Road to NM: Week 1 — Fixing My Opening Repertoire

1. Introduction

Hello! Welcome to my first blog in the series Road to NM. For those of you who don't know, this is a series that I said I would create if my blog of my journey from 1000 to 2000 on lichess in a year reached 100 likes, and if it reached 250, i would make it a weekly series. Well it happened, so you guys have yourselves to thank for this series (hopefully I won't disappoint you guys too bad lol) but anyways here I will just be talking through the way i've trained throughout the week, what's been happening with my rating, and how i'm performing in tournaments. These likely aren't going to be super long, (they'll be longer when I have tournament games to analyze) but they're just to give anyone who's interested an update on how my improvement is going. Well let me stop wasting your time and get on with it.

2. My Study This Week

A large majority of my study this week was opening based, because I have a lot of gaps that I discovered in my opening repertoire from game analysis (which I wouldn't have found without doing it, so please please analyse your games if you want to improve) and decided to do the work to fix them this week. The first one I noticed, was the opocensky variation of the najdorf (I play the najdorf if you didn't know already) and I spent a lot of time working on that one, and I feel extremely confident in that variation which is good. I also decided to learn more of a plan of what to do against the Scandinavian, because I actually have an appalling track record with it OTB, I'm not sure the actual numbers but I would assume my opponent picks up the full point around 70% of the time in this opening as black which is not good at all. So I worked on that too, and then moved on to my bigger task the KID, which I know less about because I recently switched to it from the grunfeld for reasons I'm not going to get into right now (feel free to dm me to ask if you want to know) I learned a decent amount, but for the time being, i'm more of just learning piece placements in different types of positions rather than theory because knowing theory without understanding where the pieces typically go and middlegame plans is just a complete waste of time.

The rest of my study was mostly tactical, I'm currently working through chapter 4 of John Emms book "The Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book" and am planning to do a woodpecker style training with that chapter where I will go through the tactics once untimed, then time myself rounds 2-5 as I go through them again and I will see if my speed and accuracy with the tactics are improving over time, which would mean the patterns are being seared into my brain which is the whole point of this style of training. It's taken a while (and I'll admit I haven't been the most consistent with it) but i'll hopefully start round 2 soon.

3. My Rating

Overall, my rapid rating finished where it started this week, I started at 2003, I had made it up to 2022 after beating a 2250 at one point, but then dropped down a lot from a tilt spiral (those seem to happen fairly regularly to me unfortunately) to around 1981, but I managed to finish off the week where I started at 2003. I'm overall okay with the results, because i've been very tired this week for whatever reason, so I haven't been playing my best anyways, and with the world cup being on I haven't focused as much on chess as I had been.

I had an OTB rapid tournament that is a weekly event in my hometown that I played in, it's a 3 round event with 20 minutes of time and a 5 second delay for each move. I went 2/3 overall, and gained about 7 rating, my live rating is now 1514 in quick (that's how rapid is labeled in the USCF) which is still below my peak of 1569, but I'm hopefully going to get back there soon. The first game I played was against an 1100, and in a KID where I was black I just outplayed him positionally and reached an endgame where my piece placement was far superior to his and I eventually converted the endgame not too long afterwards. Round 2 I got white against a 1600 and my opponent played the 3. Qd8 Scandinavian, which I knew wasn't the best opening because it hands me 2 free tempi in the opening, but clearly I was over confident and didn't know what I was doing in this line either, because not even 15 moves in, I was transposing to a losing endgame where material was yet again equal, but my pawns were horribly positioned and his knight dominated my bishop. I lost that game, and the next round I got white again against a 1350. I won this game in a scotch where my opponent played extremely aggressively on the kingside but overextended and I eventually reached an opposite colored bishop endgame where I had 3 extra pawns, and while it took me a while to convert, I eventually did. I can't be mad about the round 2 loss, as my opponent actually won the weekly event with 3/3 defeating a 1850 in the final round to win the tournament. I'm unsure as to whether i'll be able to play in the tournament this upcoming week, but regardless, I hope to continue studying and improving and i'll talk about that next week.

Thanks for reading my first blog on the Road to NM series, please like if you haven't already, and I'll be back next week, see you then!