My 45 day journey in improving at Chess

Welcome back to the optimized blog where we discuss all things self-improvement related and today I go over my self-improvement journey through the mechanisms of chess and what I learned from it

So, it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve posted anything and that is because I did something I wouldn’t normally due and that was to succumb to my chess addiction on purpose just to simply see what would happen. During that given time, I set myself the goal of trying to become a fide master which obviously would probably take 5-7 years and I figured I would just focus on practicing as many tactics as possible, hired a coach(NM rated 2200) and I focused on playing primarily lots of blitz chess, bullet and some rapid games. Idk about you guys but I get bored of rapid too fast and I enjoyed the challenge of improving more at blitz. To the average chess player I am probably pretty strong I started off at roughly 1250 in 3 minute time control and over that month and a half I peaked at roughly 1545. It is also worthy of noting that I am obsessive about listening to chess content, watching all the latest games it’s only natural that I would improve at a high level. One of the hard things I kept noticing is that I had a very hard-time playing in constructive moderation while pursuing a goal. It seems my chess obsession consumed me, I stopped lifting, stopped writing blogs and focused purely on game analysis, chess videos and tactical training. I would say that moderation is something that I struggle with tremendously but I thoroughly enjoyed the process of engrossing myself on getting good at one single thing at the cost of everything else. To me it was exciting and I was simply curious how good I could get. Obviously, I am an older fella at 27 but I’ve never felt like my brain was so slow that I couldn’t dramatically improve to a very high level. I firmly believe if I had been 18-17 years old and I had stuck with chess, I believe I could have become an IM more than likely. My biggest problem has always been discipline, consistency and adhering to a training schedule. This has always been one of my fatal flaws in my character is inpersistence in adhering to the given prescription.

I would say in terms of overall self-improvement I’ve learned alot about a wide range of concepts but one of the things that is typically not discussed very often is mastery. Mastery in this context is learning how to learn and implementing specifications of mistakes at a high level by which enables you to become significantly better than your average bear. Chess, piano or anything that is a static system of information that requires precision, has infinite variation and can be practiced for hours on end is something worthy of mastery. Most people pursue a wide diversification of interests. In this context, you can never become good at anything simply because you do not comprehend how hard it fucking is to become good at anything. I quickly realized that my conception of good is total dogshit. It had been so long since I had tried to truly get good or amazing at something that I realized I had been bullshitting my way through life. Spanish, dancing all of these skills I knew about I could never really describe myself good at them simply because I had not paid the true time cost. I can confidently tell you ANYTHING worth doing will require hundreds to thousands of hours of practice and nothing less. Consumption is NOT mastery nor is watching a ton of nonsensical information. You do not get better at things by reviewing mindless information you must execute the information of whatever it is that you do in some type of competition which must require you to lose and then you must review those mistakes and even get feedback from a master in the field such that you can implement those given changes such that you can get better than you ever were before. In this given context it must be seen that improvement is a deliberate process of doing a specified repeatable actin by which you either compete against someone or against yourself in order to have an orders of magnitude of improvement. Without these conditions of repeatability you cannot expect to become extraordinarily good at anything without thousands of repetitions in the given task accordingly.

The improvement of chess is something I found fairly easy to focus on and the drive of self-sustaining that given self-improvement made the given level of repeatbility fairly easy and constant for me going forward. In this context, improvement does not become really all that difficult as long as you can self-identify a reward with the given task in whatever it is you are doing. Personally, I found reading chess-books to be rather boring and dull and I did not derive much joy from doing any real study on chess or types of given chess positions. This did little to nothing for me. Thus, their appears to be a type of disconnect that I experienced in that you must have ab obsessive focus for the very thing you are trying to become super good at and their must be a singular passion towards that given objective. Without this within yourself, it will be near impossible to reach the upper echelon of talent and capability.

During this given time, I played roughly 1555 games, 90% of them were blitz, 10% were rapid and then later on I went on to play a good amount of bullet. During this given time-frame, I quickly noticed that although I had sufficient plans in terms of the french defense, king pawns opening and some fianchetto lines it felt quite difficult to improve beyond a given threshold. This became especially obvious to me once I approached the high 1400’s it was if my brain would only selectively be on and then other days I simply played like shit. My general performance dropped dramatically when I played for too long and I found myself making a ton of bad or fairly obvious blunders. In the 1000’s I found I could be most players easy but If I wasn’t playing solid or careful I could lose. The 1100’s became slightly more tactical and stronger . 1200’s were roughly the same, they had similar minor improvements, 1300’s began to calculate fairly basic lines but I could likely beat them with a good degree of accuracy on my point accordingly. While an escalation to the 1400’s I generally found it to be fairly difficult to improve my own game and often found that players typically would win through given tactical exchanges going forward. Thus, my main issue were tactical lapses in judgment that caused me significant problems. The main point of demonstration is the perspective that their were incremental improvements to the given level of mastery going forward. Around the 1500’ range I peaked at roughly 1564 an then quickly dropped back into the 1400’s. Then I averaged a given range of 1440’s to 1460’s accordingly. In this relative context, the plateau became rather obvious and dramatic and no amount of effort appeared to yield any superior form of results from this given context. Thus, the effort of getting better then became a slow grueling process of reviewing mistakes, learning from those given mistakes and then working to improve.

