End/Beginning of the Year thread - Chess and Board Game Strategy

KyleJRM82 · 12-13-2011, 12:37 PM

ITT: Talk about how your 2011 went and set plans and goals for 2012.

2011: Was a wild success for me. I did better OTB than I never planned, I got ridiculous amounts of study time in, I ripped through several awesome books. My USCF rating ended the year at several hundred points higher than where I hoped. The only one of my goals that I didn't reach was 1550 on chess.emrald.net. I peaked at 1531 and just can't seem to break that no matter how much time I spend on it. Maybe next year.

I did hit a bit of a wall about three-fourths of the way through, at about 14 months of intense chess study. I've been in "treading water" mode ever since, playing some and studying some but not real intensely. I've also been annoyed that I haven't been able to find a good chance to go to a tournament in that time.

2012: Still in the goal-setting mode for 2012. I'm going to try a study plan for the year with planned outages, something like 10 weeks on, 3 weeks off, repeat times 3. Basically, the goals will be STUDY MOAR, PLAY BETTER, and PLAY IN MOAR TOURNAMENTS.

Very tentative tournament plan for 2012:
Spring undetermined- Local club tourney (unrated) as a warm-up
March 16-18- Mid-America Open, St. Louis
June or July- Springfield (Ill.) Summer Open (have to defend my title and such)
November - Thanksgiving Open, St. Louis

Hopefully I can squeeze a couple of smaller tournaments in there somewhere.

Noir_Desir · 12-13-2011, 01:28 PM

2011: got promoted to our first team, doing OK so far with 1 win and 3 draws, maybe slightly below expectation. I'm currently on my peak ELO and national rating, which is nice.

2012: I've qualified for our federal state championship, which will be a quite strong tournament at the beginning of january. Making 50% there will be quite good. I'll play some open tournaments after that and i'd also like to finish with at least +2 in the team matches.

whiskeytown · 12-13-2011, 04:56 PM

2011: got about 100 USCF rating points over 6 tourney events - (fairly stable right now at 1640 and a new peak) - broke 1700 on my ICC 15 minute rating - finished some good game collections but not a lot of strategic/tactical books - I have definately hit some new peaks

as of this week, I'll be on an T4545 League team that's going to the semifinals so that feels good - (U1800 and my standard rating is only 1500 so my win was a nice scalp)

2012: More STC weekend live tourneys I hope - want to improve my board visualization with tactics and problem books - hope to get thru a couple good game collections and take more time on them - thinking about a coach - would love to get to 1800 and see if I can be considered a Class A player

books I want to read next year

Pawn Power in Chess - Hans Kmoch (sp)
Understanding Chess Endgames - John Emms
How to reassess your chess Ver 4. - Jeremy silman - got halfway and stopped

I'd like to pick up one or two more openings and consider a 1. d4 repertoire at some point - the deeper I get into Scotch/Pirc theory the less I like the middlegame positions

RB

**BobJoeJim** · 12-13-2011, 05:50 PM

2011: Messed around, not particularly seriously, with online chess whenever I could. Very strongly re-sparked the interest I used to have in the game.

2012: PLAY IN A LIVE TOURNAMENT. I want to put my decade-old provisional USCF rating to the test, and see if it is over or under rating my current chess abilities.

YouKnowWho · 12-14-2011, 04:48 AM

2011: played exactly 10 FIDE rated games in the entire year, lost 5 FIDE points and am now sitting at 2318. HOWEVER, spent a lot of time coaching this year (my most active coaching year up-to-date by far) and, surprisingly, seeing my students use the things that I've taught them in their games has brought me almost as much pleasure as actually playing myself.

2012: I am planning to continue coaching actively (would like to at least keep the current work load, increasing it a bit would be nice too :P) but also I will most definitely play much more chess myself. I will likely not be as active as I used to be when chess was my top priority (for example, I played over 90 FIDE rated games in 2006, adding that to all the national championships [individual in various age groups, team, etc.] which didn't count FIDE rating I easily played over 150 classical games in that year, which now seems pretty insane) but I am planning on several tournaments already. Definitely interested to see what the new year will bring

**RoundTower** · 12-17-2011, 01:31 PM

I'm in the opposite situation. I played 40+ fide rated games in 2011 and gained about 100 rating points to 2133. On the other hand I started a fairly demanding full time job about two months ago, so I quit coaching and will have less time to spend on chess in general.

I'd like to get to 2200 next year. I don't think I'll play enough games to make that realistic though, so I'd settle for playing 25 games and keeping a performance rating over 2200.

Paymenoworlater · 12-18-2011, 08:10 AM

2011: Played 7 team matches, a few local blitz tournaments and some internet blitz.
My rating is now 2328 about where it has been for like 13 years now.

2012: Will be basically the same plus reading a chess book or two.
Dont plan to do much coaching. In my club its all unpaid work.

Besides that. Just searching for a job, but not successfully so far.

