Skill Building

It’s been already two weeks since I started studying chess. During this period my rating on Lichess went up and down but stayed pretty much the same (around 2190). I’m playing mostly 3+2 and 5+3 blitz games. I continued learning and studying every day for at least one hour a day. Some days I would go over for an extra 15 or 20 minutes. Also, the day I take lessons I don’t do any formal study. I’m applying the same principle I would when practicing piano and taking lessons (no practice on lesson day).

Even though my rating hovered around 2200, I noticed some slight changes in my game. After focusing hard to find good moves during my daily studies, that thinking mode started to bleed into the blitz sessions. Every day, at the beginning of each study session, I also did a series of tactic exercises arranged by theme: checkmate, discovered attack, discovered attack with check, double attack, absolute pin, skewer, discovered check, double-check, and tornado. I already knew all of these, but drilling them consistently was nice. Also, it was fun learning all the names in Italian: scacco matto, attacco di scoperta, attacco doppio, inchiodatura assoluta, infilata, scacco di scoperta, scacco doppio e tornado. 🤓

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I started learning chess seriously around 20 years ago. During high school, I read a few chess books and went over hundreds and hundreds of games played by chess Grandmasters (GM). At the same time, I played rapid online chess (blitz) on websites such as Yahoo! Games. In blitz games, each player has less than 10 minutes to make all his moves. Some examples of blitz time: 2+0 (two minutes without increment), 3+2 (three minutes with a two-second increment after each move), 5+3 (five minutes with a three-second increment after each move).

Even though I enjoyed learning and studying the game, during a period of five or six years (my “formal training”) I only took lessons with a private tutor for a few months. I did most of my learning on my own, reading books, and going over Chessbase annotated games and tutorials. Also, I never played a rated (ELO) tournament. Later on, in my early thirties (as I’m writing this in 2021 I’m 34 years old) I would participate in a handful of semi-rapid chess tournaments that started and finished on the same day.

Chess in Italian (Week 2) Chess Expertise & Vocabulary

Skill Building Project #1: Chess in Italian (Week 1)