A Simple Mindset To Reach 1897

[@PaulFurber]

Good stuff LightSquares. I remember an interview with Yasser Seirawan where he said when he started playing titled players as a junior, that he would measure how long he could resist them. That attitude built up his considerable late middle and endgame skills in the long run.

[@LightSquares]

Nice 👌. Make your opponent earn their victory, let’s not give it away cheaply.

[@southernrun9048]

Excellent advise and points made

[@BDuff2233]

This is definitely useful advice for a lot of players. It just needs to be considered as part of a spectrum. On the end highlighted here, a player can play too loose and too greedy, leading to positional and tactical problems, failure, and frustration. On the other end, a player can be too scared to trust and test their own calculation, which will hinder their improvement in such calculation and stifle the accumulation of knowledge in the form of instincts/intuition. There may be merit to trying out a seemingly-clever tactic to win a pawn. Hopefully players will eventually develop the instincts to recognize when such a sequence is a bad idea, like when they are underdeveloped and their king is in the center. It seems like you're developing that intuition. But players could confuse it for excessive caution. A bit of a tangent, but part of my concern with players overly relying on this advice is that it may promote a local maximum over longer-term improvement. They might play overly cautiously, rack up wins and rating due to a decrease in blunders, but stall out due to a lack of skill development. It's also a concern I have with system openings (play the same handful of lines a million times so you can gain rating without getting better at chess in other areas) and the "never resign" mentality (spend tons of time trying to eek out wins in losing positions, hoping your opponent will blunder, rather than resigning and using the time to review your mistakes). Not to say that you shouldn't use any system openings or that you should resign at the first hint of trouble. But try to figure out what approach will be best for your longer term development, if you care about such things, and let that guide you.

[@LightSquares]

Very measured response, thank you! I see your point about 'local maximums'.

[@SuperOriginalRecipe]

This dude one of the top KZbinrs giving practical tips and commenting on relatable experiences for low elo. This kinda stuff makes me think that the advice from the smithyq course is spot on up to 2k cc. Like develop improve pieces, win time, and castle. Forget winning material in the opening. Ever since I started doing that I’ve just been dunking people and spending a lot less mental bandwidth during early game

[@LightSquares]

Thank you! The 'win time' point is overlooked by many. Most 10 minute rapid games degrade into blitz games.

[@IIIlIl]

Oddly specific title

[@LightSquares]

The advice is not quite good enough to get to 1900.

[@Polaroid_Witch]

Couldnt agree more, my rating has gone up 200 points by doing exactly what you said, and by going offbeat as well. Just a random question, but have you tried playing Nf3 first and then b3 as white? Its my favourite opening as white Ive tried so far.

[@LightSquares]

1 b3 e5 is very difficult against strong players so I think one day I will move to 1 Nf3 where b3 might still be possible in a subsequent move. Well done on your improvement 👏.

[@Polaroid_Witch]

Thanks for all the great advice!

[@zeynepkeskin-r4v]

I'm 14 and almost 1200 on rapid chess. Do you have any tips for me to get better? My improvement has been a plateau 2 years.

[@LateNightPhilosophers]

The biggest contributing factor to a plateau is lack of focus. It’s not your fault it’s just that the brain is always looking for shortcuts and gets lazy to save energy and that’s the hardest thing to fight. Having a literal checklist and playing long games seriously will help. Play a few one hour games with a checklist to get back focus. It can look something like this. It’s very tedious but bringing back focus after having bad habits can be really hard. This checklist works for solving puzzles too 1.) note your opponents move and your last move 2.) ID the location of every piece and weak/attacked squares (count defenders and attackers) 3.) identify all simple potential checks, pins, skewers, captures, and forks 4.) look for tactics 5.) try to see what yours and also what your opponent strategy could be (example doubling pawns, opening your king up, etc) 6.) assess and say out loud a short summary of the position 7.) generate 3 candidate moves and calculate them 8.) pick the preferred candidate move and calculate, then look at the resulting position in your mind 9.) check for blunders 10.) mentally commit 11.) blunder check 12.) physically make the move

[@IIIlIl]

I'm in the same boat except I'm in my 20s lol

[@LightSquares]

1. Daily puzzle rush survival on chess (dot) com. You need to hit a score of 30 routinely, spending ~1 min per puzzle on average. 2. Perform deeper analysis than blunders. Check what led to a blunder.

[@vichur7]

Bxf7 is the safest move, i think that white has a better position after that

[@LightSquares]

Or d3. Trouble with Bxf7 is you have to move your bishop back in the next move due to the threat of h6 (kicking the knight).