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How To Reach 2000 VOL.2

To answer the OP (I didn't read anything else) - yes, it is possible.

My advice would be - focus on the journey (learning more about chess, improving your chess skill) rather than the destination (rating goal).

I used to focus on rating goals myself, but I would become frustrated and angry whenever I had a setback. It made my enjoyment of chess dependent on results, rather than playing for its own pleasure.

If you're able to learn something from every game you play, it's a good start toward your goal :) Don't settle for seeing what the engine gives as better - figure out what you needed to see/appreciate to play that better move, and how you would approach that position next time.

I hope that helps!
@Craze

Thank you for an answer, i also think that if you learn something new in every lost game, it can be still beneficial, most of my loses are simply from stupid blunders.

p.s. you even have your own wikipedia page, its super cool :)
I agree with @Craze you shouldnt worry about optimizing rating. Also your goal was far from impossible, though honestly its quite arbitrary. Its irrelevant to focus so much on rating and could lead to avoiding tougher matches to preserve momentum and rating gains. Just focus on playing well, enjoying yourself, and reflecting after games. The irony is not worrying about rating will allow you to improve your rating long term quite a bit.

Going to very STRONGLY disagree with everyone about bullet being useless. That being said if you aren't learning from your games and thinking about some of the bigger decisions after games, then bullet can in fact do way more harm than good. Simplifying bullet to who is faster at moving their mouse is completely inaccurate. The fastest people use their stronger chess principles to anticipate opp moves/plans and are able to adjust and plan ahead very quickly/relatively accurately (obv mistakes will be made with shorter time controls, the game is only useless if you dont learn from the mistakes). Watch some opper/peng hyper bullet and tell me they are just mashing their mouse. At the higher levels there are a lot of things you learn in bullet (you get to play many more games vs same opponents and it involves many more adjustments and punishes tactical leaks) that can't be simulated in longer games. Cherry picking examples where ppl couldn't find the good continuations doesnt mean bullet is bad, the player was just playing sub-optimal and didn't have a very solid handle on the tactics. I would say learning skills to succeed in bullet is almost mandatory to get 2200+ levels for classical.
#43
>> Going to very STRONGLY disagree with everyone about bullet being useless.

There is a difference between bullet chess being useless and bullet chess being bad for your chess skills development.
I maintain the opinion that for a player who is still in the progress of improving their chess skills, say otb U1800 FIDE ELO rating, playing various bullet chess games quite regularly simply builds bad habits and creates superficial moves production. It also encourages people to play for silly tricks and focus on flagging, and it likely will be worshiping tactics.

For amateur chess players, still learning, with bullet chess there is almost never place for beautiful quiet positional moves or subtle endgames moments.
I think its necessary for development too. Building bad habits is a fault of the player not something intrinsic to bullet. You need to learn how to enter the highly volatile and high volume bullet environment w/o resorting to cheap tricks and actively building/maintaining a robust gameplan. Yes I agree for most amateurs super slick positional play will not happen in fast time controls, but once again that's due to laziness from the player. There is no reason why you cant make patient positional moves. It is a big leak of most 2200s and lower that they immediately optimize for taking initiative instead of more unorthodox or patient plans. The nice thing about a bullet match is you get to try out a lot of different plans and see how the games play out. I am also not saying this is the only arena to train in - so you can build those positional and endgame skills in slower games or during review of any game. That being said avoiding faster time controls I think is avoiding fixing leaks that need to be plugged.
#45
>> w/o resorting to cheap tricks
:-) Time out, White is victorious
Haha ill reiterate the cherry picking examples doesnt prove bullet is not good for development. was smashing majority of the game then we were scrambling ;)
I honestly never studied chess since I have little time, but I'm happy of the 300-rating improvement I've made only by playing in 1 year. I remember I had an account here (Actually I had multiple - blame my ego), and I couldn't get past 1400. I noticed that playing against stronger players made me play more accurately.

Honestly though, the best thing that helped me getting better was literally just changing my openings (Although I have little opening knowledge). I analyzed my blitz games (I don't have the patience to play classical online tbh) and that's it pretty much. I think that only by playing and analyzing you really do learn a lot. But had I studied, I probably could've get better in less time!

So my suggestions are:
- Play higher rated players,
- Analyze your own games (even blitz ones),
- STUDY your mistakes! You will probably do them again, especially in fast time controls, but you'll eventually remember them after studying.
- Find an opening repertoire that suits you best.

I don't really suggest starting from endgames until you're a 2000 player. I know I am not in the position to tell you so, but perhaps you have already noticed that most of the games you play against players rated 1800 mostly end in checkmates or a player leaving the game in a lost position. It's quite rare for me to get into an endgame especially if I play players with my rating.

I suggest only studying endgames to understand the pieces better, but still Im not in the position to give you any suggestions about it since I didn't study any endgame myself.
@JohnStuckey #47
Well, last season in the Dutch National team leagues something happened that resembles some bullet chess.
In a team match a game had a checkmate in 1 position on board. The player in the bad position thought for quite some time and then did not resign but made a move. The opponent then almost instantly blitzed out and "checkmated". However, the previous move was a check !
So, illegal move made, arbiter time etc.
Basically this could be seen as an otb chess premove blunder :-)
@achja
lmao well i would say he doesnt have very good premoving or bullet skill ;) thats really funny what ended up happening? did he flag

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