I'm a GM Puzzle-Solver!

Yay! I passed 2500 in my chess.com puzzles rating! Over the last few weeks, I buckled down and made a push for my "GM Puzzles Title." I blasted through the 2300s pretty easily but I stalled in the mid 2400s for a few days. When I got within striking distance, I really slowed down and took my time with the puzzles to make sure I'd get the +5 points for each--which clearly is the minimum points for a full correct solution if you were outside the time bonus. You can see I was way off of the target times but that's okay for me. I treat these as calculation training so I make sure I see as much as possible. 

I'd say I'm nearing my limit, though. I was happy to cruise through the 2300s, barely missing a problem. But when I got into the 2500-rated puzzles, I had some difficulties. You can see that one of the problems took 55 minutes. Obviously I wouldn't take that long in the game, but I was paranoid to drop points and I had to make sure I saw the full idea. Anywhere, here's the obligatory screenshot:

It was really nice to have this short-term goal during the last few weeks. I had to stretch my brain on some of the puzzles, that's for sure. 

On Blunders

Today, I saw this comment on /r/chess:

Usually, when we blunder, that's not because we can't calculate deeply enough, but because we didn't calculate at all.

This struck a chord. I lose many games because I don't consider my opponent's moves and threats. I make my move and then see, "Oh, they can skewer" or, "Uh-oh, they have a check." They're typically very easy tactics that I can easily and immediately calculate, I just didn't do so before moving.  Another fun one is, "Oh wow, I just plopped my move on the board and I have no idea what they might play. Why didn't I even try to visualize something...anything?" I call that "no-man's land"...somewhere you don't want to be.

This is such an easy thing to fix. I can calculate deeply enough as proved by my puzzle rating--if given twenty or thirty minutes and a hint that there's a tactic :). What I mean is it's possible for me to visualize and calculate somewhat accurately in chess, I just don't see it all consistently in my games. Why? I think there are a few reasons:

1) No time - Playing quicker games doesn't provide time to ask the question of what my opponent might play. I just don't have that hardwired into my brain as second nature like stronger players do.

2) Tunnel Vision - Those times in which I actually do calculate, but I focus on one single line and assume my opponent will go down that line, but I don't ask myself what if they play something else.

3) Selfish Brain - The big one. I notice I might play a move and then I'm in the dreaded no-man's-land: Once my move is on the board, I realize I had not considered that my opponent now gets to play a move [cue minor panic]. I'm playing selfishly as if I'm the only one moving pieces and the other side's moves don't matter. (I just learned this term from a Levy Rozman video)

I need to honor all the work I did to reach a 2500 puzzle rating by giving myself enough time to calculate deeply, to have an open mind for all the moves my opponent has at their disposal, and to always have something in mind for what my opponent's ideas are instead of playing selfishly. I played one rapid game yesterday and I was hyper-focused on their ideas. It felt great. It was like treating the game as if it were one giant tactics puzzle in which I was constantly searching for my opponent's best move if I were to play my candidate move. I made marks on a piece of paper every time I failed to do so and I found myself in a "no-man's-land" situation twice--which isn't great, but sadly two times isn't so bad for me. If I can get that number to zero, I think that'll be a huge step in improvement. Focusing on this is how I think I'm going to turn this thought process into second nature.

My Month of Tracking Deliberate Chess Study

Real things require real difficulty. Fake stuff never does. This doesn’t mean fake work is effortless. Instead, pretend activity always has just enough difficulty to allow you to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing something that matters. But, conveniently, it avoids any of the truly difficult things the real situation would create. It requires effort, but always in a way that feels doable and safe. Real things have risk. They have the possibility of failure. They have frustration. They force you to confront the possibility that maybe you just aren’t good enough. Fake activity is great for making yourself feel better, but lousy for actual results.  (From https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thing/)

I just spent a month studying my ass off. I will get to the hard-hitting lesson I learned since finishing this project, but first...


Deliberate Chess Study in July

What is deliberate study? For this project, I included:

• Solving tactics in apps like chess.com and lichess
• Working through the sample positions and calculating the exercises in Yusupov book 2
• Working through Ray Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises
• Serious online games (rapid or classical) + time spent analyzing 
• Opening repertoire memorization
• OTB games

Any time I spent doing any of those activities, I would start a stopwatch and when I stopped the activity, I'd log the minutes. Activities I didn't count:

• Browsing chess content on reddit, twitter, or discord
• Reading introductions to chess books
• Listening to chess podcasts
• Preparing positions on a board
• Writing about chess or creating/updating chess improvement spreadsheets

The broadest definition I can give is: time spent visualizing, calculating, and thinking about chess moves.

