25 years old & learning chess - my practice blog

I disagree. As long as you know how the pieces move, you can join otb tournaments. Many kids who are just starting at chess, join tournaments. OTB tournament is a good learning experience that will help you improve. There you can share or watch analysis of different people and this will also help your game.

 I like your blog, like you, I started playing chess in January and my elo has gone up from 1100-1450 now.

congratulations, keep going up.

sorry for my english ...

Thanks for the feedback. It seems that you're also progressing well. I think it's a good idea, that you are playing mostly rapid games. Those are probably the best one for beginners to learn from. Fast enough to get accustomed to a lot of different positions, but slow enough to give you time to think your moves through. I know everyone here advocates for even longer time controls, but I think 15 minutes + works just fine. At least to me they are more enjoyable than say 45 min+ games, and enjoying chess is the first step towards improvement.

Lately I have played some 20, 30 and even 45 minutes game though, and enjoyed them too.

As I am close to passing the 1400 mark here on chess.com (and actually already did with rapid!), I can consider myself more of an advanced beginner, than a complete novice. As a self-learner I can't really speak on the mind of an esteemed chess coach, but I can based on my own experiences, and to share my thoughts on effectively learning chess. I think that the rapid time control is best suited for novice players, because novice players don't really need to know or understand deep strategic ideas behind certain moves. It's enough that you make principled moves; protect your pieces, develop towards the center, get your king to safety and push pawns when they have enough protection. With 15|10 games you have plenty of time to do that, without being stuck in situations, where you have 30 minutes left on the clock when the game ends. Because let's be honest, beginners don't really know what to look on the board after making what they consider to be the principled moves (and thus how to use all the time in a 45 minute+ match). As you progress further, and your understanding grows, you are able to visualize positions and calculate lines multiple moves forward. In order to do that, a beginner needs quite a bit of time. So a novice wouldn't understand the idea in Closed Ruy Lopez of making the known knight re-route from queenside to kingside, and as such wouldn't even realize to look for such an option. As you play more games, you get more accustomed to different positions, and you already know some moves that work, and you can save time by thinking about other options as well. Once your basic chess play is on a certain level, that you don't hang up too much free material, you have your pieces protected and some kind of a coordination and a plan, the complexity of your ideas and plans grow. And therefor having more time can lead to better games, which in turn helps in understanding the ideas behind your play.

Regardless, I think the best time control (I think 15|10 the minimum, any shorter than that is too short) for any beginner, is the time control they feel comfortable at. If 15|10 feels too quick, then just play a 30 minute game instead. Personally I think 15|10 has been the perfect time control for me, and I am much more comfortable playing 10 minute games without ending often in a time trouble as well. The main point is that too long time control might make the games feel too slow, boring and reduce the interest in playing. I think that is much bigger obstacle in learning than playing faster time controls. I don't even see an issue in playing occasional blitz and bullets, as long as you understand, that it's not going to really benefit your chess playing.

If at some point I'm considering about joining an OTB tournament, I'll start practicing longer time controls more. Now I'll play occasional 30, 45 minute games if I feel like it. 

Milestones reached!

It has been 7 months since I started playing chess regularly. My lowest blitz rating (which I played almost exclusively at the beginning) was whopping 671 on 21st of December! Today my blitz rating is 1401. That means my blitz rating has increased 730 points in 7 months. I'm pretty satisfied with that! During these 7 months I have played 2148 chess games in total (majority being bullet). That sounds like a lot, but I sort of wish I could change some of my bullet to longer time control game. Then again, I enjoyed playing bullet, and in the end that is what matters the most: having good time. It didn't make me a better player, though.

Learning chess is an interesting experience: with every rating range it feels like struggling. You feel like you are constantly being outplayed, and in order to win your opponents you have to play your best. Then again, once you go up 100 rating points and play people 100-200 rating points lower, winning gets much easier. Against same opponents you struggled massively few months earlier.

Couple months ago I set myself some rating milestones I would like to reach in the future, and today I have reached all of them. I have 2000+ tactics rating, 1400 blitz and rapid rating, and 1300+ bullet rating. It felt like such a far away goal only few months ago, but with enough practice and motivation, you can reach them.

Even though I feel like I have learned massively about chess, and consider myself an okayish player, I know there is still just as much to learn (and more). The more I learn about chess, the more stuff there is that I don't know. But I guess that's the fun part. You can play this game for a lifetime, and you'll never know it all.