KyleJRM82 · 12-18-2011, 11:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by YouKnowWho

2011: played exactly 10 FIDE rated games in the entire year, lost 5 FIDE points and am now sitting at 2318. HOWEVER, spent a lot of time coaching this year (my most active coaching year up-to-date by far) and, surprisingly, seeing my students use the things that I've taught them in their games has brought me almost as much pleasure as actually playing myself.

2012: I am planning to continue coaching actively (would like to at least keep the current work load, increasing it a bit would be nice too :P) but also I will most definitely play much more chess myself. I will likely not be as active as I used to be when chess was my top priority (for example, I played over 90 FIDE rated games in 2006, adding that to all the national championships [individual in various age groups, team, etc.] which didn't count FIDE rating I easily played over 150 classical games in that year, which now seems pretty insane) but I am planning on several tournaments already. Definitely interested to see what the new year will bring

IM in 2012 or walk away in shame.

TexAg06 · 12-18-2011, 03:31 PM

2011: It was an interesting year to say the least. About a year ago I started a thread on this forum (see here if anyone cares: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/14...c-goal-961318/) stating that I wanted to achieve the rank of USCF Master (2200 rating) in 3.5 years, which would be right when I'd hit age 30. Over the past year I've done about as much studying and playing as I could have hoped considering I'm married (no kids) and have a full time job. I've loved every minute of it, no matter how frustrating the losses felt. Well, here's a graph of my USCF rating over the past year. The first event I played in my return to chess was on 12/19/10 and I went in with a rating of 1509, having not played a tournament in about 4.5 years. It has been almost a year to the day and my rating is currently 1904.

Overall, I feel like things went really well. My rating increased which was good, but I think I could study harder and focus more. The plateau at the end of the year has been really frustrating, but I'm hoping to keep playing and studying and hopefully I'll break through it sooner rather than later.

2012: My main goal this year is to really focus on trying to improve my visualization and calculation. I am a severely intuitive player, often barely calculating and just playing on feel. That leads me to go into a lot of lines that are not best but I don't have to calculate them, and it's really holding back my game.

I'd also love to play in two major tournaments this year, like the World Open in Philadelphia or the National Open in Las Vegas. And then of course, I'd like to make as many local events as possible.

Rating goal for the new year: 2200. If you don't aim high, what's the point?

Punker · 12-19-2011, 08:25 PM

Played more this year than in any of the recent few, but had very unimpressive results. Showed moments of promise, and actually did take some lessons with an IM aimed around improving my endgame play, but pretty much came to the conclusion that my time as a master is probably over unless I make major adjustments. Settling in as a dangerous wildcard who can play really well or really poorly depending on a variety of random factors.

Sholar · 12-23-2011, 11:25 AM

2011: I'm about 50% for my goals from the beginning of the year thread, playing a little more practically (especially with respect to beating inferior opponents), and finally ditching the dragon, but my ratio of playing to studying was way too high, and my clock management and terrible endgame technique both need to improve. I did not gain those 100 rating points...

2012: Playing faster, and playing endgames better when low on time would save me a lot of half-points, especially against stronger opposition. My intuition for the attack is also not that great. My openings with White are nothing, but for now, that's not a priority. But the goal is really: continue to improve. Play through more complete games; read some middlegame books. Offer a draw. And learn how to defend KRvKRB automatically. Oh, and improve my quality of play by ~100 rating points :-)

KyleJRM82 · 12-29-2011, 04:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TexAg06

I want that to be my 2012.

TexAg06 · 12-29-2011, 04:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KyleJRM82

I want that to be my 2012.

Go for the first half. That plateau in the last half isn't so fun

KyleJRM82 · 12-30-2011, 10:43 AM

I am such a New Year's dork and I am super excited about 2012.

2011 goals

Reach 1200 OTB [x]
Play at least 50 slow games with self-annotation and comments from stronger players [x]
Play 9 OTB rated games across at least two tournaments [x]
1700 in ICC45 [x]
1550 on Chess Tactics server [ ] (couldn't break my peak of 1531 no matter how hard I tried
At least 300 days of 30 minutes on CTS [x]

My 2012 plan, for now, is to do a four sets of 10/3. 10 weeks of serious study and training, three weeks of lighter chess activity to let my brain rest. Repeat four times and that's a year.

It's going to be tricky to rack up a ton of ratings points because I don't know how many weekend tourneys I can hit. We are having local tourneys now, but we have a slew of guys on the upswing who are way better than their ratings, and I have a feeling we'll all just be trading points with each other.

Okay, goals:

1700 USCF
1900 FICS
40 weeks of solid training
TD a club tournament
Play at least 20 rated games

Allen C · 12-31-2011, 12:38 PM

Happy New Year's Eve.

My chess resolution for the next year is to cut down on my chess obsession time: eliminate Internet blitz, restrict my study time to breakfast puzzles or annotated game, maybe an iPhone tactic while standing in line. Visit a couple non chess themed web sites.

However I'll try to play more tournaments, make it to the local club more often, and spend time analyzing those games. Basically keep the fulfilling fun stuff and stop the obsessive, time consuming, ADD inducing stuff.