Day 365 of #100DaysOfChess

On March 30, 2022, I hit the last day of my #100DaysOfChess challenge. In that challenge I committed to do anything related with chess for at least an hour in the span of 100 consecutive days. When day 100 arrived, I was invaded by a feeling of satisfaction for a well-done job. Although for me, the most surprising but also natural thing was that on day 101 I was able to continue the challenge without any problem. Neither day 102 nor 103 pose a problem. Time passed and day 365 of this challenge arrived a few days ago.

What did I do in 365 days?

As I mentioned in my first post of this challenge: before committing to it I did some work to measure the pace and the motivation I had. Right after the fall semester ended, I started the proper challenge. On a little more than 3 months I completed the 100 days (with the corresponding report tweet for every day) and continued the challenge for another 265 days to finally end it 4 days ago.

During this year I did a ton of chess related activities that would take me several paragraphs to talk about. So, to make a long story short, some of the chess activities I realized this year where: playing casual games, proper and focused training, participation in FIDE rated events, refereeing of tournaments, playing for and also 2nd-coached my university chess team, training matches with friends, closely followed up many local competitions, helped organizing chess events at my university, finished two Chessable courses, and maybe a couple more activities I don’t remember right now. A hell of a ride!

Obviously, for life, school, or work reasons, some of the days where not a fully hour dedicated to chess. But some days were also (a lot) more than that ‘mandatory’ hour. Definitely a great experience where I could enjoy chess to the fullest, I saw a substantial progress in my playing strength and most importantly, I met new friends along the way. If you are thinking on committing to the challenge, I recommend it 100%.

Some of the results

Although I did lots of things not directly involving playing or competing, one of the main goals of the challenge was to increase my playing strength. In my biased opinion, I have improved a lot on my tactical skills and my basic endgames knowledge. I also feel that my opening repertoire is slowly building up.

Now, to see if my biased opinion is on the right track, I played a total of 12 OTB tournaments during the challenge. In the span of those 12 competitions, I played a total of 79 games. Here are the results:

Even if not all the events where FIDE Rated, I managed to get my first rapid FIDE rating of 1623. I also moved up my blitz FIDE rating from 1608 (before challenge) to 1643. And finally, before the challenge my standard FIDE rating was 1659, which I managed to level-up to 1714.

I’m the first one to acknowledge that I have a lot of room for improvement, but this method of working constantly is showing its rewards.

The never ending challenge

I always knew it but didn’t want to accept it: chess will be part of my life for the rest of it. There will be times where I can’t enjoy it as much as I like, but it will always be there. As long as I can enjoy it with my friends; as I can keep playing, refereeing, organizing or training, I’ll be a chess enthusiast. I’ll continue the #100DaysOfChess challenge even though is not a challenge anymore. Chess is an activity I’m passionate about.

Finally, with this challenge I proved myself that with discipline, motivation, and constant work on something I can achieve things I was initially skeptical about. I’ll apply this ‘challenge’ to other aspects of my life, beginning with my undergraduate thesis (which is about chess btw). I’ll apply it also to my last’s semesters at the masters and my working-out routine. I believe I can improve on those 3 aspects of my life as well. Lets see what happens.

In the meantime:

Jugar y nada más.