My plan for today had been to go play in one of Hiro Higuchi’s quad’s. It’s a G/60;d10 event, so while it’s faster than I prefer, it’s certainly slow enough to play a solid game in.
Unfortunately for some reason I just could not fall asleep last night. It was somewhere between 4-5am when I finally drifted off. So I had to change my plans and not go.
This means I will end the year at 1774, 25 points below where I began it at 1799.
However, aside from the rating, I feel like this was a solid year for me. I can tell by the way I’m analyzing and annotating games that my understanding has increased quite a bit.
While I haven’t been as consistent as I would have liked to be, I have been putting in a reasonable amount of work. I have been putting in at least an hour, typically closer to 90 minutes, around five times a week. This is in addition to solving tactics on my phone and watching broadcasts of strong events where I analyze and play some guess the move.
For the past week I’ve been working extremely hard since I had some time off. So for the past seven days I’ve been putting in more like 5-7 hours a day. That will continue through Monday, and then I go back to work Tuesday.
I’ve been trying to vary the work a bit, but include a lot of solving. Tactics, Yusupov, Aagaard, etc.
I’ve also been working fairly hard (relative for me) on my openings. While I am not, and never will, work on memorizing for the sake of memorizing, I have been working on learning more theory and figuring out how it applies to the plans in the positions I play.
I am also narrowing my repertoire with the idea that I will learn my openings deeper this way.
All in all I feel like I had a solid year as a player. There are certain things that I don’t think that I did enough which I believe impacted the rating, but I will discuss those in my 2018 preview post, coming up next!
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott
“However, aside from the rating, I feel like this was a solid year for me. I can tell by the way I’m analyzing and annotating games that my understanding has increased quite a bit.”
On the one hand, your goal is to achieve a 2200 rating as if rating means something.
I absolutely agree that rating means something!
On the other hand, when year after year your rating is in the 1700s, you insist that the rating doesn’t mean anything, that you really are getting better, despite the rating staying about the same.
And the fact(?) that you just know you are getting better, justifies you sticking with some of the stuff you have been doing for years, like going over Grandmaster games and solving tactical puzzles.
They say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
On the other hand they say, don’t stand pat on a losing hand.
Also, they say, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing but expect a different result.
An example from myself, I had a Chicago Open where I was Black 4 of the 7 games, and all 4 of my White opponents started with 1.d4.
Then my next tournament I was Black 2 of the first 3 rounds and both of my White opponents opened with 1.d4.
So in a 10 game stretch I was Black 6 times and all 6 of my opponents started with 1.d4.
Although I was the lower rated player in all 6 games, I was not satisfied with my result of just 3 Draws and 3 losses.
Was my defense to 1.d4 broke? Yes!
Did I stand pat on a losing hand? Nope!
I now play a different defense to 1.d4