For the next 5 months I'm going to set myself a bit more relaxed rating goals: I would like to reach 1500 rating in either rapid, blitz or both, and perhaps 1400 in bullet eventually. I'm going to focus on playing rapid time control, since it feels like the time control that helps me learn the most. I will also continue working on my Chessable repertoires, and hopefully go through some of the great books they have. Currently I'm working on John Bartholomews Scandinavian repertoire and GermanMC's Ruy Lopez: Masterclass edition. I'm interested in getting the following two books on Chessable and work through them slowly: 100 Endgames You Must Know by GM Jesus De La Villa and Mastering Chess Middlegames by GM Alexander Panchenko. In the meantime I'm waiting for some other interesting books to be added to Chessable for study. I will continue doing some tactics trainings and lessons here on chess.com and enjoy watching gameplay footage from my favorite YouTube channels ChessNetwork and John Bartholomew. I'm really excited about the starting Speed Chess Championship (I love watching those games) and the World Championship match between Carlsen and Caruana.

When I started to play some chess just to pass some time, little did I know what rabbit hole I was getting myself into... Thank you all for your continuing support and advice on this journey, it's very much appreciated!

Stay tuned, more to follow!

Very inspirational... thanks for sharing!

Thanks! :-)

I decided to go through about ~30 of my rapid games from last month with computer analysis, in order to collect some statistics about my games. Maybe they will provide useful in deciding things that I should look deeper or if there are clear weaknesses in my game. I was also interested in seeing, how many of my games were decided in the middlegame, and how many actually reach fairly equal endgame. Truth is, not that many! See for yourself:

 
As you can see from the stats above, you can see that only 6 from the 25 games I analysed (I removed all that ended up with resignation/disconnection for no obvious reason) were decided in an endgame. On the other hand 19 were already decided in the middlegame, either by having a superior position (through slow grind and improvement), or through a tactical sequence/obvious blunder by either side. Most of the games did last to an endgame, but winning endgame with a piece up doesn't really mean the game was decided by the endgame (unless one side blunders horribly). So in those cases I went with computer analysis and figured that if another side had +3 or more advantage already in middlegame, and went on to win in endgame, the game was really decided by superior play in middlegame and then simplified to a winning endgame.

This in a sense makes me question, whether I should go ahead with the "Master Middlegames" book on Chessable already, instead of starting out with "100 Endgames You Should Know". I have done quite a bit of endgame trainings and drills already, and in a sense spending a lot of time studying endgames that rarely come about in actual games (that are already decided in the middlegame) might not be the most effective thing to do right now. I know that endgames teach calculation etc. as well, but it might be better to start drilling endgames more actively in a point, when games are decided less in the middlegame. I assume that is what will happen as opponents get stronger, and it's harder to grind a big advantage in the middlegame.

Any thoughts?

I went ahead and purchased the book, cleared my all ongoing chessable trainings, and decided that I will focus 100% on this one book. Excited to get started! Man, 473 variations! That's a lot of stuff to go through. :-)

What's your handle on Chessable?

That's around the time I picked up the game,around 25 years old or so back in 2005. 

Lightning

What a handle!

Here is one amazing puzzle from the Mastering Chess Middlegames book. I thought the first move was so great, that I just wanted to share it. It's not easy to find, but it's really strong, and in order to find it, you really have to know what is the key element of the position. The move is so hard to find, that it takes even stockfish a while to find it. Once it does, it's certain it's by far the strongest move.

Progressing - slow and steady wins the race!

Mastering Chess Middlegames is quite a tough book to follow. Many of the ideas presented are a bit too advanced for me, and admittedly they go right over my head, no matter how much I try to put my thought into them. However, on the other hand I also get many moves right, even though I'm not 100% sure what the concrete follow up is. They just look right. That's funny thing with chess. Somehow you just know some moves to be the correct ones, even though you can't quite grasp why. I still enjoy the book and the games presented thorougly, and it has been nice to go through all the example games. I'm sure many of the things I've read and learned will stick in the subconscious and brew there as my chess understanding grows. Talking about subconscious, I decided to pick one tactics book on the side to work with, since I would really like to stick the simple tactical motifs deep in my subconscious, so I could see the possibilities more clearly in the games I play. I think 1001 Chess Exercises for Beginners will do great. Here's my progress so far!