The Numbers

• 75.1 hours total (4505 minutes)
• 145 minutes per day average (161 min/day if counting only the days I studied)
• 269 minutes (4h29min) studied on the longest day
• 28 days of at least some study
• 3 days of zero studying
• 16 days of studying over 3 hours
• 3 days of studying over 4 hours
• 18.1 hours was my highest five-day stretch

There ya go. I first thought to do 150 hours in a month, but even before I finished my spreadsheet setup, I realized the number of hours I'd have to train per day was absurd. I eventually settled on 100 hours in a month and then after about a week, I saw yet again that was too much for my schedule. My final adjusted goal was to do 80 hours of deliberate study in a month. I fizzled a little at the end when I needed about five hours on a Friday and Saturday to reach my goal. Instead, I spent that time drinking wine so I ended with 75 which is still a pretty nice number. I maintained about 2.5 hours a day of active and deliberate chess training over the course of a month! 

The Takeaways

That's a lot of chess training for someone that works ~40 hours a week. It also helped me see how much of my "chess time" is wasted: how often I'm scrolling through /r/chess or twitter, how often I'm passively listening to GMs commentating a super tournament, how often I'm writing in my blog or editing a chess improvement spreadsheet. This past month has made me realize more clearly what little these activities accomplish if you are wanting to get better. I'm lucky to have several hours a day at work that I can choose how to spend. Fifteen minutes spent here and there on something besides calculating, solving, and memorizing opening moves was fifteen minutes not spent on my goal. Many times I'd find myself pausing my stopwatch (yes, I clocked every second of July) when I got sidetracked and noticed I wasn't actively solving chess exercises. I'd immediately feel like I needed to get back to the studying. Which is the goal right? Well...

The Bigger Picture

I just spent two and a half hours a day for a month on hard chess work. Again, that's not even including the hour or two most days that I'm passively consuming chess content. And I've burnt myself out. I've known this for a while but I'll state it here. I've done more than enough improvement from studying. I need to seek improvement from playing. There has been a contradiction in my chess life for a while now and it has become more evident than ever over this past month:

I love chess and I never play it.

I am over-studied and under-practiced. 

I'm the engineering grad student that can't assemble an IKEA couch. I'm the 10-year med student that can't take someone's temperature. I'm that guy who has read "How to Fly a Plane" books for ten years and then gets behind a yoke and can't get the propeller going. I could point out all the controls in the cockpit, explain the gauges, and describe what went wrong during a crash-landing but I'm not getting off the ground. Likewise, if given a difficult pawn weakness chapter in the Yusupov book and four hours to solve all twelve problems, I might understand most of them and even get a passing mark on the problem set. Yet in a full-game situation, I just don't have the same abilities. I have the book-smarts but not the street-smarts. I can fully concentrate for thirty minutes on a blindfold chess puzzle but then I turn around and blunder a mate-in-one TWICE in one game. 

Okay, I'm being hard on myself but that's the point. Ben Finegold recently put out a video that practically deserves its own blog-post but here's my favorite quote from it:

"If you're 1300 at chess and 1300 at blundering and then you get to 2000 in chess and 1300 at blundering....you're still 1300. The blunders are more important."

Stated in the most matter-of-fact Finegoldian way, You can know everything about chess but if you blunder, all that knowledge is meaningless. I'm not "2000 in chess knowledge" but I might be, say, 1800 in chess knowledge. However, when it comes to practical chess skill, I'm considerably lower than you'd think if you looked at my time spent studying and training. 

I've worked on the theory long enough. I need to get more experience. And that's my next project! No studying, just playing. I need to find my rating plateaus. It's the opposite problem of so many chess players I read about online. I'm not addicted to blitz. I can easily stop from playing several games in a row. I don't get tilted. I spend hours upon hours doing the stuff most casual players find boring. Ya know, like solving chess problems for two and a half hours every day for a month ;). Yes, some might say that studying too much is a good problem to have but it's taken up too much of my time.

Time to play!

Reviewing Yusupov Book 1

I did a poor job of reviewing the hardest chapters in Yusupov's first book when I went through it the first time so I decided, before fully diving into book 2, to do a review of the six chapters in which I scored the worst. These were the following:

Chapter 3 - Basic opening principles
Chapter 6 - The value of the pieces
Chapter 8 - Centralizing the pieces
Chapter 13 - Realizing a material advantage
Chapter 20 - Weak Points
Chapter 24 - Gambits

I think most fans of the book series remember some of these chapters as being among the most difficult in the book. 

Method

What I decided to do was to go back over and try each chapter a second time, taking just about as long as I did the first time. Then when one chapter was through, I'd immediately go back over that chapter again using what I could only call a bastardized version of the woodpecker method. I thought this would help instill the basics of the positions into my mind so that when I do the final review, I would have an easier time of it. My goal was not to remember the starting move and all variations, but to have my mind more quickly jump to the right area of the board and the right strategic elements and then fully calculate the forcing lines. I read a member of ChessDojo's Discord server describe it in this way:

It's not so much about remembering the specific position as it is about relegating identification of strategic factors to a background process.

