I can't lie, I invested a lot of time this week to climb the ELO ladder, mostly by doing puzzles and finishing the intermediate lessons on Chess.com, I believe I spent around 10 hours grinding my chess game, which granted, it may not be a lot of time but it is definitely the most I've spent playing chess and learning about the game when it comes to formal studying and actually striving to perform at a better level.
I've climbed around 100 points since I began striving to reach a 1,500 ELO in a little bit less than 6 weeks. Not the most impressive numbers but definitely an improvement, especially since I spent around 4 months being a 900 ELO player.
I'm not clutching anymore and I don't go into games all nervous and worried about losing. Maybe because my tactics are better and also because I think I'm more confident in my capabilities ability to turn a bad game into a good one, and to actually make my advantage give results when it's needed.
I am still having time troubles and most of my games I finish checkmating the opponent but with little to no time on the clock, and when it comes to a long game, I lose on time while my opponent still has more than a couple of minutes. This is because I spend too much time explaining my train of thought, but also because when it comes to thinking my next move I tend to spend too much so, add that to the logic explanations I do and that is a recipee for disaster if I don't mate the guy in front of me by move 30.
Overall, great video.
I won 3 games and lost one, climbed the ELO ladder around 20 points which is very good considering that I want to reach a 1,500 rate points by next November so, by these numbers I should be fine, in fact if I keep up with this trend I'll be a 2,000 ELO rate plater. Not that I want that, in fact I think my ceiling will be 1,800 points and that's it. Good enough to say I know how to play chess but not good enough that it takes 40 hours of every week for a whole year, you know what I mean?
Anyway, I hope you like the video, I'm slowly starting to get loose and confident, having more fluency while talking and also improving by english accent which was on the floor a few weeks ago after not having spoken it in over one year.
If you play chess on Chess.com, my username is @anomadsoul, find me.
About this video-series
Chess is a beautiful game, and despite the fact that I'm not great at it, I'm also not that bad.
I learned how to play Chess when I was around 10 years old but I never actually took any lessons, I just played it every once in a while with my dad, and at one point I even got good enough to actually play in the school tournaments. I never won, my best place was second against a guy (or kid? We were like 12 or 13 at the time) who knew just a little bit more tactics than me, if I try to remember I think he knew about the concept of Forks, whereas I was just very good at calculating exchanges and overall positions, but if one of the players knows about Forks and discovered attacks and the other doesn't, then the game will be incredibly one-sided.
Either way, I kept playing over the years but I never took the time to actually get better. I would still kick every other guy who said "I can play chess" but whenever I faced someone who actually played I would get destroyed.
A few months ago I started to play again for fun and damn, I got so much better in no time by taking some online lessons at chess.com and I indeed understood more about the game.
I am currently learning code, more specifically JavaScript and CSS but every time I need some air or to clear my mind, I play a short 10 minute game of chess, which if you think about it, instead of playing three 10 minute games in one day, I could actually try and set a goal for me, stick to it, and upload the progress to Threespeak.
Right now I am at 1,063 ELO rate on Chess.com and I intend to reach 1,500 in less than a year from now.
This is Chess for ThreeSpeak. No censorship, lots of bad words, open to anyone who wants to have a tab open of someone ranting at the screen everytime he loses a game, or chanting victory songs every time I get a win.
This is my sixth video and despite still having some focus issues when speaking and playing, I feel more confident and loose, more at home. I will keep getting better at them and I will get noisier and more aggresive once I feel comfortably enough while talking to a camera and a microphone.
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