My rating is probably ~1890 right now. I likely will play in the National Open in June and the rating sections there go 1700-1900 then 1900-2100.

I did not think playing a handful of rating games with an 1818 rating would put me in danger of going over that threshold. However, now I am pretty close with 0-2 games to go this month. Sitting them out seems stupid, but playing and not trying to win also seems stupid. Going over 1900 seems -EV.

The thing is, I'm not really sure how good a shot I really have at the u1900 section anyway and it could be a lot of pressure if I do pretty well the first few games. lf my long term goal is 2000+ anyway then it seems playing 1900-2100 is not a bad idea no matter what my rating is.

I guess my plan is to just keep ignoring rating and see what happens.

You are obviously playing at a level much above your current official rating.

Hence the thought that maybe I shouldn't go over 1900. I'm also getting quite lucky which helps

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April Summary:

Book Study

Finished book 6! Going to do one chapter (the one on Zukertort opening) from book 7 and then switch to the additional test book (book 10 I guess) for books 1-3.

Chess Evolution (2): Chapter 19 - 21/24 (excellent)
Chess Evolution (2): Chapter 20 - 22/26 (excellent)
Chess Evolution (2): Chapter 21 - 19/24 (good)
Chess Evolution (2): Chapter 22 - 22/23 (excellent)
Chess Evolution (2): Chapter 23 - 21/24 (excellent)
Chess Evolution (2): Chapter 24 - 21/28 (good)
Chess Evolution (2): Final Test - 36/45 (good)

Blitz Tactics

Problems: 1208
Starting Rating: 1914.3
End Rating: 1854.2

Accuracy: 58.3%
Average Problem Rating: 1872
Total Points Gained: -58.3
Performance Rating: 1933.6

Openings

Review on chessable. Also improved/fixed/redid hyper accelerated lines & maroczy lines in my black repertoire vs. 1.e4 and also added/fixed some move 3 sidelines in my 1.d4 repertoire.

Games:

Played 4 OTB games. Overall they went well but I really shouldn't have blown my 3rd game vs. a ~1950 player. Still ended up with a draw but should have definitely won. My 4th game loss I will just use as motivation to fix my repertoire a bit more. My rating is now 1903 so up over 80 points over the last two months/7 games. I feel I should be playing better but also getting quite lucky. So we'll see how things continue to go rating-wise.

Book Study

Finished the first third of Revision & Exam for the first (orange) series of 3 books. Did quite well on it although wanted to do even better of course. It's kind of nice/fun to just have problems on things I'm already supposed to know since I can kind of just pick the book up and work on a couple problems here or there.

Total for R&E: Boost Your Chess 1 - 258/285 (90.53%) - excellent (above 230)

I don't think I will be able to finish the entire book before the National Open, I'm hoping going through it will keep me sharp.

Games:

I played 1 game so far a couple of weeks ago the first week of this month vs. a ~2130 NM and won with Black. While I don't think I played the opening too well and could have played better once I had an advantage, this felt and seems like my best game yet! Link to lichess study.

"Sorry! This study is private, you cannot access it."

Oh, how much I fell

I thought a direct link worked? . No wonder no one had commented! I will make them public later today.

Ok, public now, sorry about that everyone (YKW)!

On another note I've been very stressed out recently. Even on vacation I was very stressed out whenever I had to coordinate things or things like that. Since we got back my 15 month old has been sick, wife is sick, even dog is sick somehow. While I'm not sick I feel quite run down, even after a week vacation!

So, I guess I may go easy on chess stuff (specifically I may not play Thursday and I am not putting any pressure/expectations to do any Yusupov). So we will see. I definitely do not want to be burned out on chess before I go to Las Vegas for the National Open next month. Although part of me feels like I should be chessing 24/7 up until then lol.

April Summary:

Book Study

Finished the first R&E section (for book 1) and have done 7/24 for book 2.

Blitz Tactics

Problems: 544
Starting Rating: 1854.2
End Rating: 1834

Accuracy: 56.6%
Average Problem Rating: 1874
Total Points Gained: -20.2
Performance Rating: 1927.6

Standard Tactics

Problems: 9
Starting Rating: 2149.3
End Rating: 2151.9

Accuracy: 44.4%
Average Problem Rating: 2193
Total Points Gained: +2.6
Performance Rating: 2148.8

Openings

Review on chessable. Also worked on a bunch of lines, many I just started fresh: vs. chigorin, responding to 3...c5, responding to 1...b6, bf4 lines in the dutch.