I love how that describes the reasoning for going back over problems again and again. By reviewing these hard problems, I hope that I can train my eye to start spotting the most important factors in the position by way of a background process. I seem to be training it to become a memory process in some ways and I'm not sure if that's the idea or not. In other words, let's say I see problem 6 from chapter 3 and think "Okay this is the one where I attack the queen but I do have to watch for that tricky knight-check intermezzo that complicates things." I hope that as long as I'm still calculating the full lines, it's still beneficial in some ways. And that relegating these strategic factors to memory is indeed a form of background process. In the future, perhaps I might more easily take into account things like the tempo on the queen and the intermezzo move by my opponent. 

Funnily enough, I began with reviewing chapter 20 and then I started back at chapter 3, so my order was a bit off but overall it's taken me about a month and I have just wrapped up my final review of all chapters. Here's my general schedule:

May 26-27: First Review of Ch. 20

May 28: Second Review of Ch. 20

Jun 1: First Review of Ch. 3

Jun 2: Second Review of Ch. 3

Jun 3-4: First Review of Ch. 6

Jun 8: Second Review of Ch. 6

Jun 14-15: First Review of Ch. 8

Jun 16: Second Review of Ch. 8

Jun 16-17: First Review of Ch. 13

Jun 17: Second Review of Ch. 13

Jun 18: First Review of Ch. 24

Jun 21: Second Review of Ch. 24

Jun 30: Begin Final review of all chapters

Jul 2: End Final Review of all chapters!

You can see that this took about a month. I basically reviewed each chapter in a day, maybe two, and then immediately went back over the problems. Clearly my scores are going to be much better after that second review. The final review consists of beginning with chapter three and solving/grading all the problems a final time--now that some time has passed since that second review--to see how well I do with each chapter. I think I'll finally feel that I sufficiently reviewed everything soon enough!

Results
As expected, I did far better upon my second and final reviews. Here's a nifty little graph I made:

The "Original" score was my first time through each chapter ever. Some of those were over a year ago at this point--I took quite a break last fall before completing this book! Scores from my first review were about the same as my original pass. However, there were clearly huge jumps between my first and second review which I knew would happen since I basically did the first review one day and the second review the next day (see schedule above), so all problems were very fresh in my mind. I put more time between the second review and the final review and I maintained my score pretty well for the final. The time between the second review of any given chapter and my full final review ranged from twelve days to over a month.

Conclusion
I think I've gone above and beyond Artur's suggestion to re-do the chapters you failed. I remember skipping over this advice during my original pass through the book and feeling bad about it, so I'm very happy I've re-visited these sections that took me hours and hours on the first pass. As usual, tracking progress keeps me motivated and without tracking this stuff, I surely wouldn't have been so diligent in completing this comprehensive review of the most challenging chapters in Build Up Your Chess. Even though there is some straight-forward memorization of first moves, I still did most of the calculation necessary and I hope that my mind can more quickly spot the important elements in positions like those I saw in these chapters when I play my games.

A Week in the Life of an Adult Chess Improver

Every time I read or type "Adult Chess Improver", I impulsively want to initialize it and say ACI and then I almost immediately hate it. ACI sounds like a part of my leg I don't wanna f*** up or some kind of insurance I'm supposed to get when I buy a house. I'll stick with adult chess improver.

I thought it'd be interesting to track how much time I spend on chess in a week, rounded off to fifteen minute increments. The week started off a bit lighter than usual because I haven't had quite the same motivation as I'd had on average over the last year but overall it's a pretty good spread and representative of what I'd consider a typical week. 

Some Definitions

I think I've been over this before, but I usually put chess work into one of two categories: active or passive. Examples of active chess study for this week included playing chess over-the-board (casual rapid games in a park), working through Yusupov's second book, working on memorizing my opening repertoire, and doing checkmate problems from Polgar's giant book. Passive "study" time included watching the FIDE Candidates Tournament, reading the introduction to a Hellsten book on Amazon's sneak peak page, and browsing /r/chess or twitter. It's still chess technically, but I'm not really stretching any muscles, if you will.

The Numbers

Here are my estimated times per day:

The week started on Sunday April 25th and ended at 11:59pm on the night of Saturday May 1. In this time span, I was able to spend 20.25 hours on chess. About 13.75 of that time was active chess study. Again, this was a relatively light week compared to some of the weeks I was working on the first book in Yusupov's series, for example. I'm able to get in chess study time while at work most weekdays and that's actually where most of my chess time is accumulated. On an average weekday, I'm able to spend 3.3 hours on chess--although some of that time is browsing online chess communities, or passively watching some chess content on youtube. (The 2.89 average hours per day in the chart below is taking into account the entire seven-day week, 3.3 hr/day is my average for Monday through Friday.) When I'm home, I'm doing fiancé stuff like planning a wedding, making dinner, and watching after our senior dog so I do not have quite as much time to get in as many chess games as I'd like.

