Rating Goals (By end of 2025):

-Rapid 2100 (current peak 2050)

-Blitz 1950 (current peak 1920)

-Puzzle rush survival 70 (highest 67)

Goals:

Study King’s Indian Defense (Rabachess games in particular)
Improve Tactics: (15 minutes puzzles/day + at least 1 3-min puzzle rush)
Improve intuition! Particularly learn to seek initiative in positions

-Can improve Intuition by playing and analyzing games, but even better is to look at Kasparov’s Games in book or video and his insights on his game.

- I was specifically recommended Kasparov but perhaps can find other strong players with similar play styles and strong non-engine based intuition.

-When analyzing famous games be especially thinking about moves (even seemingly ordinary moves) and think, would I have found this move? Why did they play this move? What is this move preparing? Then to remember and utilize this process tie together these ideas and their answers over many games and start building a tool to apply to positions to “play like Kasparov”!

Reviewing Your own Games (Try to mostly play 10|0, 10|5, or 15|10 Rapid Games!) (DON’T PLAY BLITZ OR BULLET!):

-Use similar technique for your own games as for reviewing GM games. BEFORE turning on engine think about hard moves to make and where the game went wrong (even if I won).

-Then try to find better moves in positions where things went badly and try to remember what I was thinking when I played the wrong move. This isn’t just for positions where I played bad moves but also in tough positions where I played the best move. In these positions where you weren’t super confident remember why you played that correct move and integrate those ideas into thought process as well.

-Then use engine to back up new calculations and make sure I didn’t forget any critical positions or miss any potential opportunities or tactics. DON’T USE ENGINE TO FLIP THROUGH GAMES GLANCING AT BLUNDERS LIKE YOU’VE GOTTEN INTO THE HABIT OF DOING! The engine is a tool that can be used to help improve your thought process and reflection but it won’t do it for you.

-After looking through game remember what you were thinking when you played the wrong moves and understand why those plans were flawed and replace them with better plans you formulated after reviewing. Also for positions you played good moves cement in mind what my ideas were and why they were good in that position.

Finish building chessable course for my White and Black openings and regularly use it to review repertoire.

Long-Term Goals:

Become expert over the board before the end of highschool.
Get rating high enough to play on college’s chess team.
Become a National Master during or shortly after college.

Note: Although this won’t be easy these goals are within reach with dedication and joy in the game. And remember that you don’t play chess for your own greatness, entertainment, or legacy. You play chess for your king and protector, glorifying God in awe of the deep artistry and beauty of the game much like a beautiful landscape or an incredible machine.

Reader

For all things done apart from God are vain, as death takes away all achievements, success, and riches.

“Gilgamesh meant never to die. Having seen death at close quarters, he knew that it was not for him. It made a nonsense of all endeavor, made fame worthless, made achievements hollow.”

-The epic of Gilgamesh

Therefore reader, I urge you not to be like this forlorn character—seeking fame and glory, success and riches, and a name to be remembered for centuries to come. As was Gilgamesh, naive to this cold reality of death, he would boyishly frolic in his ambition and desires until the death of his friend slashes him with this icy realization. Then desperately Gilgamesh would search for a way out of this cruel fate, wasting his life in an attempt to extend it. Finally Gilgamesh becomes old and accepts this doom when he is the closest to it, accepting that he will disappear and return to the earth. But reader, sadly do I inform you that Gilgamesh was wrong, all people will exist forever with those who reject the creator sent to an eternal suffering in fire.

So reader I ask you, are you like Gilgamesh, young and rash, focused on the physical world and oblivious to your certain demise? Or too, you could be like Gilgamesh as an old man, accepting the numbering of your days and marching willingly towards the cruel gates of sorrow. Perhaps you could be like Gilgamesh terrified of death crazily running from it but towards it all the while.

