7 Things I Learned from Reaching 2000 in 2 Years

This guest post was contributed by Kamryn Hellman, a writer, chess player and video creator. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature through Harvard Extension School.

Kamryn’s journey in the chess world began in early 2021 and nowadays she creates chess content on YouTube aimed at beginner and intermediate players. In 2024, she became a published author with the launch of 50 Essential Chess Concepts: An Improver’s Blueprint.

All photos in this blog post are courtesy of Kamryn Hellman.

7 Things I Learned from Reaching 2000 in 2 Years

In the era of the The Queen’s Gambit chess boom, I taught myself how to play the game from scratch. I learned how the pieces moved, watched a ton of videos to learn the fundamentals, and started practicing online.

I quickly fell in love with the game and was determined to improve. My obsession led to an intense daily study routine that included puzzles, games, analysis, books, and videos.

And less than two years after I learned how to play, in February 2023, I reached a Rapid rating of 2000 on Chess.com.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

1. Play games (and analyze them).

When I first started playing chess, I didn’t have any grandiose rating goals in mind. I liked playing, and I liked winning. Hence, I learned everything I could so I could win more.

As I continued to climb the rating ladder, playing and analyzing games remained a core part of my study routine. After every rapid game, win or lose, I took a minute or two to review the key moments and try to understand the mistakes I made. I wanted to be as efficient and effective with my time as possible, so I tried to learn something from each game. This is a great habit that’s stuck with me to this day.

At a certain point, I also limited myself to just two or three rapid games each day, to avoid the dreaded tilting trap of “I’ll just play until I win.” The daily scarcity helped me stay focused in each game, rather than mindlessly blitzing out my moves.

2. Learn to deal with losing.

Lost games may be the most difficult to analyze, but they’re also the most important. When my rapid rating was around 1400, I started a document that I called “Why I’m Losing.” At the end of the week, I went through every rapid game I’d lost and wrote down a few bullet points describing my key mistakes.

After a few weeks, it was easy to look back through the data and see the patterns frequently causing my downfall. This helped me reorganize my study plan about once a month to ensure I was spending time on the things I was struggling with.

Why wait until the end of the week? Why not face the music and do a deeper analysis immediately after losing? Because losing hurts! I found that when I waited a few days before that in-depth review, I was able to look at my games more objectively, rather than getting caught up in the negative emotions.

As I started playing more over-the-board tournaments, this method remained extremely important to me. I now rarely check my games until after the tournament is over—I much prefer to review them once I’ve had a few days to recover.

3. Study openings the right way.

It’s the age-old question—should club players study openings? My answer is: yes, obviously. But there’s a spectrum, depending on how much time you want to spend on them.

At a minimum, opening principles are necessary—control the center with pawns, develop your minor pieces, and get your king to safety. If you like learning tricky and trappy gambits, go for it! But if you’re aiming to improve, it’s vital to learn the basics of your chosen openings well enough to get you a playable middlegame position. I like learning traps too, but unfortunately, our opponents won’t always fall for them.

Eventually, I settled on the London System, French Defense, and Queen’s Gambit Declined and aimed to play good positional games. But trust me—under the master level, there will always be some kind of tactical fireworks eventually, no matter how boring the opening may seem.

The vital thing to recognize about opening study is that memorization is less important than understanding. If you don’t understand the reason you’re playing a certain move, it’s harder to keep complex lines straight in your mind. I like to give a why to each move, whether it’s to prevent the opponent from creating a specific threat or simply adhering to basic opening principles.

4. Drill tactics to raise your skill floor and ceiling.

Puzzles were the single most important addition to my study routine when I was moving to an intermediate level. As someone who started playing chess as an adult, I learned all the tactical vocabulary words and occasionally attempted a handful of puzzles.

For a while, I thought that was enough. But until I had seen those patterns hundreds of times, in hundreds of unique positions, I could not reliably spot them when the opportunities arose in my games. My tactical instinct was low, and so my overall skill ceiling could not rise until I fixed that problem.

I make a distinction between easy and difficult puzzles in the way I structure my study routine. The easy puzzles are the repetitive ones you can drill quickly in something like Puzzle Rush, while difficult puzzles require a few minutes of intense calculation, with a higher chance of failure. Both are essential to stay sharp. Easy puzzles are a good warmup before playing games and can continually raise your skill floor. Difficult puzzles are great for training your calculation thought process and can challenge your skill ceiling.

5. Stay focused.

A lot of chess is psychological. Lose focus for one second, and you might totally blunder away your winning position. Even as my rating went up, focus often became a major problem for me later in the game. Of course, it didn’t help that usually I was in time trouble, attempting to navigate complex endgames with just a minute or two left on my clock.

There were a few practical steps that helped me with this problem. First of all, I learned all the basic endgame principles I could, so that ideas like opposition or pushing passed pawns didn’t require as much thinking.

Next, I worked on my time management earlier in the game. I started playing blitz and bullet to learn how to move faster, and found the simplicity of good-enough moves translated to my longer games.

And finally, I simply started reminding myself to stay focused whenever I sensed my attention was straying. At every stage in the game, I considered what my opponent wanted to do, and decided whether I needed to stop their threats, or if my plan of attack was more pressing.

6. Take a break.

My fastest period of rating growth (1549 to 1807 in about five weeks) came after I’d taken a few days away from chess. I was spending two or three hours a day studying and consuming instructional content, and I felt like all that information was overloading my brain when I actually sat down to play.

I returned refreshed from my break—my head was clear, my board vision was sharp, and the wins flowed. Ever since, I’ve made a point of taking a few days off my usual chess study routine every few weeks, and especially after a tournament. Otherwise, burnout is a huge risk. It’s impossible to find the motivation to spend a lot of time studying something if you’ve lost your passion for it.

Patience is key. When I started getting really obsessed with chess, I wanted to learn everything as fast as I could, and I wanted the results now. Like any skill, progress can be explosive at the beginning, and when you can’t keep up that initial pace, you might feel stagnated. But chess knowledge builds on itself. You need to spend a lot of time mastering the basics—and proving you know those basics in your games—before moving on to studying higher-level concepts. But improvement will come if you’re patient with yourself and put in the work.

7. Set the right goals.

I reached the 2000 milestone because I set that goal in the first place. When I decided on the 2000-in-two-years idea, I knew it was realistic, but would also challenge me. In chess, rating is generally an objective measure of progress. However, it’s also important not to let your self-worth get tied to a little number on a screen.

Other types of goals are just as valuable for long-term improvement. Rating is a performance goal. There are also process goals, internal goals, learning goals, and event goals. All of these can help round out your improvement journey, and take those overwhelming performance goals in smaller steps.

Since reaching 2000, my performance goals have shifted to my over-the-board tournaments. Being involved in my local chess community has been a huge part of my overall positive experience in chess. The online rating goal was exciting, but nothing compares to sitting across from a real person and pouring every ounce of concentration into a single chess game for hours and hours.

Whatever your goals in chess, my advice is to set your sights high and make sure you’re taking small steps every day to reach them. I have a sticky note on my mirror right now that reminds me every morning: If you want to win, you have to put in the work. And it really is that simple.

If you’re a chess beginner working toward your own goals, I humbly invite you to check out my Chessable course, 50 Essential Chess Concepts: An Improver’s Blueprint. It’s comprised of many chess rules I’ve discovered on my journey, and will give you a motivating roadmap for success.

Editor’s Note: Kamryn’s course is on sale.