Conclusion

I ended up with a touch over twenty hours:

For a rather light week, I think this is pretty good! I wish I included some more numbers in the summary chart. For instance, 13.75 hours of active study comes out to an average of almost 2 hours per day of performing active chess work (playing/analyzing games, calculating tactics, solving positions from books). And I multiplied my total weekly hours by 52 to conclude that I might spend around 1053 hours a year on chess. Which I think is great, and in a decade, I'd surpass the Gladwellian 10,000 hour mark (see Malcolm Gladwell, among others), whatever that might mean. However, I should probably only calculate my active chess hours for that metric. So 13.75 * 52 = 715 hours per year of active chess work. At that pace, It'd take me about 14 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark. Or, if you want to reach ~1000 hours of active chess work every year, then that would require about 19.25 hours a week. Well, this past week I spent 20.25 hours on chess so if I simply transform some passive chess "work" like youtube videos into harder chess study, I'd be very close! I hope this was interesting for some of you and it might inspire you to track your own chess habits. 

Best of luck.

Completing Yusupov's Build Up Your Chess 1

This book makes me feel like I'm doing serious chess work. It was largely review so that's nice although there were some very hard chapters that I outright failed. The book is a great mix of familiar tactical motifs, principles, and even exact positions I'd seen before but most everything still requires some level of calculation...and I didn't always nail everything perfectly. Yusupov's grading system helps you quantify your strong areas and your weaknesses. It should be noted that this is nowhere near comprehensive since it's only the first book in a nine-book series. My goal is to eventually finish the three orange books.

About the book
The book is tactics-heavy, which makes sense as it's the first book in the series and newer players are always told to hit tactics hard. I've done my share of beginner tactics and so I was able to perform well in those chapters. Ditto with the endgame.

Number of chapters in each category:

• 11 Tactics
• 4 Endgame
• 3 Positional Play
• 2 Opening
• 2 Strategy
• 2 Calculating Variations

There were a few puzzles, especially endgames and tactics types, that I'd even seen before. No surprise there. I'd have to assume that as the series progresses, there might be a better balance with the Positional and Strategy chapters. As an aside, I couldn't quite figure out how Yusupov differentiates Strategy and Positional Play.

My Results
Here's a summary of how I fared. Red indicates my worst chapters. After you tally scores, Yusupov provides a remark based on your totals for the chapter. Best to worst, these are: Excellent, Good, Passing, or Not Passing. If you didn't reach a Passing Score you are told to re-do the chapter. I only quickly reviewed those before moving on (more on this later).

For all of the Tactics, Endgame, and Calculating Variations chapters, I scored Excellent or Good. I'm happy with that. These are foundational skills and I think I have a solid grasp on the basics of each of these areas. Of course, it's very helpful, while solving, to know the type of puzzles I'm doing as well as the difficulties. Strategy was a mixed bag as I scored Excellent on one (Open Files and Outposts) and Not Passing on another. This highlights the non-comprehensiveness (I'd be surprised if that's a word) of the book: I couldn't really use this to say my strategy needs work or is up to par. But this is a reason for continuing the series as a whole. Positional Play and Opening were the worst.

Here are my points grouped by category and sorted by percentage:

Strengths
As expected, I excelled at the tactics, endgame, and calculating variation chapters. As far as the tactics and endgame chapters, there wasn't much I hadn't seen before. This series of books intends to fill in gaps, and I think I can safely say that I don't have a gap in understanding of the basic tactics and endgame knowledge. And of course, calculating variations is generally a matter of finding the forcing moves. I assumed I'd do well in these areas and it's nice that I did perform well. However, I'm more interested in the chapters of the book with which I struggled.

Weaknesses
I had a hard time with most of the the positional and strategic chapters (in my opinion, the opening category is vague and the puzzles seemed to be either slightly tactical like the Gambits chapter, or strategical like knowing where your pieces go). Even with the themes categorized, these chapters seriously tested my positional understanding and thus my major weaknesses were made clear, as Yusupov claimed the book would do. The chapter on Weak Points is the one most clearly in my memory and it is a good example. I would take large amounts of time for each exercise and miss half of them. This experience is completely opposite to the simple tactics chapters. 

A large reason is that I've spent countless hours looking at tactics. I've been looking at pin tactics for years and it was one of the first things I learned after hearing the term "chess tactics." So if Yusupov gives me a chapter on pins, I'll spot the pin-motif in every example almost immediately. In contrast, when Yusupov introduces Weak Points/Squares and gives examples, everything took longer and I lacked the clarity to know how to solve. I can find a pin in a second, but seeing positional weaknesses would take me at least a minute or two. I'd even spend 30-45 minutes on some positions when I was determined to figure it out. I'd inevitably see the move at some point in my calculation, but often I'd revert back to the more forcing move that I thought was nearly working aside from one defense I couldn't see past. In spite of this, I still wrote the forcing line down as my solution only to see the answer was a different move I'd considered but hadn't concretely calculated. 

