Getting Back to Chess: My Story (December 2023)

It's been about 30 years since I played in a chess tournament. Back then, I was just a teenager with an ELO rating of 1650. I liked chess, but I never got too serious about it.

Nowadays, I'm working as an executive at a big finance institution in the Philippines. My job keeps me very busy, but I've decided to make some time for chess again. I'm trying to spend at least one hour on chess every day, two if I can manage it, aiming for at least 20 hours a week. I'm curious to see how much better I can get.

I actually made a Chess.com account over a year ago, but I was only playing blitz games for fun. Then I found videos by GothamChess, and they got me excited about playing again. I even bought some courses from Chessly because of him. I started playing the Caro-Kann Defense and the London system, which are solid openings for people without that much time to study. They helped me win against players with lower ratings in blitz games, but I was making too many blunders as I was only blitzing.

Levy Rozman aka GothamChess, talks a lot about Vienna game/gambit in his videos. So, I decided to get his courses on E4 for white and Caro-Kann for black. His lessons are awesome for casual players like me who want to get better. But I found it hard to sit through all the lessons without working with personal coach, and I didn't really use what I learned in my games. I realized you can't really apply these strategies if you're just playing blitz games at a rating around 800-900.

I wasn't very dedicated to chess, just playing blitz games now and then, watching some videos, and hoping my rating would just go up by itself.

But then in November 2023, I got Covid and had to stay home, which meant no golf for me (I live in the Philippines and I can golf all year round) and thus I had some time I was able to allocate for chess. I started watching a big chess tournament the Grand Swiss and thought maybe I should get a coach. I found a coach from the Philippines on Chess.com. He's an International Master with 3 GM norms but ELO a little below 2500. We started working together in December 2023 and moved our training to Lichess. We practice once or twice a week for a 1-1.5 hour each session.

The first thing my coach told me was that I needed to match my playing style with the right openings. We picked the King's Indian Defense (Pirc against E4) for black and King's Indian Attack for white. He also suggested I play longer games, not just blitz, so I can really think about my moves.

I've just got my first rapid rating after finishing 12 games, and it's 1715. I've also been doing lots of puzzles on Lichess, and my rating there is now 2140 after about 300 puzzles.

I'm going to keep working on chess in the coming months and see what happens. Starting at 1715 in rapid is pretty good, but it might be tough to stay at this level. I hope that with my coach's help, I can get even better. Let's wait and see!