The Fool’s Mate: Journey to Chess Master #1

Hey friends, hope we’re all keeping well.

I’m going to be starting a new series on the blog, where I’ll be documenting my journey to becoming a chess Fide Master.

Chess has truly become one of my new favourite hobbies, and the idea of having a challenging goal for it is very appealing. Of course, I will do well in remembering that having fun will be the most important component of this journey.

In this series I’ll basically document my journey and progress from time to time, like what I’ve been studying recently, changes in my rating (chess points, basically), and what’s been on my mind regarding chess.

I realise a vast majority of my readers have no interest in this type of content, which is why I’ll try and upload another post every time I make a chess one, to complement it I suppose🙂.

I think the general rough idea for these posts will be that I’ll treat every one as if it’s a journal entry, but just exclusively regarding chess.

Anyway, I’ll see how it goes.

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So, the current openings I’m studying intensely are the Evans Gambit for white, and then the Leningrad Dutch Defence and French Defence for black. I’m studying these via Chessable, whose framework (active recall combined with spaced repetition) has already proven itself many times already when I was studying for exams.

That being said, my current plan of action is to steer away from studying openings so much, and begin focusing on tactics and strategy. I really want to try a Chessable book on tactics, like the Woodpecker method (which I’m extremely tempted to get), or 1001 Chess Tactics.

Also, a recent YouTube video I watched by GM Daniel Naroditsky has him advising to use chess studies, as a way to improve and study chess, which I’m also considering to add to my training regimen.

My current rating at the time of writing this for December 2021, is 1625 rapid in Chess.com. I don’t have a Lichess account yet, but I’m considering one.

Also, I want to place a stronger emphasis on analysing my own games, even if they’re games I won, as that’s the main method of improvement for the ChessDojo YouTube channel.

To summarise, here’s my new daily plan of action to improve my chess:

• Do daily Chessable review
• Study 10 new Chessable opening lines
• Attempt to solve 10 chess puzzles
• Complete one chess study
• Play minimum 2 games (with minimum time control of 10 minutes), and analyse them afterwards

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I’ll update my progress at the end of January 2022, to see how I’ve gotten on.