Playing a lot more chess

I have a spent a lot of time playing chess over the past couple of months.  It kicked off when a new trumpet player joined our band and told us he was a professional chess coach.  I chatted with him and he told me there's a chess club that meets every Tuesday and I should come along and try it out.

My chess skills are stunted in a weird way; I know I'm good at tactics because I do a lot of puzzles I reached 2500 rating) , but I have been staying away from playing actual games against people (except for the slow tournament I did in June 2020). I don't know why; I just had a weird block about not wanting to know how good, or more likely, bad, I actually am at the game itself!

I took the invitation to join the club as the incentive I needed to kick myself into gear, find out my real Elo scores and get some advice on what I need to work on. I also signed up as a member of the US Chess federation so I'd be able to play in tournaments and get an official Elo rating (currently 1281 after last weeks tournament, where I beat two 1500 players!)

The people at the club were excellent; many of them are chess teachers and gave me advice on what I needed to work on. They said my tactics skills were indeed strong, but I had too many blunders (giving away pieces in "silly" mistakes) and needed to get those out of my game.

As for openings I was advised to keep going with the London system for white, learn the French defense for black against 1. e4, and to learn a "diamond structure" for black against everything else.

League of Legends

I was prepared to settle down and do some serious, slow study, but then I found the chess.com League system!

It's a kind of rewards system that the chess.com site added a while ago to encourage people to play games against each other. You get rewarded for winning and, importantly, there is NO punishment for losing. You are randomly assigned into a group of 50 users and whoever finishes in the top few spots will be promoted to a higher league. You will never be demoted - you can only go up and that's very appealing to me!  Its trivial to get out of the first couple of leagues but the higher leagues take, I estimate, up to an hour of day of play to earn the points needed for promotion.

You get points by winning short games against other people - the 1 minute bullet and 3 minute blitz are the most efficient ways to earn points.  

You see my dilemma; I was preparing to settle into slow study sessions and here comes this shiny trophy system encouraging me to play lots...and lots... of bullet/blitz.  As I write this post I'm a few hours away from winning the final promotion to the highest league, Legends. The stats page show I've played 470 games in the last 7 days. It's close to 1000 in the last 30 as well.

At least I know where my Elo ratings are now - I'm about 900 in bullet (1 min) and 850 in blitz (3 or 5 min).

Bonus Points

It turns out to be relatively easy to win promotion - chess.com offers bonus points (see the red circled bit above) for playing your games in their tournament/arena format, instead of against a random individual. It makes no difference to you - you can join and leave the tournament any time, but a win earns 2 or more extra points. So a 1 minute bullet win goes from being worth three points to five! That's a serious increase when you're playing hundreds of games. In my example here I have 612 points from bullet, 300 from blitz, and 592 bonus points. 

It's easy to join - simply click the Play button, then click "Tournaments" and pick a "1-0 Bullet" or "3-0 Blitz" tournament (they usually have hundreds of players) and then click the "Join" button. You'll be instantly matched with someone of similar skill and the game will start.  When the tournament ends (they last only 30 minutes or so), just join the next one and keep going. There is always a tournament of those two formats available.

It turns out that I'm the only player in my group of 50 that has earned any bonus points! Here's the player in second place - they have worked very hard to get here, but without those bonus arena points...well, I'm getting 5 points in 2 minutes where they are getting 9 points in six minutes.  I'm running  in second gear and they're still in first!

I think I have learned some basic raw chess skills from these hundreds of games; playing the same opening over and over again gives you insight into the traps you might fall into.  I'm ready to work more on the French Defense and also a more aggressive other opening for black. After I reach the Legends league I think there's actually no incentive to keep playing these short, fast games, so I'll have done what I set out to do and can settle back to study and working on my ratings.

In future posts I'll show some game highlights - despite the fast pace and huge numbers of errors, there's some fun moments in these games.