Duckfest Digest 24

2022: Progress update Q3

Introduction

My previous quarter (Q2) was good: I made progress, I played some interesting tournaments and I played some spectacular games featuring miraculous comebacks (I declared myself the King of Counterplay).

Last quarter (Q3) was a different story. I made virtually no progress in Rapid. I made no progress in Daily games. I lost about 80 rating points in Puzzle. Overall, not a great performance.  On top of that, the tournaments hardly excited me and few of the games I played were interesting enough to share.   

This quarterly update is a good moment to reflect on my journey, especially when there is no visible progress. What about my development as a player? Oops, that’s also not going great.  These last couple of months, I have not been able to focus as much as I did before. My learning curve was flattening and my priorities were all over the place. The passion for chess that refueled last year wasn’t burning as bright anymore. The flame is still there but closer resembling a pilot light than a wildfire.  

The article will have 3 parts

1. Looking back on Q3 results
2. A brief update of my progress
3. My goal for Q4

Looking back on Q3 results

Results in Rapid
Between July 1st and 30th of September I have only played 9 games. With a sample size that small it’s not possible to draw conclusions with confidence (scientifically speaking). On the other hand, the data I do have totally supports my narrative. I will use it anyway and I will do so with confidence!

The results are promising

• My accuracy went up from 74.7% in Q2 to 78.9%, an increase of 4.2% point.
• My winrate against players rated 1400-1499 was 66.7%, and went up to 100% based on 1 game.
• My winrate against players rated 1500-15-99 went up to 50%, based on 8 games. My winrate was 43.8% in Q2 and 35.7% in 2021.

While the data set is too small for definitive conclusions, or any conclusion whatsoever, the results do point towards progress. There is also my subjective experience: I feel more comfortable at the 1500+ level and so far I can hold my own. And with that in mind, given the fact that I previously was losing against 1500s, my +7 rating increase is not a sign of stagnation, it’s a significant milestone for me. Let’s hope I can keep it up.

Results in Daily games

My Daily games this quarter have been a continuous stream of disappointments, with only a couple of brief moments of joy. It wasn’t terrible, it was okay. As you can see below, my rating remained more or less the same and my accuracy was only 1 percent point lower than the previous quarter. It just wasn’t fun this season. 

From the start, the effects of the holiday season were visible. In July, I won 12 games by timeout, that's more than 20% of my games. In August I won 4 more games by timeout. That’s good for my rating, but it’s not a satisfying way to win, especially when some of the games are not even out of the opening phase. I realized that no vacation tournaments also have their downside.

Lesson learned: Avoid playing Daily during the holiday season

Even worse, the same happened to me when I went to Spain for a week. The schedule allowed me enough time to do what I wanted and the facilities to log in on a daily basis were available.  I could have continued playing my tournaments with the same effort and as usual, with the same . I could have kept playing with the same attention and effort as back home, had I wanted to. But I didn't.

Spending time with family, hanging by the pool and just chilling felt great. The relaxation was exactly what I needed and chess was no longer a priority. It wasn't that I stopped enjoying it or didn't want to play, it was just that my mind was elsewhere. And my perception of time changed dramatically. You eat breakfast with family, go to the pool, visit some village, have lunch, spend hours talking and at the end of the day enjoy a beer in the sun. Every time I blinked 8-10 hours had passed and I had a lot of difficulty keeping track of deadlines. And suddenly, at the end of the day, I had 12 moves to play, most of them in complex positions.

Three of my games were directly lost on time because I missed the deadline, but many of the other games were lost on time indirectly, as a result of playing 8 suboptimal moves in a row. 

Worst of all, these games didn’t have any value for me. Daily games are ideal for deep analysis and really work on your strategic/positional play if you put in the effort. In September, I didn’t do that, I just Blitzed out moves. Post-game analysis didn't teach me much afterwards, I already know that I can't find the best moves if I don't invest enough time to find them.

A brief update of my progress

Opening Repertoire
This was my main priority for Q1 and Q2 and I kept working on it during Q3. Over the past nine months, I have spent countless hours on this, multiple times the hours that I had initially budgeted. The result is an opening repertoire containing a collecting of good and playable opening lines. The process of building it even helped me understand the fundamental choices I had to make. It’s reliable and practical. It’s also 50 times bigger than the initial goal. That’s not figuratively, that’s literally. It helped me a lot at first, because I was able to identify some bad opening decisions or discover which opening lines I was totally unprepared for.