If you look at a position long enough, the "right" move will probably come to your mind as it did to mine, but I kept wanting to go back to the forcing lines even if I didn't see all the way to the end. I just thought it had to be right since it was so forcing and I could at least see the future up to a point. The lack of clarity I found in the other moves (that were often the beginning to the correct solution) led me to eventually give up on them and return to my other candidates. Perhaps because my mental energy had been spent on the move that I'd been trying to force to work, I'd rarely follow that analysis fully and just assume it had to be right. This is a major pitfall and a big source of frustration due to spending 30 minutes on one idea when it had been another move I'd barely looked at.

I think my tactics training has helped me to the point which, if given a basic tactical position, I can spot three or four forcing moves immediately then a few seconds later, I then can sort to the most forcing, and I start to see the key motifs in the position. Then it's a matter of calculation, visualization, move order, and a check for counter-play and safety. When given a similarly basic strategic position, every aspect takes me longer: it might take a few minutes to find a handful of weak points, then a few more to find the best one to attack/exploit, and finally it may take ten to twenty more minutes to come up with some line that appears best. Then I check the solution and half the time my execution was still off, either a little bit or a lotta bit. 

So as a positive, I can see the ideas usually if given enough time, but executing the right plan to exploit it was not always accurate. I think the ideas themselves are simple: I can explain outposts, open files, weak squares, and color complexes to anyone, but learning to apply them in the examples given was a difficult task. To me that means I don't fully understand them. At the least, this minor hardship most surely means I'm learning since I'm not very comfortable in solving these types of exercises. I need to push myself a lot harder in these positions.

Re-doing My Worst Chapters
Yusupov provides a scoring system at the end of every chapter and if you score below a threshold, he suggests the following:

Slightly edited for inspiration :)

I've decided to move forward with the final test but later on, I intend to review my problem chapters and see if I can perform better...

• Ch. 3 Basic opening principles  (14/31)
• Ch. 6 The value of the pieces  (10/19)
• Ch. 8 Centralizing the pieces  (11/27)
• Ch. 13 Realizing a material advantage  (13/21)
• Ch. 20 Weak points  (9/23)
• Ch. 24 Gambits (13/20)

July 2021 Edit: I've completed my review of this and wrote about it here.

Final Test
On April 16th, I completed the final test. I did score above the Passing Mark which is nice to see, although it wasn't totally smooth sailing. I ended up with 33/47 points. 36 points would have been in the "Good" category but oh well. I surely would have done better if the puzzles were provided with a category but that is not a true test and it's honestly a major hint/crutch when solving the chapters one at a time. The final test does its job at finding your true standing. Yusupov did provide the category of each puzzle in the solution. Here is a breakdown of those along with my cumulative scores in each of the categories:

It looks like the final test is a pretty good representation of the entire book in terms of proportions of each category. Notably, he left out any opening positions but that's about it.

Conclusion
More than any of my other serious chess projects--like Part 1 of The Woodpecker Method, 1001 Chess Tactics..., or analyzing a game a day for a month--completing this book feels like a BIG accomplishment and the start of serious chess work. My problem-areas are becoming obvious and I'm excited to start seeking out methods to work on them. I'm nearly ready to jump in to the second book with the realization that any non-tactical chapters are going to be very difficult. I want to try to focus most of my energy on those sections and I hope that, overall, I start to see an improvement in the harder chapters.

Yusupov's Books and My Training Plan

It feels good to settle on a training plan that gives you an almost tangible feeling of improvement. As you work through your daily routine, you feel yourself doing actual chess work and you know this is the way to improvement. To me, there's not a much worse feeling in my chess journey than preparing some grand plan revolving around a book or project only to feel dejected that the work involved is not what you thought it was going to be and you eventually quit the plan entirely. In these instances, it feels like I put too much weight on the plan, as if it was going to do wonders. It just plain sucks when it doesn't work out and you give up. But you keep trying until you find something perfect for your level that provides the right amount of serious study. 

Enter Artur Yusupov.

I think I found a plan that has been working for over a month now. This is due in large part to re-discovering Artur Yusupov's famous book series. Working through these problems for the last month has given me a bigger sense of accomplishment than re-doing tactics three, four and five times from 1001 Chess Exercises for Club Players--which was my last project. The series I'm talking about is the Build Up Your Chess, Boost your Chess, and Chess Evolution books. There is some confusion over the order since Yusupov chose a slightly strange naming and coloring convention. 

Is blue first or green? Wait, do I do Build Your Chess 1, then Build your Chess 2, or complete one color pattern first? When do I do the Revision and Exam book? At the end, right? Will I ever finish it? How long does this take?

The color order in terms of difficulty is Orange, then Blue, then Green. Each color group has a "Build Up Your Chess" title, a "Boost Your Chess" title, and a "Chess Evolution" title and those are meant to be completed in that order before going to the next color. Orange is The Fundamentals and you do those first, Blue is Beyond the Basics, and Green is the Mastery series. And as far as I understand, there is a Revision and Exam book that you should complete after you finish the three orange books. Here's the order for those still wondering

1. Build Up Your Chess 1 (The Fundamentals)
2. Boost Your Chess 1 (The Fundamentals)
3. Chess Evolution 1 (The Fundamentals)
4. Revision and Exam
5. Build Up Your Chess 2 (Beyond the Basics)
6. Boost Your Chess 2 (Beyond the Basics)
7. Chess Evolution 2 (Beyond the Basics)
8. Build Up Your Chess 3 (Mastery)
9. Boost Your Chess 3 (Mastery)
10. Chess Evolution 3 (Mastery)

Finish them all and you've completed the Yusupov Challenge.

