What is your story of success and chess improvement?

If you are a chess player that experienced sudden chess improvement, please share it here with the community.

Your improvement may consist of ‘external things’ like rating, insulting your opponent until he resigns (writing ‘tic tac’ when your opponent’s time is under one minute for example, please don’t do that, that’s rude), or flagging skills.
Or it may be ‘internal things’ like overall understanding of the game, knowledge, pattern recognition, positional understanding, etc. These ‘internal’ things are much more interesting to the aspiring chess player than those external things like rating, as you want to improve your chess and not your rating (as it will follow automatically if you have a greater understanding of the game).
Example: Maybe you read through ‘My System’ by Aaron Nimzowitsch and gained a lot of knowledge about positional understanding (internal), but you didn’t immediately jump 200 rating points (external). Nonetheless, it still improved your chess a lot on a long-term basis and is worth a mention here.

So please share your story of chess improvement and rating jumps, it might help a lot of players here. Thanks in advance.

Endgame Study elevates anyone chess. After solving 200 from the 70K+ Endgame Studies Collection I am now 2100+. from my normal 1800+.

@ryan121 What is the 70k+ Endgame Studies Collection?

Harold (can't recall complete name) Endgame Studies Collection. It's the largest collection of endgame studies.

A Sample

Sweet one. I think I know the database you are talking about, I even once looked at it a while ago. Why do you think endgame puzzles (and this one is just a rather easy puzzle, not exactly the dreadful, maybe even artificial position one often associates with endgame studies) are particularly helpful for improvement? I own van Perlo's Endgame Tactics and could use some motivation to actually work through it ^^

I started solving puzzles on chesstempo, whilst still doing puzzles in puzzle storm (lichess) as well. I feel that this worked very well for my improvement as I started to see patterns better by calculating lines from start to finish

Analysing with a strong trainer (GM).

Before I had to stop otb for health reasons my last two games were a win with black against an IM and a draw with white against a (weak) GM.

1.Basic - Tactic training as daily gymnastics, slowly getting more difficult.
2.Learn typical middlegame structures and procedures.
3.Analyse you otb games carefully.

Play otb tournaments (slow chess!).

If you don't believe me, take a look at this. I got my knowlegde from stronger players.
https://www.newinchess.com/media/wysiwyg/product_pdf/9103.pdf

@teerdurchzogen

Endings studies are helpful for several reasons

• You learn a more exact style of thinking. The reason is the sharper feedback of the position for a mistake.
• You learn to know tactical resoures in innocent looking positions. This is possible in middlegames too. But it's much harder to find middlegames with equal difficulty and a clear solution.
• Studies teach creative thinking.
• If you know about 200 typical endings you make a lot of points. Even if you don't get this or that ending, you can judge a lot of positions and calculations better, aka more precise and faster, with this knowledge.

The first reason is for the people who like to work, the last reason is for the lazy ones. ;)

@teerdurchzogen
If we can't calculate or have intuitive moves when there are 16 men or less in the board, ee can't play Strong moves whwn the board is crowded. Tactics exist in endgame too.