This is a thank you to Jeremy Bader:

This is a thank you to Jeremy Bader:

Last month had an opportunity to catch up with my friend Jeremy Bader and we talked chess at the Easy Tiger in Austin.

Jeremy Bader is kicking ass and is well on his way to USCF master, while I have been playing chess off and on since childhood.

In my late teens I played 50 USCF sanctioned tournament games and had an even record and ended up at a 1309 rating 20 years ago.

Every couple of years, I would pick up the hobby again for a month or two, and see no improvement. I have always been haunted by my favorite professor in university telling me sharply one day that chess is a waste of time.

Basically, I wanted to know Jeremy's opinion if I should bother trying to improve any more, or am I stuck in the 1300s?

Playing on at blitz time controls after a couple of hundred games I was also stuck in the 1300s.

Jeremy and I went over a dozen of my recent games, and consistently I could speak well on the strategic positional themes and tensions, but time and time again I would miss tactics that totally dominate the outcome of the games.

Jeremy and I worked the following action plan:

1) Stop playing blitz (Game in 3-5 minutes) and bullet (Game in 1-2 minutes)

2) Play only rapid (Game in 10 minutes) or longer

3) Do 30-90 minutes a day of tactics training puzzles

4) Switch my black response from the Sicilian 1.e4 c5 to the Caro-Kann 1.e4 c6

5) Focus my white openings to the various 1d4 lines

The result? After 40 games of rapid, I am now 1634 and still climbing!

This is a huge 300+ point gain, and much, much more than what I needed to see to keep me excited about studying chess.

The Caro-Kann has been very kind to me: over a 70% win-rate.

I am now addicted to the tactics puzzle training exercises on lichess and have even saved a few games being a rook down.

Of course, I am going to keep going on this plan. More tactics and more positional opening mastery. I am curious how much more improvement I can make at a reasonable hobby level of time investment.

Also chess is so much more accessible for learning now as compared to 25 years ago. The online streamers and videos are amazing, online UX and tools, and so on.

(This is a re-write of the post that fb declared was spam and killed the other day. I requested a review, but after 48 hours, nothing.)

Originally posted on Facebook on October 29, 2018.