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On the road to chess mastery: goals for the second year

Written by Sciurus

Sunday, 07 January 2007

I don't think very highly of New Year's resolutions because most of them are broken anyway. However, I do believe that it is important to set goals and my "chess year" happens to coincide with the calendar year. Therefore, it is time to set some goals for my second year of playing chess. There are two kinds of objectives: The ones one can control such as solving a certain number of chess tactics problems each day and the ones that are less controllable such as becoming a better player and obtaining a higher rating. I can force myself to spend X hours to study chess but I cannot guarantee that I will win more games. However, the less controllable goal of becoming a better player is the "real thing" - after all I am not logging on the Chess Tactics Server every day to become a better problem solver but to play better chess. This post deals with the performance goals and another post in the near future will set a plan to reach this goal.


Recursive board by gadl

My goal for the second year of playing chess is quite simple: to become a decent chess player. What does "decent" chess player mean? To me, this means to have average playing strength as determined by the rating system. In most ELO rating systems, this translates into a rating of about 1500, but the exact numbers depend strongly on the details of the ratings system. As mentioned in an earlier post, my current personal playing strength depends a lot on the kind of chess games I play, particularly on the

time control:

correspondence chess: My current rating at ChessWorld is already slightly above the average. I attribute this less to my chess skill than to the fact that I probably play a lower number of simultaneous games and spend more time analyzing the positions than other active players (But then, they could spend more time thinking, too). However, sometimes I make really careless moves forcing me to ponder a lot other the resulting positions to find my way out of trouble. My goal here is to maintain an above-average rating and to try to play games against stronger players to practice making strategic plans and careful tactical calculations.
Slow time control play at the Internet Chess Club (ICC): I reached my minimum goal for 2006 which was to play enough games to get an established rating. It is not that I am that keen on the rating itself, but many people simply refuse to play against provisionally rated players. Currently, I am in the bottom 25% for standard time control and will have to increase my ICC std. rating by about 250 points to be able to say that I am a decent chess player...
blitz chess: even though I play only relatively slow blitz chess games, I lose almost all of them. Consequently, my current blitz rating is too low to write about without getting red in the face. It ranges in the bottom 5% of all active blitz chess players at ICC. I will not set any specific goal for blitz chess but concentrate on slower chess games instead.
The Chess Tactics Server (CTS): my current rating at CTS is about 200-250 points below average. Doing chess tactics problems is not that important to me by itself, but it will be interesting to observe how the CTS rating correlates with the other ratings.

The most important goal is of course to keep playing chess and have fun! Feel free to challenge me for a game when you meet me on one of the above mentioned chess servers or sign up here at SquirrelChess.com to play correspondence chess!

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