How I Got 2000: A Guide for You

Have you ever thought about getting to 2000 rapid on Chess.com? If so then this is definitely the blog for you!

Overview:

• My Journey
• How to get started
• The importance of consistent training
• Tips and tricks
• How to handle tilt & losses

My Journey:

Getting into chess was very random. I remember sitting in English class journaling about wanting to start a new hobby at the time I didn't know what but that hobby would later go on to be Chess!

I started playing chess on 9/20/23, Starting at a rapid rating of 300 but in 2 months of playing I got around 1200. Now how did I do this? I played a lot, and whenever I would hear a term I didn't know for example like opposition, kingside & queenside, fianchetto and things like that I would just always have to look into it, out of just pure curiosity and desire to get better at the game. Now it was during this time at 1200 that my rating would plateau and this was due to me starting to get scared of losing my rating and if you have this problem then don't worry it's called "ladder anxiety" and I know I ain't the only one. I see a lot of people only playing bots as they suffer from this same issue. As for the solution... will power! just play a game, just do it. It might be difficult but you're never going to get rid of those feelings of fear if you don't take the leap and bear through it.

The plateau lasted a total of 4 months, during the time I was just playing bots like 1 bot, once a day and watching some random video on the internet from some random obscure chess channel totally ditching the original training plan that got me to 1200 in the first place. This was a huge mistake by me and kind of a regret as I did nothing with something I enjoyed so much just due to fear but I overcame it and that gets me into the next part of my journey.

The next part of my journey was the turning point, the point where I decided that I really wanted 2000 and was willing to put in a lot of work for it. I saw 2000 as the holy grail of chess rating and I wanted it very badly. I would go from 1200 to 1300 in 1 month, 1300 to 1400 in 1 month, 1400 to 1500 in one month, 1500 to 1600 in 1 week! 1600 to 1700 in 1 1/2 months, 1700 to 1800 in a bit more than half a month, 1800 to 1900 in roughly 2 months and 1900 to 2000 in 2 months. The progress is something I am very proud of but this journey wasn't easy. It was quite stressful and grueling at some moment and I'll go into dealing with that in the "How to handle tilt & losses" section of the blog.

How to get started:

I am a believer in that to get good at something you have to be interested in it but at the same time a bit obsessive so if you want to get started on the road to 2000 you need to know 2 things.

1. Don't overthink
2. Do things right.

Let me elaborate, chess is hard but if you overthink it then it just makes it harder. I hear people all the time ask things like "oh what openings should I learn" or "what books should I read" or like "is this 199$ chess course going to make me the next Magnus Carlsen". I want to say that I am guilty of this, I asked way to many questions instead of taking actions I used to make forum posts all the time one of them was named "what's the best time control" and I remember sitting on this forum waiting for responses, waiting until I would get that golden piece of advice, than I made another one on "is it okay to listen to music when you play chess" waiting for another response, than another "Can I make National Master". Like I asked all these questions waiting for a response not doing anything chess related. Now if I went back in time I would tell myself to stop asking these questions as it was simply a way for me to think I was working on my chess without actually working on my chess. 

Here's another thing people think they need to spend 8 hours a day studying to improve at chess. Well from personal experience I can say that's absolutely false. I remember when I first started chess spending 1 whole hour making a google doc of a chess schedule that was 7 hours long! Now this was in summer so I had the time but little did I know that this was very unnecessary. Now if you're a professional chess player then yeah I wouldn't doubt that you would have a crazy long training plan but for most of us especially beginners playing for that long in a single day just is too much. A simple 1-2 hour training plan will definitely show improvement over time and you don't have to over do it and think things like "if I don't practice 8 hours a day I am going to never get better" it's all just about how you spend the time and doing right things over wrong things. I will talk more about training plans in "The importance of having a consistent training plan".

