5 Weeks into my Chess journey
Quick Career Recap (so far)
Well, I made a previous post about my Twitch stream, and it was mostly talking about chess. Well in this post, I will further go in-depth into what is going on in my chess career so far.
Beginner
I made a lot of mistakes at first (and still do) as a beginner. I do watch some chess videos for tips, just from a basic Youtube search. The popular chess content creators that I watch for help in my game are mostly GothamChess and Daniel Naroditsky, both of whom have a lot of content which is delivered very nicely for a ~1000 rated player like me.
On chess.com, where I started my career, I put myself as a beginner, so I think I only started at around like a 500 rating. If I put the default one (I think intermediate), then there might be a chance that my main account that I use to stream chess on will be over 1000 rating by now, since the ELO gains is a lot more volatile when starting out, since the website is trying to determine the proper ELO tier that you are actually on.
Well, nonetheless, I decided to set 1000 ELO as my benchmark target, since it seems realistic, but it also seems like I do have to dedicate quite a bit of work to learn the game as well.
Chess Origins
I never played chess too much. Probably at most once a year on average before I started this year. So I barely know the rules (learned about en passant last month XD), and in terms of strategy, all I knew was that the central squares are important in the early game.
So I think it is legitimate to say that I am pretty much a complete beginner at this game, when I started streaming. In the beginning, I think I was taking way too much time on the clock and not managing it properly. So far for my streams, I mostly do Rapid 10 | 0, since that seems like the default (so games will be easy to find, and it probably won’t be infinite time long). It seems to be an appropriate length for streaming. But I do suck at it.
Progress
So after around a month of streaming chess, I am now at over 900 ELO! Though I think it will take at least 6 more games to reach the coveted 1K. ELO gains are pretty marginal these days (usually around +10 for wins). I also still blunder a lot. But I am happy that I am learning from some mistakes. My friend Stephen also helped me analyze a game and gave me helpful tips overall!
Although some days seem like there is almost no progress, since I just keep losing, or it seems like all the other 900s are easily beating me, there are sometimes glimmers of hope that I am indeed making progress in my chess skill.
Just yesterday, I played a game against another 900s person, and it went so well. They played some weird non-optimal moves, and somehow I decided to capitalize on it. There ended up being a chain reaction, and I was able to fork the queen and win other pieces safely! Although I did not plan for that, it seems like the puzzles and watching pro games might be paying off little by little! Was a dominant win. It should be, if the opponent is playing questionable moves. I am happy to see a pattern to capitalize off of it, even if I can’t fully make out the end result that’s 10 moves away!
Puzzles
I love doing puzzles! I did a lot of lichess puzzles and peaked at ~1873 which is pretty solid! Lichess is nice since everything is free there, though quite addictive. I usually do them during exercise bike sessions, which should be ~30 minutes but doing puzzles may double or triple that time, since most of them take a lot of brain thinking.
A bit draining, but pretty rewarding when/if I find the solution. Overall, my goal is to be around 2000 rating at puzzles on lichess. Chess.com puzzles are at around 1000 rating for me right now, since I can only do ~3 a day (free).
I sometimes do puzzle rush as well. It is pretty fun to chill and listen to a song while doing like a 3 or 5 minute one. My PB for 3 minute is 13 which stinks a bit, but hopefully I can hit 15 soon!
Conclusion
Overall, this has been my chess progress over the last month. For now, I think I have and will slow down on the lichess puzzles. I will mostly do chess.com puzzles since it is easier to control the amount. For playing and practicing, it will probably be only on stream since I want to capture LIVE the moment of hitting 1000 ELO. That will be exciting, but still a lot of big brain energy to go! I also have other goals (maybe I will talk about in future posts) that take some time away from chess, hence I may not be practicing too much off-stream.