Challenge 2500 | 15. Push!

It’s been a while since my last post (even longer here than on Substack), which is regrettable.
On the other hand though, while there certainly were some things I could’ve written about, it wasn’t exactly much: In 2024, I basically only played Bundesliga (and later in the year, back to my home club in Hamburg, Oberliga).
Of course, the word “only” refers to the quantity of games this amounts to, not the quality of the opportunity: It was brilliant to get to play some of the best players in the world.
I ended up scoring a slightly disappointing 2.5/11 — drawing games against Navara, Cheparinov and Nisipeanu, winning against Horvath, and losing the rest — and while I had hoped for better results beforehand, I obviously learned a lot and gained valuable experience competing against such strong grandmasters.

I did not play any open tournaments that year though, and so in some ways, the journey toward 2500 was paused. This year however, I set out to be more active as a chess player. To summarise, so far I’ve played:

• 3 league games, where I scored wins against 2159, 2342, and 2339,
• a small 5-round tournament in Brühl (where the goal was mainly to reacclimatise myself to tournament play) with 4/5 and a performance of 2494,
• Italian league with 3 wins and 2 draws against an avg of 2235 (the story about me playing for a small Sicilian club from near Palermo for 4 years now and about how we actually promoted to next year’s Master league perhaps merits its own post),
• and finally, clearly the chess highlight of the year so far, the Grenke Open in Karlsruhe, with a score of 7/9 and a performance of 2557.

It was the Grenke Open in particular where I gained quite a bit of confidence in my skills, as I was only ever in real trouble in one game. The rest were of pretty high quality — many of the wins were clean and convincing, and the draws very solid, the one against GM Saric being the most gratifying.

Here are (most of) the games:

I haven’t been training very rigorously lately other than playing Blitz and doing some tactics on ChessTempo right before the tournaments, Grenke in particular — having this in mind, the results were fantastic.
All in all, so far this year I scored 18/22 against a rating average of 2287.4, winning 14 games and drawing the remaining 8. I started the year at 2453, and should be now at 2478 in the new rating list. Basically, a smooth and to some extent unexpectedly successful start to 2025, which I am very happy about.

So, what’s next? Nothing much — at least not in the immediate future. I won’t be playing any chess for the next few months, and focusing instead on finishing up my studies and publishing my second Chessable course (which will be a German-language complete 1.d4 repertoire based mainly on g3-Systems, for anyone wondering).

I do want to keep — or rather, continue — working on my chess though, as I plan on competing again later in the year, roughly in August/September/October (I’d appreciate any tournaments recommendations/suggestions!)
My routine starting now couldn’t be simpler: Just approx. 30 minutes of standard Lichess puzzles every morning. My training plan used to look slighly more refined than this (and if I had the time and energy, I would include other things such as practice games and other forms of calculation training), but I want to keep it simple and just try to make significant progress in the area where I think I can improve most: Deep, precise calculation.
Of course, there are other (perhaps better or more effective) resources for calculation training, but I enjoy how easy and convenient it is to just open Lichess, click on Puzzles, set up the position on my physical board, and start thinking. And if I intend to keep this up for months, making the start to each session as frictionless as possible is probably a good idea.

A few weeks before playing my next tournaments I will return to playing training games and solving easier tactics quickly to to get back into the groove, but for the next few months, it’s just going to be good old calculation training. Well, and of course I also get some opening work done by finalising my my repertoire on 1.d4.

As a last remark: At this point I feel like my chances of reaching 2500 are excellent, and, to be honest, I could see myself aiming for more in the future. I should be patient though and avoid idling away on the laurels of the progress made so far, and instead work on making possible and probable that final push towards the defined goal of 2500. After all, the final ~22 points might turn out to be the most difficult to earn.

Thank you for reading and for following along. Cheers!

PS: Some previous & all future posts @ https://jakobpfreundt.substack.com/