I thought the jobava attack was 3.Nc3 and assumed this was a way to handle that black move order in the london.

I looked at jobavas games briefly about a year ago and decided you have to have very good feel/understanding of piece placement and long term unlcear compensation to play it well.

Been able to do at least the tactics portions of my daily schedule in the last few days, which is quite good. Been looking through a few other materials too. Currently taking a nearly three hour train trip to travel out of town to play a rapid tournament, reading GM Rios book on pawn structure and it's quite mind blowing. I definitely want to spend more time looking through strategic stuff because there's still a lot of interesting things to learn.

okay traveled more than six hours to get out of the city and back to play the rapid tournament, managed to come 2nd and lost just one game. Will spend the week analysing and posting games because i think they highlight my flaws perfectly, which i will proceed to elaborate further on later. Played alot of wild games that didn't really made alot of sense.

Nice!

Taking a break from tactics for a day (maybe just do a little bit) so I can analyse my games from the rapid last week...

It's time to build on my repertoire

Did do much today but did pass 2700 on tactics trainer. Progress is progress.

2700?! JFC!

Nah chess.com tactics trainer is inflated. 2700 on there is around 1900 FIDE or something idk

Got my new puzzle rush record to 36.

Just played at a playoff for a trip to nankai university chess invitational event and represent my uni. Manage to make the top 2 and made it through, guess we will be going to china at the end of this year!

I did a quick look at a few of my friends' tactics scores and while they are both over 1900 FIDE, have done quite a few tactics, and neither's tactics high was anywhere near 2700.

My PR score is "stuck." Although I can only do 1/day and I do feel it's probably better to do a few at one sitting to get in a groove.

How strong is the competition at your university?

Not very strong. Mainly club players. Although alot of them are much better at fast time controls than normal times, and can give higher rated players alot of trouble. Such is the online generation when most people rather play blitz over the internet than travelling around to play real life tournaments which often have depressing atmosphere.

Something must have changed recently on chess.com tactics. A year or two ago I was bouncing between 2400 and 2500 (as a 2150 FIDE), and my 2390 friend was hovering around 2600. Now I am just going straight up, and should break 2700 some time tonight lol. Some easy problems have high ratings, not sure why.

Yeah, same with me, I was hovering between 2400-2500 too, then going straight up. I thought doing tactics everyday was making me improve. That's abit disheartening to hear. I'll ask the management then.

There are some puzzles that I'm getting like this: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/770040 (3400 rated) which are quite hard

But I also got some absurdly easy ones like this one: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/567902 (2715 rated?!)

Ahh, the friends I was looking at mainly did puzzles from a couple of years ago so perhaps that explains it. But I was assuming 2700 was at least 2200+ FIDE level. Maybe I should start doing chess.com tactics, although I only can do 5 a day so meh.

Well, you probably are improving but, yeah, it is quite annoying if there is some weird rating jump thing and it's not easy to tell if it's a real improvement or not.

Btw - I've found the analysis/survey data here interesting:

https://chessgoals.com/puzzle-rush
https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison

You'll note that he doesn't have too many strong survey participants since the data doesn't go too high but it still is kind of fun to look at.

According to all of this my OTB rating should still be at like, 1800 or something lol.

Maybe it's due to strong players sharing their accounts with students.

Just as a chess fish I thought I’d say when I was around 1300blitz 1600std a few years ago I could only get to 1500 tactics.

I came back a few days ago after not playing for years and managed to get to 1800 pretty easily. So I think it’s just been inflated at a lot of different rating levels.

I think tactics cap off at some point in terms of difficulty, and afterwards you can just keep gaining rating. Like there's this guy on 15000 tactics rating and the second closest is on like 12k rating

https://www.chess.com/member/FlashyFerrari

Played blitz with a friend til 2am XD Gonna take a break for abit til monday, still gonna do an hour or so tactics a day...

It's more that there is only a limited amount of high rated tactics, so some people just memorize all of them. Casper Schoppen, who holds the rush record with 105, claims he knows all rush puzzles after level 40.

It's an impressive feat of memorization, but it has little to do with chess.

Like it or not, a good part of chess IS memorization. The amount of depth people go into opening preparation when often just knowing the idea isn't good enough but you actually have to know the concrete lines by heart... same with endgames...

Just broke 2200 on chess.com blitz I'm gonna start saving my games and studying my lines using blitz from now on.

That would be cool to hit 2200 blitz! Do you get to play GM's occasionally?

nah, rarely. Mostly FMs and some IMs. GMs can get to really high ratings (2800+) with closed pool inflation...