800 is currently a bit of a hump. Will need to improve my game a little to get to 900. I currently beat most players rated lower than 800 pretty consistently, do okay against the 800-899 bracket, and not well at all against 900+. But, I am markedly better than I was a couple of weeks ago when I was in the 600-750 range, and my game continues to improve. The key is to rely less on taking advantage of opponents making mistakes (because as they get better, they make less of them) and rely more on gaining a positional advantage and/or finding forcing combinations, as well as playing solid in the endgame. By taking more games into the endgame, I am winning or drawing some games I might have lost before.
I have been tracking some statistics about the matchmaking service on chess.com (see the ELO graph). I am beating almost exactly half of opponents ranked higher than me, just over half of opponents ranked the same or lower, with the average opponent being rated 8 points or so higher (this is an average -- in practice, the difference is much larger most of the time, in either direction, but it averages out in the statistic). So far, I am gaining just over 1 ELO per game (as of this update). So, I am improving, but still losing a lot of games which I could be winning if my knowledge of the game were deeper. To make it to higher rating levels, I need to continue studying important strategic ideas and openings, on top of making less mistakes. Currently, I don't really play openings on purpose. I have a vague idea of whether or not I want to play king's pawn, queen's pawn, italian game, sicilian, french defense, etc. but I haven't yet committed to studying the lines necessary to pick a few and make a habit out of using them. Instead, I just try to play logical moves and the opening is what it is (resulting in the current graph of openings, which is all over the place but does show some early preferences).
Before I go all-in on studying opening theory, there are still holes in my fundamental tactical game to work on. But, soon, to achieve ratings of 1000+, I am going to want to study some openings in-depth instead of just having a passing familiarity with them. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Game on! The most important thing is to not go on a losing-streak/tilt. Lately, I am approaching each game more carefully and if I lose a game I try to study it and bounce back right away. This has been successful, as I continue to challenge the 800+ barrier despite stiff competition. But it will be important to take my game to the next level to reach the next level, and each level thereafter.
Although the climb to 800+ is more difficult than the climb to 700+, there have been noteworthy milestones. From March 24th-26th I faced a long string of higher rated opponents, and managed to hold on to upwards progress. This bodes well. Increasing ELO in chess is a marathon, not a sprint. You learn new levels of the game at each level, and have to become thoroughly comfortable with beating your current rating bracket before beginning to chip away at the next bracket. It is systematically very interesting, and the matchmaking system on chess.com does a very good job of this in combination with the way ELO works.
It turns out that my town has a local chess club downtown, and I decided to check it out. Playing over the board is also an important skillset, and I will probably check it out some more. In the future, I would like to include some of the games I play there in this data as well.
To facilitate more effective study I have moved from the method of "playing a bunch of games and seeing what sticks" to "analyzing each game and reading books / lessons to see why I lost". This means playing fewer games, and trying to make each one count for more, while studying a couple of chapters a day from some useful books and perhaps taking a few lessons. Although, at this rating level, many (perhaps even most) of my wins and losses can be attributed to things like missing an imminent mate and/or hanging some pieces, more and more are won or lost as a result of better or worse strategy instead of easily-prevented blunders. So, the time is near to take my game a little deeper.
I have finished all of the "stock" lessons on Chess.com, but haven't really even begun to scratch the tip of the iceberg that is all the lessons offered through the platform (truly, a wealth). I will want to re-take several of them a few more times, and in conjunction with the puzzles (which are also top notch) that should help to hone basic tactical recognition. I have beaten all of the "beginner" and "intermediate" training bots (rated up to 1400), and have not yet begun on the "advanced" ones (1500+). These lessons have been very helpful, and are part of why I was able to go from ~600 to ~800.
I also picked up some quality books: Logical Chess by Irving Chernev and Mastering the Chess Openings by John Watson. Logical Chess is very good. The author lays out a number of games by theme and goes over each move with the broad strategic picture and immediate tactical insights in mind, and repeats useful axioms. I am currently most of the way through the first section on "Kingside Attacks", and the advice contained therein (about both the topic of kingside attacks and also just advice in general about openings and tactics) has helped me to win a few games already. Mastering the Chess Openings I am just beginning, but it promises to be a pretty good book so far.
At this point I'm familiar with most of the basic ideas, and a few short lines from several openings, but I have not yet studied any openings very deeply. My grasp of more fundamental concepts is more important at this level of play. But it's never too early to start digging a little deeper, because the competition on chess.com is pretty good, in my opinion. Someone rated ~800 is about as challenging as a training bot rated ~1400. In the immediate term I am using these books to get situational insight while analyzing my games, but soon they will also be useful for in-depth study of specific openings as I decide which ones to take to the next level.
I've made a lot of little improvements to the website's code. The pie graphs are now more useful, and the line graphs as well. They now include more colors (which can be changed by re-clicking on the button for the graph if they aren't contrasting enough), and more information presented more accurately. One upcoming improvement is to make it so that each data point on the graph has a hovering tooltip, and clicking on it takes the user to the display for that game's full data. The website in general is still pretty barebones, and I plan to spice it up a bit.
Right now the "database" (don't laugh) consists of a single manually-updated JSON file, activated offline via node, which is included in the browser code via an import statement in JavaScript. There is no client-server architecture at work to speak of, just yet, and all of my solutions for graphing, dom-generation, and database-handling are home-rolled. This was for the sake of exercise (wanted to see if I could), but it will do for now and I'm kind of proud of it actually.
In the future, I will want to hook up some third party libraries for stuff and use some pre-existing solutions, as I take the site to the next level. I will want to replace my "database" with SQL or something like that. I will want to replace my home-rolled dom-generation with something like React, and I will want to set up some kind of automated system for scraping my games from chess.com (and Lichess, why not?) and adding them to the database. At some point I may even want to use some third party libraries for statistics and data visualization. For now, though, my home-rolled stuff will do; all of those other things are slightly longer-term goals (as each will require learning how to use some new tools and restructuring my code to integrate with them).
The end result will probably be cloud-hosted, which is another thing I will need to learn more about to do securely and correctly. Since everything happens manually on my laptop at the moment, it's a pretty simple (if barebones and inefficient) operation. I play some games, and then I go to chess.com and input all the data from the game manually (except the move list, which I download and then manually trim metadata from before feeding it to the script which adds games to the database) in to the game object (which is then inserted into the database via node). Totally reasonable for a small-scale personal project, but it would be neat to automate that whole process.
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