Games:

Ended up playing only 1 OTB game, which I posted already. I was travelling for 2/4 games and the 4th I skipped due to being kinda sick and my family all being sick. Going to take June off from weekly games to stay hungry for the National Open later this month.

I think I'm going to start logging more frequently. Not sure anyone will care but, ok, we'll see.

I have the National Open in Las Vegas coming up in less than two weeks. My main concentration is reviewing all of my opening lines since I don't remember a lot of them super well. At the same time I'm cleaning up some lines and doing some work in a couple of areas which I've been putting off.

I went through all of my White lines last week and afterwards did all of them together (~750 moves), making 20 mistakes. I don't think I completely butchered too many moves, many of them are transposition issues where the move I missed was not critical. I feel my White lines are pretty solid across the board, much better than a year ago after I initially created them. There were too many muddled lines that I either didn't enjoy the resulting position.

I've gone through more than half of my Black vs. e4 lines, although I need to fix/update my Alapin lines and also vs. Yugoslav lines and then go through them.

Yesterday for my chess lesson I played three 15+0 games vs. my coach. Went 2/3 and that includes being up a piece in the first game and drawing instead of winning. I did not remember everything in the openings but my coach went astray in the first two games trying to test me since he was playing stuff he never plays.

11 days until National Open

We care, we care!

Log more

I could have sworn I logged on Tuesday, weird.

Well, the last two days I completely revamped my Alapin lines and reviewed the rest of my ...c5 repertoire. Yesterday I went through them all one after another and made 7 mistakes out of 700 positions. Which I'm quite satisfied with. We'll see if I can get close to or beat that in a couple of days once I'm done reviewing my ...f5 lines.

8 days until National Open

The National Open should be awesome. Have you played in a huge event like that before? I'm on the East Coast and recently decided at least once I have to make a run at the World Open. Can't do it this year but definitely going to go next year if it's in Philly again. Gonna take my study more seriously in the next year and try and win the U2000 (ha)

I've played in the National Open quite a few times over the years. I also played a US Open in Hawaii in HS. And amateur team tournament in Chicago when I was in college. I've mainly only played large tournaments. Lol

As far as prep I finished reviewing my lines but need to review main line Dutch more than just once. I'm kind if burnt out so may just take it kind of easy the next few days.

Well having a countdown to get me to log daily has not quite worked. Nevertheless, time keeps getting close to the tournament.

I feel good about my openings at this point although I do not know every move flawlessly. However, I'm not sure I ever will. Either way I plan to keep reviewing a bit the next couple of days but mainly just do whatever I feel like chess-wise. Maybe Yusupov, maybe standard chess tactics on chesstempo, maybe nothing? I dno.

I've been waiting to see Svidler's recap of the Carlsen/Aronian game so I will do that today and also see if Wesley can win a game (although he has black) today.

I don't really have a chess coach anymore either, although we basically finished preparing me for the tournament so hopefully it won't matter or affect me too much.

I'm thinking after Vegas and annotating/analyzing all of my games myself, perhaps I'll take the rest of the month off or even July and actually try to study zero chess (except keep my streaks on CT and chessable alive, lol). We'll see though, I could also be very pumped up after Vegas and want to dive even deeper for a while.

3 days until National Open

First round had white vs 2051. Blundered a pawn. In the opening. Made a game of it. Ended up accepting a draw offer after time control. I think he was a bit worried although I was still down a pawn.

I'm so damn tired though so kind of just snap accepted. We'll see how next round goes and then how I feel tomorrow.

Won second game with black vs 2001. 1.d4 f5 2.bg5 h6 3.bh4 g5 so was a pretty exciting game!

So far so good, you are a beast!

Won third game with white. A Barry attack where I thought I should have had a winning g attack but he diffused it and I went into an ending and was maybe winning when I set a trap which he fell into and it made finishing the game much easier.

