My Road to Chess GM — Week #1
Achieving my childhood dream, one week at a time
Tuesday. June 4, 2024. 5:51 am CST.
Dear reader,
It is a pleasure to have you accompany me on this journey from good to great. I have been playing chess competitively on and off (mostly off) since age 6. When I was 9, captivated by the royal game, I dreamed of becoming the youngest grandmaster by age 11.
My eleventh birthday came and went.
So did my twelfth, thirteenth, and so on.
By the time I went to high school, my attention moved to grades, the SAT, college admissions, socializing, and so on. Chess was a distant memory. You see, my story is painfully commonplace: a childhood dream (a chess career in my case) falling to the wayside as the vicissitudes of life pick up.
By no means am I bad at chess. At a USCF rating of 1946, I stand in the 96th percentile, 3147th best in the nation out of 78160 registered chess players. However, I cannot help but feel slighted. As if my chess potential was stunted by my (arguably poor) decisions leading up to this point.
If I had only been a smidge more consistent in practicing daily over the past 13 years, would I have achieved what my 9 year-old-self had set out to do?
I don’t know. But what I do know is that in 13 years, I’ll look back on today and have that same thought if I don’t actionably change my life.
I cannot change the past. But my future is an open book.
The Goal
My goal — the same one I shared with my 9-year-old self — is to become a Grandmaster in chess.
As defined by FIDE (the “Fédération Internationale Des Échecs”, a.k.a. the “International Federation of Chess” for non-French speakers), in order to earn the rank of Grandmaster, a person must meet two requirements.
1. Achieve a FIDE rating greater than 2500 at any point
2. Earn 3 Grandmaster norms (i.e., 3 really good performances in really strong chess tournaments)
An astute reader will notice this is not a “SMART” goal (specific ✅, measurable ✅, achievable ✅, realistic ✅, timely ❌) because I do not know how long it will take me to achieve this goal. As a now adult (at least, I like to think so), I have too variable of a to-do list to make so certain of a prediction.
Instead, I would like to be faithful to a lifelong journey of improvement at chess: committing to practicing for at least 15 minutes each day and learning 1–2 new tidbits per week, which I will publish here for your viewership.
I cannot change the past. But my future is an open book.
Quantitative Baseline
Currently, I am at a USCF 1946 rating. As seen in my rating history chart in Figure 1, I plateaued around the 1800–1900 range (although the COVID quarantine played a role in killing the beginnings of a rally in early 2020).
Chess.com also contains some neat statistics, albeit my chess is not necessarily perfect during blitz. As seen in Figure 2, my rating has definitely improved over time, up about 700 points from account creation in mid-2012. However, I’m definitely far off my peak of 2230 (chess.com) achieved in the height of quarantine.
Anecdotally, I struggle greatly with time pressure: most of the blitz games that I lose, I feel like I lose on time or blunder with <10 seconds. Statistically, this seems to be the case, as a whopping 39.5% of my games are timeouts with 36% being resignations. (Moreover, I’d be willing to bet my bottom dollar a large chunk of those resignations are from blundering when in time pressure.)
Knowledge Baseline
Apart from a purely quantitative baseline, it is important to understand where I feel weakest.
By far, I believe my top 5 “opportunities for growth” (i.e., weaknesses) ordered by severity are:
1. Time Management: I take about 15–30 seconds/move in 3 min blitz games, not to mention blundering incessantly when in time pressure.
2. Openings for Black: I know less than little theory for black, and have bounced around between at least 5 different responses to 1. d4(!) and 5 for 1. e4(!) Even if I escape the opening relatively equal (which is usually not the case), my opponent has already won the mental game and gained a psychological advantage… just by playing white!
3. Planning 2–3 moves ahead in blitz: while I am much better at planning in classical G60+5 games (for obvious reasons), I often “react” instead of “respond” in blitz, playing the move my intuition screams at me instead of visualizing the ideal position I want. This point goes hand-in-hand with number 1, and getting better at planning quickly will hopefully help me with time management.
4. Knowledge of pawn structures and the resulting plans: I know surprisingly little about pawn structures. While I — like everyone else — know how to play against isolated pawn (blockade, pile up, create 2 weaknesses, attack!), I know fairly little about other pawn structures and how to optimally play the middlegame to lead to an advantageous endgame.
5. Knowledge of advanced endgames: I rank this relatively low because my games rarely reach a non-trivial endgame due to the above weaknesses. Moreover, most endgames I do reach are fairly basic (e.g., promote to a Queen/Rook, checkmate on the board, etc.). However, perhaps the reason I steer all my endgames to these common winning techniques is because I lack knowledge of other winning strategies 🤔.
With these weaknesses triaged, I now must devise a way to address these issues, which will inform my day-to-day training plan.
How to Address My Weaknesses
#2: Openings for Black
The most straightforward area to train would be #2: Openings for Black. (For that matter, my openings for white could use some work too.) My greatest barrier to improvement in openings has been my never-ending, futile search for the “perfect” opening: one that gives me a winning advantage by move 10. Because of this hunt, I jumped between the Benoni, the Dutch, the Snake Benoni, the Queen’s Gambit Accepted, and more.
However, I have now realized Stockfish would beat Magnus Carlsen with any opening. Thus, the “best” opening is the one I pick and master.
With that framework in mind, my current opening repertoire is as follows, with TBD indicating a little more research is needed.
White: e4
- Against e5: Bishop’s Opening
- Against Caro-Kann: Two-Knights Attack
- Against French: TBD
- Against Scandinavian: TBD
- Against King’s Indian Defence: TBD
Black
- Against e4: Alekhine’s Defense
- Against d4: Semi-Slav
- Against c4: TBD
- Against Offbeat Openings: TBD
After researching a bit online, I have selected these Chessable courses to help me become better at my selected openings:
- Butcher 1… e5: The Bishop’s Opening (Chessable link)
- Beat the Caro-Kann: Two-Knights Variation (Chessable link)
- Alekhine Defense — The Dark Knight Rises (Chessable link)
- Lifetime Repertoires: Shankland’s Semi-Slav (Chessable link)
#5: Knowledge of advanced endgames
In addition to openings, endgames are fairly easy to train since there are so many resources geared toward making you an endgame guru.
I have personally selected two:
- 100 Endgames You Must Know by Jesus de la Villa (Amazon link)
- Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual 5th Edition (Chessable link)
Other Areas
As for the other areas, I still need to do a little more research into optimal training strategies. I am not sure how I would improve in time management and there do not seem to be as clearcut a plan for improving in pawn structure pattern recognition.
What do you think I should do? Leave a comment below.
Training Plan
With the above in mind, a simple training plan that I have devised is as follows:
- Study 1 of the “100 Endgames You Must Know” per day (~5–10 minutes)
- Use Chessable’s MoveTrainer to learn 1–2 variations per day from the Semi-Slav course and Alekhine’s Defense Course (~15 min per day)
With this training plan, I will complete the “100 Endgames You Must Know” book in approximately 100 days (3 months), and the Chessable courses in about 1 year.
Hey — no one said improving at chess would be a quick process!
Conclusion
Well that’s a wrap. Thank you for joining me on this journey of self-improvement. Becoming a Grandmaster at chess has been my childhood dream.
What is yours?
Featured Image Source: Image by svklimkin from Pixabay
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