Road to FM: Getting Started | Identifying Your Weakness

In order to reach CM, NM, FM, IM, GM, or any rating point in general, one must analyze the situation. After all, how are you supposed to improve if you don't know what it is you have to improve at? Today, I'm going to be covering an extremely crucial aspect of chess, one that many people neglect. It is identifying your weaknesses. It's important to figure out what you're not as good at, and then work on it. Doing this will help speed up your chess improvement drastically. 

What is Road to FM? Check out the introductory post here.

How?

There's a certain cycle that you should follow in identifying your weaknesses. It's very simple, but absolutely necessary for chess improvement. You'll see why below

Step 1. Identify your weakness

Step 2. Improve on your weakness

Step 3. Repeat! Once you improve at something, something else will become the new "weakness" because you have improved overall!

While we may never truly master the game of chess, we can slowly and surely work our way closer towards that goal!

Why?

For more than 2 years, I was stuck in the 2100 USCF range. NM was right there in front of me, but I just couldn't seem to get there. It gets frustrating when you push so hard, for so long, and then end up losing 80 points in 3 tournaments. Yikes.

But after some reflection, my determined self came back and found a way to achieve this seemingly impossible goal. The one thing that completely changed the strategies and methods I used to improve was simply by evaluating my chess abilities again!

You see, it's very important to actually know what you're bad at, or not as good at. It turns out, I had not realized my lack of opening preparation! I was under the impression that my openings were fine, and since I was happy with them, I did not ever think about improving them. It takes a long time to learn, study, and master an opening, and I did not think doing so was as necessary as improving my understanding of the middlegame.

However, after some reflection, I realized that my weak spot was indeed my opening repertoire. I took a hearty 6 months to completely switch out my 1.d4 opening repertoire for 1.e4, and within a couple months, in January of 2020, I made National Master. Take a look at the quote below, which nicely sums up this entire concept:

This principle of life can be applied in anything and everything that you do. You have to fix your weakest link in your "chain" in order to improve. By doing that, you will be able to focus on improving at your weakest aspect. That doesn't mean you drop everything else, it just means you prioritize working on your weakness over some other things you were doing before. 

Now that we understand what it means it identify your weakness, and why it's important, I'm going to do a quick analysis of myself to help focus my time on working on the most lacking aspect of my game in my next post. I'm going to be looking at these main categories: Openings, Positional Play, Attacking, Endgames, and Tactics. Stay tuned!

Phew! That took a long time! I hope you enjoyed this first post of my new series Road to FM! Hopefully this helped you identify YOUR weakness. If it did, make sure to comment down below what your weakness is and how you plan to improve on it! Until next time! 

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