But if you are any of these fear not! You mustn’t perish like this hero of old, instead I give you hope. There is a savior who has the power to pull you out of this pointless world that Gilgamesh so desperately fought. And all you must do to receive this priceless gift is to turn to Jesus hanging on the cross and repent of your sins that shackle you to this corrupted rock. Indeed though the life of this man may seem a fable, a crutch to cling to if you cannot stand to face the hardships of life on your own consider this:

Although it may seem to take immense faith to give up everything to an ancient story about a character resembling zeus doing supernatural stunts, it takes much greater faith to believe that everything around us came to be from random chance, and lucky occurrences, devoid of the orchestration of a divine creator.

We see around us creation that is indescribably massive, the planets, suns, stars, and galaxies that whirl about through this mysterious void. But we see too particles that are unfathomably miniscule, like quarks that compose subatomic particles which compose nuclei which compose atoms, and even these atoms are so small that more than five million million hydrogen atoms could fit in the head of a pin. There is also so much incredible mystery around us, like what huge things in the universe lie outside of our grasp? Or what unfathomably small things compose quarks, besides what even is a quark? Perhaps the most mysterious is, what is consciousness? How does the brain work, and what even is making you think and gives you your character this very instant? We also ponder our sense of morality, and how and why we feel like there is an intrinsic right and wrong.

To answer all of these questions with Macroevolution—the idea that the universe started with this ball of matter and energy (where did this ball even come from?) that explodes and evolves to our universe today without any external intervention—takes great faith. Perhaps even more faith than trusting that there is a creator, that a force of good and order that brought light to the darkness and life to the still.

To quote Blaise Pascal a brilliant 17th century physicist and mathematician,

“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the creator.”

Returning, to the tragic life of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh had this hole, Gilgamesh felt, he knew, that there was something more to this life than fame, money, or strength and might. When he watched his friend die he knew that the physical world wasn’t all there was, it didn’t make sense. Why would there be such desire for making progress in this world for it all to be made pointless by an inevitable demise?

So, reader, have you ever felt this vacuum in your soul cry out to be filled? Then, and maybe even now, do you try to stuff things into this hole but they never seem to snap? According to Pascal, Finite things cannot fill an infinite desire, and the vacuum inside us is an infinite desire for God. Therefore as you try to fill this infinite longing with worldly things they won’t stay embedded for long. Perhaps offering temporary distractions but never complete nor permanent satisfaction or rest.

To further quote Pascal using reasoning from Pascal’s Wager:

There are two possibilities either God exists or not. Starting with the case where there is no God, you can either put your hope and belief in a God that doesn’t exist, or you do not believe in God. However, whether or not you believe won’t make much of a difference as if you not follow God you might have slightly more time, money, and earthly pleasure, but after a short blink of time both the believer and non-believer are gone and there lives, regardless of how much progress they made, how much money and fame they had, or how much pleasure they had in life all of that is gone and was pointless. However, if such a God does exist then whether or not you put your faith in that God has infinite change. If you have believe in God then you gain everything—eternal life in heaven. However if you don’t trust in him you will lose everything and be sent to eternal damnation in a churning inferno.

Finally, I am not a Christian because when carefully weighing the arguments above I decide that I think it’s slightly more likely that there exists a God than there doesn’t. Or that I’m not really sure whether or not there exists a God, but was just so afraid of the prospect that there could be a God that sends me to an eternal torture that I decided to claim allegiance him just in case.

No, instead I am certain that God exists. I see him around me in nature and feel him walk besides me and dwell within me through the holy spirit. I also see his greatness in the family, friends, teachers, church family, and even strangers who I meet. I also am not a Christian because I simply want eternal life. Although I do, and it was what drew me when I first became a Christian, now I follow God because I love him. I love his creation, his promises, Jesus’s love—so great that he suffered death on a cross and separation from God, but perhaps most of all I love God for the relationship I’ve built with him through prayer and reading his word. Therefore in this great love of God and of you, I invite you to meet Jesus, to find the thing that fits that aching void in your soul. I offer you the elixir that Gilgamesh so earnestly sought but his dry lips never found.

luke440