring how to go beyond 1400. I'm sure that once I get my basic chess to a level, where I stop giving material en prise, or by simple tactics, I have a lot easier time in making progress towards improving my strategical, tactical and positional chess.

Milestone reached!

Today I completed one funny milestone I set myself, which was to get 1300+ bullet rating. I'm not that good of a bullet player, so it took a few intensive sessions of tryharding. I just felt like 1300+ looks nicer than 1280 something. ;-) After hitting 1300 I played couple games against computer for fun. While playing bullet I started wondering, how accurate is my bullet play? So I decided to analyse like 15 of my random bullet games from past few days, and here were the results:

Excellent: 363 - 62,4%
Good: 109 - 18,7%
Inaccuracy: 44 - 7,5%
Mistake: 38 - 6,5%
Blunder: 28 - 4,9%

582 moves inspected

It's kind of interesting, that the results are fairly similar to the ones I had between 1000-1200 blitz/rapid games analysis. Only I made more minor mistake and less obvious blunders. I guess obvious blunders are easy to spot quickly, once you start recognizing hanging material better. Tactical variations are harder to find in 1 minute time control. But I think it's kind of funny, that nowadays I'm playing 1 minute games with similar accuracy that I used to play 15 minute games just few months ago. I guess that's what a lot of practice, tactics training and watching chess games does to you. Your intuition just gets much faster and your awareness better. Pretty cool!

I started wondering how would my results compare against top level players, so I went through like 10 or so games Magnus Carlsen played on 5|2 blitz, and combined the results of both players. The games he played were against Tigran Petrosian, Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura. Results were as following:

Excellent: 585 - 77,4%
Good: 115 - 15,2%
Inaccuracy: 35 - 4,6%
Mistake: 13 - 1,7%
Blunder: 8 - 1,1%

756 moves inspected

As you can see, even with 5 minute time control, blunders are very rare at top level play. And at the same time grandmasters make obvious mistakes less than 3% of all moves, even against other top grandmasters. Even though these statistics don't really tell much about the games themselves, it just proves that in order to beat a grandmaster, you don't need to only have great ability to coordinate your pieces and make plans, but also be extremely precise in the execution. There were multiple games where a single inaccuracy was enough to lose the game. That's tough!

I have been trying very hard to get past 2000 tactics trainer rating, but for some reason I always get a streak of failures as soon as I start to creep close! Darn it. Already got to 1990 today, and then failed a few and back to 1930 or so. Oh well, eventually... By the way, over 5500 puzzle attempts on tactics trainer so far. Wonder if I can go past 10 000 before I have played for a year? :-D

Milestone reached!

After attempting over 5500 tactics puzzles on chess.com, I've finally broken the troubling 2000 rating barrier. It took in total 5613 tactics puzzles with a success rate of 59%. I will continue completing tactics puzzles, albeit on a slower pace. I had this 2000 rating milestone in eyes ever since I first hit 1900, so having reached it I can focus on other things. Also, my next goal regarding tactics training is to increase my success rate. I've been attempting to increase tactics rating, which demands a certain speed of solving to do efficiently. Now I'm going to focus on solving puzzles for accuracy alone, not really caring about the speed I solve them.

Future goals rating wise are probably trying to break 1400 rating on both blitz and rapid. In the meantime I'm working on my Chessable repertoires and maybe occasional tournaments on Lichess. I have plans about starting to practice longer time control games (1h+), because I would like to go to an OTB tournament one day. 

There are many players, who are just learning chess, joining chess tournaments. So i think you should join otb tournament now. Win or lose, it will be a nice and good learning experience for you.