For now I’ll just post the training I did and the games with a short analysis for each day and possibly a weekly or bi-weekly summary. Bulk posting after about two weeks. I also figured out afterwards that you can see the ELO as of after the game so I’ll use end of day ELO in the title. The tactics training is basically grinding through Chess King Tactics for Beginners then repeating it (woodpecker style).
Initially, my plan was to work through the book “Back To Basics: Tactics” and do it Woodpecker like in a couple of cycles as my tactics component. However, I found that I didn’t quite like working with the book. I did some puzzles on chess.com and liked that more. The CT-ART 4.0 app was recommended a lot so I downloaded it, did some puzzles and recognized quickly that they are too advanced for me. I did however find the “Chess Tactics for Beginners” app from the same company which suits me better. I did all of this during my “diddling around” week and so on day 1 of the challenge, I was already in the flow of doing 30 minutes of tactics daily in that app. Additionally, I do the daily free “Puzzle Rush” 5 minutes and decided to do Lichess “Puzzle Storm” before playing my daily game to get into the right mindset. I picked this idea up from Youtuber Kamryn, she’s doing Puzzle Rush before each game and doesn’t allow herself to play before reaching some puzzle target.
I also did some lines of the “Black Lion – Short&Sweet” on Chessable and liked this quite a bit. I’ll use it in conjunction with the book “The Black Lion – The Chess Predator’s Choice Against Both 1.e4 and 1.d4”. I also quickly reread the rough move order and move order checklist in “The Moment of Zuke” and played the openings against Antonio the bot. My goal was to have at least some sort of opening to feel a bit more confident with the idea of resorting to opening principles once I ran out of “prep” or faced responses I didn’t know.
I also watched the Video Beyond Material by Irina Kush because it looked like the most interesting topic in my recommended videos list. Quite interesting but I’m not sure I’m capable of these thought processes yet.
With all of that out of the way it was finally time to dive into my first game. I played a couple of rounds of Puzzle Storm on Lichess before switching to chess.com. I picked a rapid game of 10 minutes and was off to the races. First rated game on chess.com let us gogogo. I got the black pieces and also learned that the initial rating is not 800 but rather unrated. Ok good, tick tock it was time for my first move….and…
10 minutes later I had lost on time. I felt like I actually played better than expected but the time crunch had me panicking at the end. Immediate lesson before jumping into the analysis…this is too fast for me, I’ll do 15/10 next time.
The next step was my post-game analysis. I simply used the Learn/Analysis feature and wrote down some notes and thoughts. Here’s the raw dump:
Overall, I’m happy with day 1. Quickly learned the 10 minute time setting is too fast for me and played reasonably well. Even could have won if I hadn’t missed the M2. Overall training time for the day was around 90 minutes.