That sounds scary...But possible...I suppose. Right? I've never heard of anyone doing it but I can only imagine it'd do wonders to fill in the gaps in your chess knowledge, which is what Yusupov claims his books will do. My plan is to complete the orange series and I think this will do a lot to get me closer to 2000 OTB. Every chapter I do out of book 1 teaches me a few new things and requires me to calculate a lot more than doing those simple 1001 Exercises books. And it's more than just categorized tactics. Let's get into the book I'm currently working on.


Build Up Your Chess 1: The Fundamentals
Yep, I started at the beginning. Duh. I believe I started it about a year ago but I recently picked it back up again and I'm glad. The book, and this goes for every book in the entire series I believe, has 24 chapters covering a broad range of topics. Here's the chapter list for this book:

1 - Mating motifs 1
2 - Mating motifs 2
3 - Basic opening principles
4 - Simple pawn endings
5 - Double Check
6 - The value of the pieces
7 - The discovered attack
8 - Centralizing the pieces
9 - Mate in two moves
10 - The opposition
11 - The pin
12 - The double attack
13 - Realizing a material advantage
14 - Open files and outposts
15 - Combinations
16 - Queen against pawn
17 - Stalemate motifs
18 - Forced variations
19 - Combinations involving promotion
20 - Weak points
21 – Pawn combinations
22 - The wrong bishop
23 - Smothered mate
24 - Gambits
Final test

Pretty good start huh? And each chapter has an introduction then 12 problems to solve and grade yourself on. I love the structure and that's a key to finding a book to work through. I'm pretty familiar with most of the information he provides but the quiz section has put me to work--especially on the positional stuff. I am two-thirds of the way through and it's going great. I'm tracking percentages on the point totals for each quiz so I know my weak points for review later.

If each book has 24 chapters (plus a final test of 24 problems) and I complete all three orange books, that's 936 problems to solve. That's not including the eight to ten example problem he uses in the introduction for each chapter. If I take my time with all these, I'll surely fill in a lot of knowledge gaps and work on my calculation while doing so! I'd have to think this will be one of the best 3-book series to work through. For someone at my intermediate level, it's a great balance between review of things I've seen before and calculation in the harder problems in the quizzes. 

Here's a youtube video of Artur being interviewed in 2017 about the series.

Openings

The only other chess work I'm doing is working to build up a stronger opening repertoire for white. At the moment, this means making my digital flashcards of positions with an essay-question like prompt and then entering the solution with all variations and ideas/plans in a text file. I've began the project with a book called Starting Out: 1. d4. It's a good introduction to all the things you'll likely see as a d4 player but I find it quite theoretical unfortunately. I'm going through most of the lines and taking screenshots of all interesting positions for my flashcard system anyway, but I absolutely need more than this. We all know that most openings at my level are not played in the same way that masters play them. The Starting Out... book does not cover a lot of "doozies" (Tothian-speak for blunders or mistakes) in the openings so I need to fill these in myself. My idea is to eventually have a large set of flashcards for each major opening family and here's how I plan to build them:

• All interesting positions showcasing strategic plans and ideas from the Starting Out book for any openings I see often--I won't worry about Dutch or offbeat replies to 1. d4 for the moment. 
• Review these positions and add in any other questions. Add in the information to the solutions.txt or make new position screenshots if needed.
• Play through the illustrative games from the book and make more flashcards.
• Use Lichess' opening library but filter the games so it only shows moves from "non-masters", i.e. players below 2000 rating. This will show more doozies than were brought up in the Starting Out... book. Make screenshots of all these positions with prompts and solutions. This is probably the most important bullet point since I'll see more of these types of moves than, for example, perfect theory on move 10 of the slav.
• Continually make flashcards of positions in my own games where my opponent plays something weird or out-of-book. Or if I mis-play my repertoire.
• Go through Chess Structures by Flores and make more cards and notes on those positions.
• If I need more, go through Zurich 1953 and find games in my repertoire.

Whew! That's a lot and probably more than I'll ever do but I'm more convinced than ever that this will serve as a huge boost to my comfort level during the opening stages.

Conclusion

That's it! Openings and the Yusupov Book. I've lately been working on the opening flashcard system for a few mornings and nights a week, and then the Yusupov book during the workday when it's slow. I can generally do one chapter every two or three days. The opening work is slower and I've yet to begin reviewing my cards but I really hope I can stick with that. My idea is that the opening flaschards are tailored specifically to my game and the Yusupov books will be general chess work ranging from tactics to strategy and endgames. It's a simple enough plan I think! I realize this goes against my advice to "just do it" instead of telling everyone your perfect training plan, but I'm very excited about it and it's been working for a solid month! Good luck to any readers looking to find a routine that works for them.