Now for #2 "Do things right", as I said in my journey I asked a lot of questions which wasted a lot of time. If you are serious about chess you need to see what you are doing to improve and ask yourself "will this help?" because you could easily be doing the wrong things, I have a friend who is about 500 and he said he was starting to play chess and I asked him what his goals were he said "I want to be 1500 rapid" I was asking him what he was doing in order to achieve such a goal and he responded with "well I am playing 10 bullet games a day plus 1 rapid game, read an endgame book, and watching videos on openings". The problem with this is that bullet isn't going to help your chess as much as longer time controls would, especially if you are a beginner, 2 he doesn't need to read an endgame book as he is still just hanging his pieces in the opening & middlegame rarely even making it to an endgame 3 he doesn't need to learn openings as he doesn't even understand the basic opening principles. This friend is now about 1000 elo but is pretty inactive but I remember my advice actually helping him and that advice was to focus on blunder-checking, which is checking that the move you want to play isn't a blunder, pretty self explanatory. Also opening principles instead of openings as it's good to have a solid foundation that are the principles of the game, so before you start and try to memorize opening lines and theory, get the principles down. I also told him to stop reading the endgame book, there isn't anything wrong with learning simple endgame patterns like how to checkmate with a rook and king vs just a king. However, the endgame book he was reading was way above his level, which is also something to look out for when you read a chess book.

Now I could make this section longer but for the sake of the readers I will wrap it off with just make sure you don't overthink chess, it can be difficult but you don't need to commit hours upon hours a day in order to see improvement. Patience is a virtue. Do things right, a lot of what you think will help you improve might not get you the best results.

The importance of a consistent training plan

This is the section I have been yearning to write since I started following a training plan and remembering that I felt like I finally cracked the code to chess, I just had to make sure I wrote this in this blog and told people, no gatekeeping here lol. 

To get to 2000 I did 3 things everyday for around 6-8 months
1. 30 minutes to 1 hour of puzzle practice a day

2. Play at least a minimum of 3 rated rapid games (10+0 is my preferred time control I didn't see as fast of progress playing 15|10)
3. Review those games using the self analysis tool on chess.com (engine analysis comes after the self analysis, I might make a blog on the different ways to review a chess game but there are already so many blogs on the subject already, also there are many methods to reviewing a chess game)

Simple right! This took around 1-2 hours a day and I saw very clear upward progress. Now I also want to mention that everyone's different, so what works for me may not work for you, however I am sure that doing these 3 specific things should realistically help basically anyone.

I am a big believer in that consistency is the key to improving at everything in not just chess but other aspects of life. I really recommend adapting a simple training plan like this that you can do everyday. 

Tips and tricks

This section goes over some smaller things that I think can help players lose less elo points.

Do you know that chess.com has this very cool feature where you can set a rating range for your opponents? Mine is set at -25 (the lowest it'll go) so say I am 2000 then the lowest rated player I can play is 1975 and if I win that game I will gain 7, and if I lose then I will lose 9 elo points. This is if you have already played a lot of rapid games as if you make an account and win you'll gain like 100+ elo. The other setting is usually set at +100 or +200 so the best player I can play will be like 2100 or 2200. This is actually an amazing feature and I really like it as I get the chance to play higher rated players and having that chance allows me to win more elo, I remember losing like 4 rapid games in a row losing like 28 elo just to win 30 elo in 3 because they were all high rated and I get like +10 points if I win.

Now how to access this feature: Chess.com home screen --> New Game --> "Custom" (a smaller button under the "Play" button). Now you should see it and you can access this from any device (Mobile navigation: a bit different but "Play" --> "More" (small button under the "Play a Bot" button) --> "Custom Game").

Another tip I have is to face strong players, not too strong as that'll probably just be pushing on wood. A healthy difference would be like 200-300 points. Why is facing stronger players good for your chess? Versed stronger players you get a feel for how an opponent stronger than you plays, you can also be introduced to new ideas. I have a friend here on chess.com whom I have played over 150-200 times since I was 1200, note this dude is 2000. Our current record is 16-10-135, yes I have lost to this dude 135 times but I had a key takeaway mostly every single time I played him and yes he was 800 points higher than me and for the longest time it was me pushing on wood as I would lose very fast to him but as I made progress I started to realize more things about the moves he was making like I was now understanding them. 

