TL;DR:

TL;DR:

my.chessRating += 300 in 2 months

I have a huge thanks to Jeremy Bader:

I met up with Jeremy back in Austin in early last month to get some chess advice from him.

25 years ago I used to play in D-class tournaments (sub 1400 USCF) and on and off again through the years I would pick up the hobby for a few weeks and then get discouraged about the lack of progress.

At the end of the 50 tournaments games 25 years ago, I had an even record 25-25 and ended with a 1309 rating.

So, my question to Jeremy, is should I spend any more time trying to improve in chess or is 1300-ish about where I would be stuck without a crazy investment of time.

We went over about a dozen of my games together, and I discussed the openings I play, and the style of my play.

In general, I have had a relatively strong handle on positional chess, but overall weak in tactics. I loved long games and coming back from an ill-timed attack and loved the counter attack.

The specific recommendations we settled on:

1) Stop playing blitz and bullet

2) Play only G10 (rapid) (or slower)

3) Do A LOT of tactics (puzzle) training

4) Switch openings - for black instead of trying the sharp theoretical lines of the Sicilian I changed to the positional Caro-Kann (now running at a 71%+ win rate with CK!)

5) switch to 1. D4 for white (again avoiding the sharper theoretical variations and focus on the more positional chess from queen-side openings).

After about 2 months of casual training (including a lot of travel, boat work, coding and other tasks) - I have results I would not have thought possible:

A 300+ point gain - to 1634! in rapid, with a positive win rate of 60 to 40. I am still gaining fairly rapidly.

I would have been very happy with a 100 point gain, 300 is just crazy sauce.

Chess is so much more fun to study now than 25 years ago, the online videos and streams by Ben Finegold, Eric Rosen, and many more are so entertaining and accessible. The online tools at lichess.com in particular are awesome and slick.

Originally posted on Facebook on October 26, 2018.