Quickly, it became fairly obvious to me that I was not talent at all in any context within the realms of spatial recognition especially considering that other kids can easily have an incremental improvement period that follows from the 900’s —> 1800’s within minimal span time-ranges. In this given context, it can be seen that the given improvement can be seen as selective based on the contingent level of age and range. At 27 years old my learning improvement from 1300 in 3 minute to only a mere 1565 is only a standard deviation improvement of perhaps 155+ points. This standard deviation in this given context is roughly perhaps 20% improvement over 1400+ games which shows that mastery and self-improvement is highly dependent on age category which determines the amount of improvement that can be accelerated within a given period of time. The reality is that I learned chess at probably 17 and I can tell you that the learning pace saturation from 17 to 27 is quite vast in terms of my capable learning rate. Although, their was an incremental improvement I was quite surprised at how difficult mastery or truly improving was. Let us consider the fact that their were some days where I was expending roughly 8-10 hours a day sometimes on weekends playing game after game with no consecutive improvement of any type nor any kind. Thus, this experiment shows a few things, improvement does not happen through volume of repetition nor even time investment but rather it must come through selective improvement and massive intentional repetition vs unintentional repetition that reinforces bad habits. The difference between the two is vast and wide. Their is also a clear demonstration that learning skillsets of high levels of capability are best learned from an intensive place of youth rather than waiting at an older age where learning is suboptimal and significantly less energy efficient. In this given, context mastery likely has a definite time-frame at least in the realms of chess to the level of improvement that you are or can be capable off. Is it possible I could attain fide master or even international master? I believe most people could likely achieve CM or 2000 rating at a minimum if given enough effort and time-expenditure but the task to this acquisition is non-trivial in it’s nature.

The average period of mastery and daily training regimen I’ve adopted to do this given task requires roughly 45 minutes of training, tactics, one day of daily game analysis along with a NM coach and I’ve barely even scratched 1600 and that is with all of this working in my favor. One of the critical things that most people don’t realize, is that blind repetition or playing tons of bullet or blitz has zero correlation to improvement. I tested this over a 2 day period and saw only fluctuations in cognitive performance but no real improvement due to the simple fact that their is no correlation between this and long-term self-improvement in terms of cognitive thinking. In this given context, the task is non-trivial and I have found it difficult to wrestle the addictive tendencies of chess into something constructive but I believe I am getting significantly close to an objective of turning something that people use to waste time as towards a mechanism of self-improvement, self-deliberation and self-discovery. In doing so, I hope to discover latent capabilities that I did not have nor have I done before. Within, this given context the process of mastery appears to be a significantly non-trivial task that requires an extensive amount of effort, development, capabilities, discipline, singular focus and obsession in order to be significant in terms of the given metric. Therefore, the given level of mastery is something we should prize, we should value it significantly and recognize that when you say anyone can be a master you are absolutely delusional and fooling yourself. Remember this. Do not forget that mastery is something that requires significant dedication, discipline and without it you can expect to achieve anything of substantative success.

As for me, I intend to pursue this focus and intend to see what are the next realms of self-improvement as to where it will lead me going forward. Hopefully, in doing so I will ascend to a high level of self-improvement and capabilities of latent potential that has yet to be realized. You may try many things but masterying something has the same given equivalency of being able to do numerous things at a fairly medicore level. In this given context, depth often beats breadth. Develop your capabilities and develop them well and you will have something that you can keep repeatedly going back to time and time again. From my given experience, I also recognize that the higher of capability’s requires significantly more and higher exertion to achieve anything of consequence. Going from 1200-1500 was fairly non-trivial in the amount of effort required to improve. Now the improvement metric from 1500-2000 is requiring far more exertion to even improve 100 points. Thus, the closer we approach perfection the more difficult it will become in order to be able to improve. So, find your own endeavor learn something for mastery’s sake and not for some-type of monetary reward. Find something that allows you to extrapolate this given mastery to a wider-application by which will afford you a greater level of self-improvement. Self-improvement without mastery is akin the pursuit of knowing the capabilities of improvement but never pushing it to it’s absolute limits and without pushing yourself to it’s absolute limits you cannot expect to achieve your maximum or best self. Chess is a meaningless endeavor but their is one thing that I have learned and that is learning how to learn and mastery is the end pursuit that can allow you to be a feared foe in all realms of human endeavors.