Another thing I would like to mention is having a friendly rivalry in chess is also a good thing. I live in a small town where chess isn't that prevalent though we do have a small chess club. I remember going to this chess club when I was 900 elo, I was still a beginner and when I went that was the first time in my life that I had seen a chess board. I was very scared of the outcomes but I managed to beat everyone there. Except 1 guy, this guy would go on to push me into becoming a better chess player. I remember going to the chess club losing to him and going home so inspired to get better and finally beat him, we would share things we liked about chess while we were fighting it out on the board. I remember he recommended to me a movie called "Searching for Bobby Fischer". This movie is a pretty good movie if you like chess. I would definitely recommend you check it out. I remember watching it and right after being hyped to play chess. He gave me another reason besides pure passion for the game to be motivated and it might be hard to find that rivalry as online chess can be quite lonely sometimes when you're just on that grind but others are also are on the grind and I would assume those people may also be out there looking for a training partner or a friendly rivalry like this.

How to handle with tilt & losses

I ain't a depressed individual nor do I get that emotional but chess sometimes can bring out emotions I cannot explain. I have sat in front of my monitor screen so many times staring into what seems like an empty abyss (in reality it's the extremely lost chess position right in front of me) thinking negative thoughts about myself, saying things like "I'm stupid" or "How did I not see that" just being hard on myself, and I truly ain't ashamed to admit this as I like to be honest and also I feel like if you haven't said either of those 2 sentences to yourself at least once than maybe you just haven't played enough chess.

Now methods on how to deal with tilt aren't going to be explained in this blog as I never really learned that much on how to avoid tilt other than the simple stuff like stop playing after an X amount of losses. Think of your mind as a personified figure, like it's a human. When you lose, that human, which is your mind, takes a punch to the face. Now most people can take a few punches but the pain builds up, and you either quit as you can’t withstand the pain, or can and you grow stronger and keep pushing and see as pain becomes less painful. I have lost so many times that my mind has built a fortress and yes I am sometimes a little upset after a loss but it’s in a healthy way. I have also taken the time to look into and adapted the “student mentality” which means no matter what there is always something more to learn and improve at no matter if you think you’re an expert and I recommend you look into this especially since it helps a lot with losing because you know that somewhere you messed up and your are fortunate enough to have the resources available to you like game review and self analysis on chess.com, to learn from your mistakes. This is what stopped played me when I was 1200 because I was scared to lose more, I remember my games leading up to 1200 were very bad and progress was on a decline and incline numerous times, I had tilted a few times and was just done when I got to 1200 saying to myself "I'll just peak sit here for a bit". 

I also suffered from a tilt in the 1900-2000 range, in fact 2 separate times I got 2 wins away from 2000 and tilted 100-150 points. There was actually a time during this point where I was debating on taking a long break for an indefinite amount of time but something told me I had to keep pushing. I just want to say if you are suffering from the fear of loss the only way to get past that in my opinion from personal experience is to face it head on no matter what, even if the thought of the worst outcome feels like it's crushing your chest in half you just have to bear the pain, and if you don't than clearly your desires aren't important enough.

Hello thanks for reading my blog. I hope you enjoyed it! If you have any questions I will try my best to answer them in the comment section, I never made a guide so I am thinking that I could possibly revise it later in the future when I am more knowledgeable. I am currently at 2005 (rapid) and have been since I hit it (on December 31). I ain't peak sitting as I plan to play more rapid in the future. I have just switched to playing blitz as it's the time control I enjoy playing. I would also like to mention I am trying to be more involved in the community as I am very passionate about chess and want to help out as many people as I can.

Thanks for reading my first Chess.com Blog!