My First OTB Tournament Experience!

In February of 2020, I played my first USCF over-the-board games. As mentioned in other posts, I was able to play six before the COVID-19 shutdown stopped everything. Chess-players in Missouri had to wait a year before any rumblings of a weekend tournament came around but sure enough one sprung up in Columbia, MO! It's something that's been on my chess "TODO" list ever since I started playing over-the-board so I jumped on the registration list as soon as possible. The tournament was ran by Blakeman Chess and it took place during the weekend of March 6th and 7th.

As some background, I'm in my mid-thirties and I've been playing chess seriously for over three years working very hard on improvement with a focus on slower time controls. My classical and rapid ratings on lichess are currently around 1800-1850. I've played less than ten bullet games in my life and rarely play blitz lately. My USCF rating before the tournament was 1096 (provisional/6). The tournament games would be 90m+30s with three rounds Saturday (9:00, 2:00, and 7:00) and two on Sunday. Sounds exhausting.

Expectations and leading up to the Games

As far as my chess life goes, I've never felt quite the level of "nervous excitement' as I did in the day before and the morning leading up to the tournament. It was close to the same feeling when I played my first games at the club over a year ago, but there was more anticipation leading into this weekend. Both then and now, it came down to a matter of  the "unknowns" for me. Last February, I simply didn't know a lot of basic things: 

• What was it like to score an entire game?
• What if I get put in the wrong section? Are there sections?
• What if I hang mate-in-one?
• Do you shake hands like they do in the super-GM tournaments?
• What if you make an illegal move?
• Do you have your opponent sign your scoresheet when you're done like Magnus and Fabi do? (The answer is nope)
• What do you do when it's over?

This post covers those learning curves from 2020. So I'm glad I was able to get some experience and I knew what it was like to play a classical game in the real world. Those questions were answered. However, a full tournament came with its own set of new unknowns:

• What's it like to play three games in a day? Then two more the next day?
• My only other OTB games were a maximum of two hours. These games might be 3 or 4 hours long, oh gawd. How mentally-taxing will this be?
• Do I need my own scoresheets?
• Is there a larger tournament strategy I should know? Should I take strategic byes?
• What do I do in between games?
• How do they announce the first round? Do I just chill in the lobby until something happens?
• With hotel and entry fee, this was a few hundred bucks, What if I lose every f***ing game and I want to quit chess after this? Am I putting too much pressure on some silly little tournament?

That's where I was coming from. Maybe that's helpful, maybe it makes me look crazy. The best thing about new experiences is they are a guaranteed education. You will learn so many new things. These range from the logistical operations of a tournament to the little nuances you notice in the tournament hall to the struggles and choices you make in the face of new things. The more experiences you have, the more you learn to embrace the nervous excitement. The best thing of all is this ultimately results in growth regardless of outcome.

On to the games

I won't use this space to deeply analyze the games. Instead I'll add thoughts and observations about each one, how I spent my time between rounds, and what it's like to be at a weekend tournament in general.

Round 1

After breakfast and a quick jaunt back up to my room to make sure I had everything, i.e. a writing utensil, I came down to the lobby a little before nine. As the lowest-rated player in the field, I had a "see the TD" note next to my name on the pairings list. He said there was an odd number of players so I could take a bye and play a rated or unrated game with him if I'd like. I said sure since I'd come here to play chess and didn't want to kill time for five hours. Turns out he's a 2100-rated player and so the game didn't last long. He was very nice afterwards when he told me I was under-rated. We talked for a second then I peaced out to my room with about four hours until the next game. 

Even though I did not have a strenuous game in the least, I tried to practice what others had recommended during my break: don't rush up to your room and cram chess between rounds. I laid down on the bed for a while since I didn't sleep well the night before, watched some tv, and eventually finished reviewing some of my opening notes I had. I grabbed lunch then right before next round, I did a handful of puzzles.

Round 2 (first rated game of the tourney)

Finally, actual chess against somebody on my level! I started to try out a pre-game system even though I was largely unprepared for these things. The tournament website said boards and clocks would be provided but to bring your own if you'd like. Many did. I didn't. It would have involved me carrying around my rolled up vinyl mat under my arm and the pieces in a Sony headphones bag. I didn't even own a clock until yesterday. I fixed all that and I've even got a little case on the way now too. I'll be super-pro next time. I'll also consider getting a scorebook since I had to notate the first game on blank printer paper. Anyway, at this point, the TD started printing generic scoresheets for players that needed them. I grabbed one of those, wrote down my opponent's information and the board number and went in. 

Just like when I first started playing games at the chess club, I realized there were some things that might go overlooked by those that have played hundreds of club and tournament games. There's a trial period where you're trying to learn the motions you like to go through before a game, how you become familiar with the playing hall and general environment, how you like to navigate through the game itself in terms of snacking, getting up, and drinking water. These things are not really mentioned to you when you go to your first tournament. They're simple things but I found that finding a comfort level with what to expect before and during each game was helpful in calming me down. From round two onwards, I started to get a grasp on how I like to do my pre-game setup.