Lost my fourth round. Was doing very well in the opening in a 150 attack but then didn't cash out for a pawn and instead kept Queens on and then missed a significant resource. Probably should have fought on down a pawn but instead complicated things and was very lost. Although he did hang a bishop near the end but still had a winning position. Meh

Thanks!

Lost in the fifth round. Out of book on move two lol. I've been depressed and it's harder and harder to get up for the games so I just withdrew and hung out with my family last night


Finishing 2.5/5 is fine but I really don't think I did a great job mentally preparing for round 4 or 5. Especially 5. Although I tried meditating and affirmations and stuff. Maybe 3 games is my current limit in terms of ling games. Lol. Or, you know, nobody is perfect and I just finally had some off games.

Chessable Book Review: 100 Endgames You Must Know

As I've mentioned previously, I'm a pretty big user of Chessable. Recently one of the co-founders reached out asking if any users had a blog and when I replied that I did, he gave me advanced access to 100 Endgames You Must Know. Here is a link to the book (it's 20% off for the first week). A book that I've always know is supposed to be one of the best practical endgame books to study. However, I don't own it and haven't looked into it until now.

Having spent a week or two so far with the book it seems like a perfect match for the training power of chessable. I remember going over some of these endgames before at various times in my chess career and in varying detail. However, without training them I only vaguely remembered how to handle the situations. By going through these endgames now, with training, in the same amount (or less) overall time I'm much more confident that if I face them over the board later on I will have the most important patterns/ideas fully internalized and am much, much more likely to win or hold a game based on them.

I understand very well that one should be able to do all this training manually without using a tool like Chessable. On the other hand, I really can't imagine actually implementing such a plan successfully without getting derailed. It's soooo much simpler and better in my experience to just go to Chessable on my phone or computer, start clicking buttons, do a bit of thinking and profit. This way I don't have to spend an enormous amount of time getting out books, pieces, tracking my progress, setting reminders to re-study things, properly grading my knowledge, etc.

So far, a great book and in my opinion the single most valuable (and it's not close) addition to the chessable library.

So I took the rest of June and all of July off from what I consider serious study. I've gone through 100 endgames you must know (via http://chessable.com), which is actually pretty serious. So perhaps I should say rigorous study, e.g. Yusupov, or really knuckling down on analyzing my games from the National Open, stuff like that. I did achieve 365 day streak on http://chessable.com, which I'm happy about. Although I lost my streak on chesstempo that was longer than that.

A tragedy befell my previous coach, who I had been working with for only a couple of months. It had been going so well and the whole thing just kind of stopped me dead in my tracks. I greatly underestimated how much it affected my mental state at the tournament, as even when I was winning I was depressed to start the next game.

The good news is that I am excited about chess again and going to resume my main study progress. For now I'm not sure what to do about coaching. I probably should try to find another one but I may wait a while since I'm not sure I want to deal with trying to figure out who to approach, how much I am willing to pay, etc.

So, for August the main goal is to finish the Yusupov book I'm on (Revision & Exam). I also will likely shore up a few opening lines from some books I liberated online, continue to review 100 endgames (possibly starting some sections over), and may do some tactic problems here and there.

I don't think I'll play any games this month. However, I may decide to try some in September, we'll see.

Wowow, I haven't properly updated this in forever.

I basically took July off but still made some progress the other two months:

June, July, and August Summary:

Book Study

Finished the rest of Revision & Exam for the orange Yusupov books. I started in on the 7th main book this month.

100 Endgames You Must Know via chessable.com

Blitz and Standard Tactics

I did some in June it looks like but then lost my streak during the National Open and have done barely any of this since then. Not sure it's worth even reporting here although it's not like I lost or gained a ton of rating or anything.

Openings

Worked a lot on openings before the National Open, then since then I've been reviewing. I feel I've forgotten quite a bit though. Oh, I also picked up a new book on the Hyper Accelerated Dragon and reworked several large areas of my repertoire to match it.

Games:

Played the 5 games in Las Vegas. I've been burned out since then but am playing in a chess league this week and then plan to play 3 games on 9/30. They are classical time control but not super long (g/60 or something I think).

Coaching:

I've found a new coach and hope to start doing lessons again soon. We'll see how that goes.