But the low hanging fruit has already been exhausted and working on it yields less and less. It requires more effort to improve on it, for smaller marginal benefits. Which made me realize, I need another approach. For weeks I’ve been thinking about an overhaul of how I study and approach openings. But so far I have not found a way that feels both engaging and useful. Maybe I should drop it for now.  It remains a work in progress and probably will be forever. In its current form it’s 10 times more completed than I set out to achieve and it's pretty good. It makes sense to mark the project completed and focus on other elements of the game.

Priorities

My plan for Q3 was to shift my focus to back to Rapid games and spend more time on tactics and lessons, maybe end games. But I did almost none of that. Part of the problem was that I had so many things I could be doing that I became indecisive. I needed direction. A plan.

My plan was straightforward:

1. Identify what are the biggest weaknesses in my play that I should work on
2. Work on them

The first step was to analyze my gameplay as a whole and use that as a starting point for further training. Make an effort to analyze my games with deliberate intent to find weakness in in my play, tactical oversights, gaps in my knowledge, maybe discover some structural mistakes. Then use that information to find the patterns. That gives me an overview of my biggest weaknesses. Later I would add other factors like impact, feasibility and my personal preference and enjoyment. 

One of the things I did was analyze a selection of games and try to identify recurring mistakes and weaknesses. Just as a starting point that I could expand on later. In the process of doing this, I discovered many interesting things. The problem was not a lack of findings, but an abundance of findings all pointing in different directions. The result was an ever growing list of flaws, weaknesses, notes, todo's and topics to research. What I wanted was as simple reliable overview of my biggest weaknesses, that was coherent and useful. As simple as it sounds, I was not able to do it.  The question "What are my biggest weaknesses?" remains unanswered.

Without getting into details, that’s a story for another time, it basically comes down to a trade off between getting reliable insights for each game (analyzing in depth) or getting reliable insights about my overall play (by analyzing many games).  

My inability to work this out has been a nagging frustration for a while now. With this quarterly review coming up, I had additional motivation to finally push myself towards a solution. Over the last couple of days, I’ve put in extra effort to overcome some of the challenges. I desperately wanted this blogpost to include a plan for next quarter. All I needed was to determine what my biggest weaknesses are.  

I failed.  

My goal for Q4

For next quarter, I do have a goal. Eventually, my inability to form a plan led to a breakthrough insight. While it’s never a pleasant experience to accept defeat, it can also be very liberating. Taking off the blinders after being stuck in tunnel vision for a while, can show a completely different image. Instead of believing I was very close to solving this, it dawned on me that I might be approaching this all wrong. Which led me to challenge some of my assumptions.

After abandoning the assumption that ‘I could do this by myself’, the logical question to ask myself was: ‘Should I do this by myself?’.  No. Why did I assume that? There are tons of ways I could benefit from getting other people involved. 

The second one that I am throwing overboard is the assumption that developing a full picture of my strengths and weaknesses is feasible in the timeframe I had in mind. I’m letting go of the idea that it should be easy and I’m embracing the preliminary conclusion that it’s going to be an intricate and complex problem to solve. I remain a believer that it is feasible, but challenging. It is possible to develop a coherent and complete (enough) understanding of my current abilities and identify the most important priorities. 

It's just going to require a lot more time and effort. That will be worth it. The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s going to pay off to invest in this. I should drop the assumption that I need a full assessment of my abilities first and that I will start making progress later, once I start working on the areas of my chess play that I have selected. It is more than likely that by spending a lot of time identifying my weaknesses, most of them will be half eliminated once I have discovered them.

That’s why this will be my goal for the next quarter: To take the full next quarter to develop a full assessment of my chess play, with all my strengths and weaknesses. I was lacking motivation because I didn't have a plan. That was wrong. I should be motivated, because I don't have a plan. Yet.

I'm looking forward to doing this. I want to explore new ideas and approaches. I will go beyond game analysis by myself to examine my weaknesses. Instead, I need to dive deeper and find out everything I can about the the way I play chess. I should try to broaden my perspective and I need to start using a wider range of resources.  I'll be working on better understanding my play and have fun doing that.