My goals: chess

It’s the end of the year, time to take stock and see what I want to learn in the future, so it’s good to look at where I stand right now, so I can see where I can improve and how far I have improved when I look back at this post in the future.

I am old, or getting old. In 2022 I will turn 35, and I always said to myself that I want to improve every five years. I have commited to this. Every 5 years, I want to be a different person, having learned new things,…

In difficult times, I always seem to look back at chess, as I can see from my past games on chess.com, where I have an account since 2012, and every difficult time since then, I have turned back to chess.com and played a few games, to get through the emotional period so it seems. Now after my colleague died, I have taken up chess yet again, which is now a few months ago, and have stuck with it, up until now.

Something in me has clicked I think, that I want to delve deeper into this, and at the moment, I still need a lot of instruction. Like… a lot. I know how the pieces move, I know a few techniques and tactics, but I still lose a lot of games. For every game I win, I lose about 3, which are a lot of losses.

Now, here comes a promise to myself: I want to improve so much that I reach at least 1500 ELO. I already have a plan of attack, which is the step-by-step method of chess, a Dutch developed method of learning chess, plus the soviet chess primer, so I have 2 great methods to learn chess and get a lot better by the end of december 2022. It will take a lot of work, and a lot of dedication to improve. Studying, doing exercises, making a lot of mistakes and playing tons of games, to get to 1500 ELO (I will use my chess.com account as a measure).

Currently I am around 400 ELO on chess, so to improve towards 1500, will take a me a lot of games, and a lot of studying, but I believe it can be done and if not by one year, certainly the year after (I am already changing the goalpost here…).

I am really curious if this will work out. Really curious how it will go even. Will I give up, will I persevere,… I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I really learned a new skill this far, the last was magic, which I did started in 2005, and I put a lot of time in that one. Like tons of time.

Chess is something I always wanted to play better, and one of my goals is learning chess so well, that I can beat a former friend every. single. time. as he beats my well-rounded behind way to much, so if I can do that, I am happy. I might stop there,or if I am feeling like I have ways to improve, I might go further. I don’t know my future self, but if they read this. Please make it. Please go on. Your past self has faith in you.