Chess Journey Journal: A New Beginning

Since February I had basically been putting my all into chess, almost all of my free time went to playing, studying, and reviewing. As you can imagine that was extremely exhausting, and my only major break was when I got covid, when I still logged on but stopped playing long games for a week.

I had started at 1050, climbing up to 1830 rapid on chess.com in September, but this is when I started to tilt. I went down to the 1700’s and couldn’t get back, I felt stressed out and I had a lot to do, so I did the only thing I could: take a break from doing 100% chess. I still watched chess and played a bunch of shorter games, but I did it mostly for entertainment and invested some time in other games and relaxing in general. This had a great affect on my attitude, making me much more lax and motivated.

The break I took from mid October until now not only helped me mentally, but it allowed my brain an abundance of time to figure out how all the pieces and parts I learned for together and work together. Once I dust off the rust from my play I’m confident that I will be able to climb back up, and probably surpass my old peak. This experience has taught me that breaks can be helpful sometimes when done so in a good manner, and now that I’m back at my full self I’m looking at the next goal up the road: 2000 rapid rating.

Rating itself doesn’t matter much to me, but it’s the show that my skill level is enough to keep me there is what I’m looking for. It’s a measure of your average strength, since some days you might have really bad scores and some days you feel on top of the world. 2000 is the first goal I set for myself in 2022, and I thought it would’ve taken two years to reach, but in several huge arks of knowledge crossed in a short time 2000 is reachable by the end of this year if I really put effort into it.

How will I accomplish this? A good start for me would to play a bunch of longer games and get the rust off, as well as analysis on every game so that I can learn from my past mistakes. I can make a chart showing how much time I spend on chess to motivate myself further to not get distracted, and make sure I make time for learning new concepts. Tactics is one main area I want to focus on, and I’m going to brush up on my openings for black, since I do not fare well. The last thing I must work on is that I take losses like a bullet wound, and it’s something natural that I need to be able to learn and move on from; not something that I should dwell on and the fact I lost X rating in Y amount of time.

If you’ve made it this far than I’m guessing you care enough to comment on what I can do to improve on top of what I listed above, and maybe some modifications to what I said. This is my first blog on Lichess, and it’s been pretty relaxing to write. Letting all of the words flow out somewhere helps me think, and I haven’t had a chance to post something like this because I usually edit for hours, which ruins the point of just writing all of your thoughts. I’ll probably be writing more of these, maybe like a journal, but for now, thank you for reading, and I wish you an amazing day!