This week I spent a few hours on my 2000 challenge. I spent 10-20 minutes a day during the week doing chess puzzles. Solving puzzles are great for when I’m taking transit to and from school, and when I’m relaxing late in the evenings. I am getting more fluent in chess notation, but reading notation is still a cumbersome effort sometimes. Some pages of my book are mostly written in chess notation, so reading a 30 page chapter is a heavier undertaking than I thought. The weekends are my opportunity to spend a bigger chunk of time with this challenge, and I’m already seeing a change in my thinking towards the game of chess. 

Each week I’d like to do a resource update, where I report on my experiences with my three main tools for this challenge, Lichess (app), Silman (book), and Agadmator (online instructor). I completed many puzzles and a few games on Lichess this week. I discovered that Lichess has a ton of statistical analysis on my profile’s data, and I’m excited to have a larger amount of data to pull statistics and trends from. I read a chapter of Silman this week, and it gave me new ways to think about the game – specifically looking for imbalances to create dynamic plans for my play. Reading Silman is difficult, he uses a lot of notation. It would be easier to read if I set up a physical game of chess while I read through the book, so I could play along through his ideas. I imagine his chapters will get easier and easier to read once I become more fluent in chess notation. I watched a video of Agadmator this week, an analysis of a game between Yu Yangyi (2763 rating) and Ding Liren (2811 rating). While I watched and listened, I discovered that I was thinking differently about what I was watching and I was able to keep up to Agadmator’s lightning fast notation better than usual. If you are interested in checking out this high level game and analysis by Agadmator, check it out here.

I’m looking forward to getting more data onto Lichess. I’ll do that through doing more puzzles – I’ve surpassed 777 puzzles on my profile this week – as well as through playing more games. I’m looking forward to content on Agadmator’s channel, the world of chess is holding various ‘candidate tournaments’ to determine the best player to challenge for the 2020 world championship between world champion Magnus Carlsen and the world’s best candidate. In terms of Silman, I’m really looking forward to Chapter 4. If I wasn’t doing this challenge, I would have probably skipped forward to that chapter already! Chapter 4 is going to teach me better initiative, a weak area of my game.

In conclusion, this challenge has been going really well so far. I’m excited about my progress so far, especially in terms of improving my understanding of the content I’m exploring. I’m also excited about my sources and how they’ve been so suitable for my needs/goals. Finally, I’m excited about the future of this challenge and what lies ahead for me in chess. Thanks for reading. – Mike