This puzzle is one of many that I completed this week on Lichess, feel free to give it a try. White to play, find checkmate in 6 moves. I’ll post the solution at the bottom of this post.

This week I got into my 2000 challenge in earnest. Things felt a little clunky as I was gathering resources and figuring things out the last few weeks, but things are running smoothly now. I have daily chess routines with puzzles and reading, and I’m committing to playing at least once a day. I plan to read a chapter a week of Silman’s book, and I’m making sure to budget an appropriate amount of time towards this challenge. The technology that I’m using to both study chess and report on it are starting to feel smoother as well. I appreciate when I have startup tasks out of the way and I have the foundation laid for learning. I’m impatient, and often I want to just get down to learning, but it’s significant how much more productive I work when I have a roadmap in place.

I’m facing some realities in my challenge already after just a week. The first reality is that I have to improve my use of chess notation. Chess notation is how chess games are recorded and described, and the notation is universal nowadays. I’ve been casually using notation for years, but it’s clear now that I have to commit the vertical file letters and horizontal rank numbers to memory.

The other reality is that I need to have a complex opening repertoire. Earning a rank of expert in chess requires a serious amount of time spent studying the first 5-10 moves of a game. Serious players study chess openings in great depth. Fortunately for me, studying chess opening theory tables is actually enjoyable. There is an encyclopedia of openings on Lichess, and it’s an amazing tool that I take advantage of when I study my own games.

 

I had a fun week playing, learning, and watching chess. I watched Agadmator a few times, checking out his most recent content as well as a few classic clips that I’ve watched many times. I really enjoy historical chess games, and one of my favourites is “the game of the century”:

Thanks for following along with my blog, I’m looking forward to posting again next week with another update. If you tried the puzzle at the beginning of this post, check the image below for the solution and the notated list of moves I took to find checkmate in 6 moves.