@Blundered_the_queen I saw you play 2 games with e4, and you won both. How did it feel? Do you think you play more solid?
I think you did.
According to what i read, you apparently have some dilligence, but have been discouraged because you have not seen rating improvements.
Im telling you, you have some good insights in the game, you have good tactical sense, and decent understanding of the position. The improvements of your study are there, you just played riskier than you had to and that came to bite you in the ass and because of that, there has been no rating improvement.
Blunders are understandable, we all do, i probably do them as often as you, but since i play a bit safer, i often can salvage the situation. Now do the grinding with e4, and you will see that you will get a bigger rating in a span of some weeks since you have, in my opinion, a better understanding of the game than a 1200 by a mile.
And if you do the drills i suggested, you will be ironing some rough spots you have in your game, and will also kick in faster, because they are focused on specific areas.
>There was a forum post on here two days ago discussing how much improvement the average person should expect after 4 years; the consensus was the average person should expect to reach 2000 blitz by his 4th year of chess. I'm only a few months away from my 4th year starting from when I first started playing chess seriously, and I'm currently 900 points off from the average.
Im 39. I learned to play when i was like 7, but started playing for real when i was like 13. According to online tests, IQ 115-125~ I was able to break to 2000 just about last year, and still hovering. So that part is BS. Its doable, but we all dont have coaches.
I can assure you that the improvement is not related to the quantity of effort, i did my own share at a point with almost negative impact in terms of rating. The fruits of that training is starting to show like 8 years later.
Its about the quality of the effort. The thing is that we all who dont have a mentor that can identify our rough spots and tell us what to correct, thus, we continue to train incorrectly for many years. We study the same stuff, the things that we know, and we do not develop new weapons, we continue to make the same mistakes.
With coaches, you can improve fast, but without them, unless you know how to train from other fields, its near impossible. Learning how to train is also a skill. Its not just doing blind drills of something ad infinitum.
But once you understand that you need to continue learning the new things, we can quickly adapt and implement new ideas to the game that will, over time, transform in less lost games, when that happens, your rating naturally increases.
The last time i checked, you had 48% wins 2% draws and 50% loses (Thats overall, i cant filter by color nor opening, but you can do that). If you can filter that stuff up, you can see where all the negative impact comes from. If you manage to shift 1 or 2% of those loses to either wins or draws, you will have a rating increase (my increase did not come from winning more, it came from shifting loses to draws for about 1.5-2% and was worth like 200 points over time).
I mean, its micromanagement. the first step is to change the opening that gives you the most amount of loses, then tactics you missed, then studying against the opponents opening that result in worst positions to you, etc etc.
But its just about focusing on small goals, you never had one, so you were running in circles, obviously with no visible gains.
