It has been a year now that I started researching and testing different techniques to take my chess skills to another level. While results may not have always been as expected, positive signs will certainly encourage me to persevere in my quest.

Although I need to put aside the project for now, my work is certainly not finished yet.

 

Disappointing results but encouraging signs

As enthusiastic as I was in the beginning of my journey, I gradually realized it would be hard to progress as fast as I had hoped. My “non-chess experiment” during the first 6 months did not end up as well as I had thought in terms of results, as I lost some chess reflexes over the board.

And after that, despite having worked on my game for roughly 10 hours a week for a period of 4 months, the two other tournaments I decided to engage in did not yield the results I had hoped for either. I underperformed again during the first tournament in Germany, while my Elo performance in Cappelle (France) only reached 2117.

Yet I’m still not 100% sure I totally failed, as I saw really encouraging signs of progress in my way of playing, resulting notably in a win against an International Master.

 

3 positive things I’ve taken from this experiment

Not much time to work on the method I developed

Although I started working on my chess skills in November, I roughly had less than one month to use the training method I put in place, since researching to create it took much more time than I had initially thought. Still today, I feel I need to investigate more to extract the best techniques. To be honest, I didn’t write as many articles as I would have wished. I also have to admit I stopped working on improving my game after Cappelle, partially due to some discouragement, but mainly because due to other priorities I won’t be playing before next year.

My non-chess habits keep on helping me

Through the experiment, I learned a lot about ways to put my body and mind in good condition for a chess game. Some habits I put in place like meditation or my morning routine still provide me with great benefits in my everyday life.

A solid opening repertoire

Talking about chess, the main efforts I’ve made have been on openings. With openings being my main weakness in the game, I needed to work hard to find what suit me the most. Now that I know how to enter the game properly and considering what I like, applying my method for a future tournament should be a lot easier.

 

What’s next?

As mentioned previously, I still need to work on my method and see how it can help other players as well. And because I’m not sure if I will play another tournament before 2019, I prefer focusing on other priorities for now and get back to my chess thing next year. The idea will be to prepare another tournament and invite a few players that I would coach to join in. 

Until then, I didn’t want to leave you without anything so…

You will find on the homepage what I consider to be the 10 most useful articles of my blog!

And I ‘m also sharing with you a last article with the top 50 tips of 2700+ players on chess improvement.

 

See you soon

With all these tips, I hope you will find answers to some questions you may have regarding chess improvement and I wish you all the best in your own quest towards improvement.

For my part, I have faith that my results in the future will reflect the big challenge I have set for myself.

So as the saying goes; only time will tell!

See you soon!

 

Grégory