How to improve in Racing Kings? Simple question, long answer.
- Play blitz time controls. Take your time to think about moves, learn to calculate deeper variations and properly evaluate positions. Playing bullet RK is fun, but you won't improve nearly as fast as when you play blitz.
- No matter at what level you are, always continue to analyse your games. Stockfish is your best friend when it comes to finding the blunders in your gameplay, so to improve the quality of your endgames to make sure to analyse what you're doing wrong. Ask yourself why you missed certain ideas, why you thought a certain move would work out when it didn't, etc.
- At 2000+ rating level, opening theory plays a huge role in RK. I had a look at @david9426's opening tree, and from what I can see you exclusively play Kg3 Kf4 openings with white. 1.Kg3 as an opening is generally solid, but as you climb the rating ladder more and more players will know either the full drawline or deeper variations that are generally harder to play with white. If you want to reach the 2100s, I strongly recommend adding 1.Nxc2 and 1.Bd4 lines to your repertoire - and practicing 1.Kh3 or other openings definitely won't hurt either. Learning new openings will give you more options to work with against various types of players, whilst also improving your defensive repertoire for black.
- There are plenty of studies about RK on lichess. Racing Kings puzzles are available on chessvariants.training/Puzzle/RacingKings and in various studies on lichess. A couple of months ago, my friend Jesus did a great job of compiling most of the quality RK studies into a forum post: lichess.org/forum/team-ss1-team/guia-de-carrera-de-reyes-racing-kings-guide#1
In case I left any questions unanswered, feel free to ping me in this forum topic or send me a private message. Good luck shooting for 2100! :-)
- Play blitz time controls. Take your time to think about moves, learn to calculate deeper variations and properly evaluate positions. Playing bullet RK is fun, but you won't improve nearly as fast as when you play blitz.
- No matter at what level you are, always continue to analyse your games. Stockfish is your best friend when it comes to finding the blunders in your gameplay, so to improve the quality of your endgames to make sure to analyse what you're doing wrong. Ask yourself why you missed certain ideas, why you thought a certain move would work out when it didn't, etc.
- At 2000+ rating level, opening theory plays a huge role in RK. I had a look at @david9426's opening tree, and from what I can see you exclusively play Kg3 Kf4 openings with white. 1.Kg3 as an opening is generally solid, but as you climb the rating ladder more and more players will know either the full drawline or deeper variations that are generally harder to play with white. If you want to reach the 2100s, I strongly recommend adding 1.Nxc2 and 1.Bd4 lines to your repertoire - and practicing 1.Kh3 or other openings definitely won't hurt either. Learning new openings will give you more options to work with against various types of players, whilst also improving your defensive repertoire for black.
- There are plenty of studies about RK on lichess. Racing Kings puzzles are available on chessvariants.training/Puzzle/RacingKings and in various studies on lichess. A couple of months ago, my friend Jesus did a great job of compiling most of the quality RK studies into a forum post: lichess.org/forum/team-ss1-team/guia-de-carrera-de-reyes-racing-kings-guide#1
In case I left any questions unanswered, feel free to ping me in this forum topic or send me a private message. Good luck shooting for 2100! :-)
