Reached 500 ELO!
A few weeks ago, I posted about just starting to learn chess and reaching 400 ELO. Today, I finally hit 500 ELO in Rapid!
As an absolute beginner, a few things that have helped me:
Watching Aman’s Building Habits series. It made me much more conscious about simply trying not to hang an entire piece every other game.
Spamming the hell out of the Italian Opening after watching content from ChesswithAkeem and GM Igor Smirnov.
Trying to stick to my own plan regardless of what my opponent plays. This works... somewhat better in Rapid than Blitz. In Blitz, I get punished for this approach pretty regularly.
I mostly play 15+10 Rapid, and having the extra time has definitely helped. My Blitz rating is currently around 400, so apparently I am a completely different chess player once the clock starts bullying me.
A few questions for the community:
My realistic long-term goal is 1000 ELO. I believe that's somewhere around the 90th percentile of the Chess.com community, which would honestly be pretty satisfying for someone who started out barely knowing how the pieces moved.
2) Does anyone else get anxious about playing?
I think I could have reached my current rating much sooner, but I've only played around 30 games this month — basically one game a day.
Losing a game can put me in a surprisingly bad mood, so if I win a game, I often just stop playing for the day because I'm happy with the result and don't want to risk ruining that feeling. 😅
So I've been playing with a bit of a knot in my stomach, which obviously isn't the ideal way to enjoy a game.
3) How did you guys improve at Blitz?
I lose a lot of games on time. Chess.com Insights says around 70% of my losses are by timeout, compared with around 30% for players at my level.
Is this simply something that improves with experience, or should I be approaching Blitz differently?
Also, do you guys use completely different opening approaches for Blitz compared with Rapid, or is it better to stick with the same repertoire and just get faster?
Would love to hear how you guys approached these stages of improvement!
submitted by /u/Aggravating-Fix2870[link] [comments]