I had the white pieces against a 1600-rated player. I know these people have families and friends and jobs and interests, so it feels a little wrong to relegate them to some four-digit number. Such is chess though. Anyway, the game was a slav with a symmetrical structure that went to an endgame where I eventually won some pawns and converted four pawns and a knight versus two pawns and a knight. It took four hours and it felt great when it was over. Getting this win was a tremendous confidence booster. Totally worth the time. It was 6pm now and I had an hour before the next game.

Round 3

There are some in-between-game choices you'll have to make that you might not think about until the time comes. For this one, I opted to skip dinner until the 7pm game was over. I'd rather snack before the game and play on a partially empty stomach than eat some crappy takeout or fast food then rush back to the hotel. I was black against another 1600 (provisional but I didn't know or care at the time--people may not have known my rating was provisional either) and he played a london opening. He was probably better after the queen trade but then I won a pawn towards the end and he resigned when I had a winning pawn endgame. This one took two and a half hours. I felt good, more confident, and pretty tired. I celebrated with Taco Bell. Naturally.

Round 4

When I went down to the lobby on Sunday morning right before the round. I felt great so far in the tournament. I'd won my two games yesterday so I thought whatever happens on Sunday is icing on the cake. I was assured my worst fears--losing all my games--weren't going to come true. I'd beaten two solid players. I figured I'd gain some ratings points. I had already learned so much about what it's like to play in a multi-day tournament. That's a win.

I hadn't even considered my place in the standings and it hadn't dawned on me that the first round bye was a full-point. I was solely concerned on playing each round and learning from it. By this time, I'd settled on a pre-game routine when I entered the lobby:  Grab scoresheet, write down opponent and rating, who has black and white, the round number, and the board number, go into the playing hall, find my board and set up everything on the table how I like it, then adjust my pieces and make sure the clock is all good to go. After I found this groove, I was so much more relaxed compared with the moments before round one when I entered the playing hall with nothing but a pen. I'd imagine anybody's first round at a new tournament might be similar. It's probably a good idea to scope out the playing hall and chat with some people before the first round ever begins to feel a little more comfortable.

I had white in a slav that featured middlegame fireworks that eventually settled to an ending in which I was up two pieces to one but my knight was stuck in the corner. I found a skewer tactic that my opponent didn't see (not sure if it's winning otherwise) and took the game. We chatted afterwards and that's when he alerted me to my standings and that I was going to be playing for first place in the lower division. After room checkout, I hung out in the lobby for the rest of the time which was a great idea. None of my other games finished at good times where I could shoot the shit with fellow players and the TD but if you have the time to do so, I recommend it. 

Round 5

It's the final game and I'm playing for first place. My mindset ever since the night before was that I had already performed better than expected and yet I still tried very hard in this game. I ended up messing up and playing some aggressive-looking move that seemed clever but didn't really amount to much and so I was eventually down a few central pawns. My opponent had two serious threats and in the end I lost the exchange. After he stopped my last-ditch idea--what I believe the redcoats would call a cheeky lil mate-in-one threat--I resigned.

Conclusion

And so with all the nerves and excitement and unknowns, I ended up tying for first in the U1800 division and winning the prize money for highest U1500 finisher. This was a great way to wrap up the weekend and I couldn't have been happier. It was a strange experience to not know I was in the front until the very last game and that undoubtedly helped me. It's not naivete or a sense of "Gee-golly I keep accidentally winning, is that good?" Honestly part of it was that I didn't even know the ongoing tournament scores were posted as part of the pairings list for each round so it was truly off my radar and there was zero pressure. For better or worse, I'm certain I'll be paying much more attention to these things in my next tournament!

Before last weekend, I felt like a 1500 rated player was scary and that I didn't even know if I was at that level to comfortably compete with such a player. I'll be less intimidated now. There is certainly a recency bias and a rose-tinted perception here since the tournament was only last weekend, nevertheless, the experience of my first OTB tournament was a massively positive one on a personal level as well as a results level. It's given me tremendous confidence in progressing up the ladder. Time will tell how I handle the inevitable bad tournament in the future. 

Moving forward, I'll feel far more comfortable at the outset of weekend tournaments like this. My ultimate goal is still to reach 2000 USCF and this tournament has given me a lot of positive energy towards that goal.

The weekend also made it abundantly clear that I have to agree with IM Andras Toth that this is real chess. To put it more diplomatically, this is the chess I want to play. I'm talking about real chess pieces, clocks, and long time controls. I like taking twenty minutes and doing a mediocre job at exploring a position. It's fun to hit a clock and write down a move. It's nice to meet people and share experiences. Go play some chess in real life when you're lucky enough to take part!

Post-Tournament USCF Rating: 1391 (P10)