My 2023 Chess Summary

Well, 2023 is nearly done and 2024 is about to begin.  I figured I would take this moment to summarize my year in chess: what I've done, what I've accomplished and what I hope to achieve in the coming year.  This will act as a time capsule, something to compare with this time next year, and it lets me celebrated some of my achievements.

Happy New Year, everyone!  Here's what I've done.

Life Generally

Two things stand out.  First, I finished my articling period, got called to the bar and am now a fully-fledged lawyer!  This process has consumed my life since 2018, when I began studying for the LSAT, and culminated in June of this year.  It's definitely been a journey, though I suppose it is far from over.

Second, I earned my next blackbelt in karate, capping off a grading process that started in January and culminated in ... June.  When we look back and wonder what I did in the first half of 2023, now we know: very little time for chess, which was barely on my radar during these first six months.

I had a two month holiday in July and August, during which time my mind returned to chess.  Coincidentally, I'm sure, this blog then re-started in September.

Chess Specific

We can divide this into three sub-areas: my playing, my training and my content.

Very Little Playing

I played very little chess this year, essentially only during my holiday.  As mentioned, I focused on non-chess activities for the first half of the year, and though I refocused on chess in the second half, I did not treat playing as a priority.  Instead, I re-immersed myself in the game, which appears to have been the right move.  My interest and enthusiasm has steadily increased since the summer.

All-told, I played 83 blitz games, winning 42, drawing 2 and losing 39. That's a 51.81% score, though White (24 / 1 /16, 59.76%) vastly out-performed Black (18 / 1 / 23, 44.05%) in this small sample.  I also played a few training games against Stockfish.

Despite the small number of games, and presumably the rust that goes along with it, I defeated two of my top 5 highest-rated victories this year, being 2310 and 2288, respectively.  Neither game was that special (game 1 and game 2), but I'll take it, and I'm gunning to finish 2024 with even more wins against the 2300+ crowd.

Restarted (Real) Training

Since starting law school (and getting hit by the pandemic), my chess "training" has essentially been Chessable-based, going through various repertoires and doing a decent chunk of tactical puzzles, including the Woodpecker Method.  This has improved my general pattern recognition, and certainly I know more opening theory than ever, but I've mostly tread water the last two years.

For most of this year, I was interested in chess but not enough to do much about it.  That interest slowly smouldered, waiting for a spark to rekindle my drive.  That happened sometime in October, and in November, I began training in earnest.  I focused on visualization training, doing 30min every day, and by mid-December I was playing my first blindfold game against bots and by late-December I played my first games against other people (including getting my first win!).

In other words, it took two months of steady and consistent practice to go from ground zero to playing blindfold.  That seems absolutely mammoth, and I have to wonder, where will I be six months from now?

I am now moving beyond just visualization and into specific chess training, as identified in my training plan. During the Christmas holiday break, I have rewatched the videos for GM Smirnov's "Grandmaster's Positional Understanding" and have started going through the exercises again.  I forgot how much fun it is to deeply analyze a position, to get lost in the variations, to reach the end and then realize somehow an hour has gone by in the blink of an eye.  This will continue into 2024.

Finally, it might be worthwhile listing what I've stopped doing: opening reviews.  I haven't used Chessable in two years, and I stopped using Chess-Tempo's (much better) opening trainer earlier in the spring.  I should probably write a blog post explaining why, but in short, too little results for far too much time investment. Speaking of blog posts...

Back to Creating Content

After shuttering my original blog at the end of 2020, I received the odd comment from old blog readers ... consistently.  During the summer, as my interest in chess renewed, I was most excited about communicating and discussing chess, rather than playing or training.  The result: the blog was born.

It's been a heck of a ride.  I have consistently published 1.5 posts a week (Monday and Friday one week, Wednesday the next), all while writing 2 posts a week.  As a result, I have 31 posts published and roughly 15 drafts in various states of readiness.  In hard numbers, that works out to 43k words and 104 word document pages.  Not bad for four months of work!

Now that I am focusing on training, I will have less time for writing, so this output will likely diminish.  I have enough drafts to cover January, and if I write one post a week, that should keep the content churning at 1.5x a week for the first quarter.  After that, it might fall down to a single post a week, maybe even less.  Honestly, it will depend how much I remain interested in blogging once training kicks into high gear, and that's hard to predict.

I've also begun posting a few videos on YouTube again.  That will likely continue at a reduced rate, maybe once a month, but it's definitely a distant priority and I make no promises.  Still, if you haven't, check my channel out, and I'm always open to feedback.

Yearly Highlights

Below, I collected my favourite games played this year and lightly annotated them.  Next year I'll have even more, but let's celebrate what we have:

I'll also plug my favourite blog post, which I absolutely loved ... but it has gotten the least amount of views.  That makes me sad.  Check out Personal Patterns Persist.  Maybe I could use a better title (I'm a sucker for alliteration), but this post describes the act of discovery in chess, of how finding out something for yourself sears the knowledge into your brain and lets you use it effortlessly.  It's fascinating.

Also, for this post, Why I Love Miniature Games, I put more work into that than any other post.  It had three different drafts, a full re-write, and I love the final product ... and it also has very little views to show for it.  Might as well give that one a plug as well.

Meanwhile, my three most viewed posts this year were:

1. Using the Chessmood Method, which describes my attempt to use their recommended approach to learning an opening ... something I have really slacked on.  Even on my blog, opening content gets the views!
2. My Thinking System, which details, get this, how I think in a game.  Modeled after GM Smirnov's content.  I've expressed the same ideas elsewhere, but this is the most coherent and detailed version.
3. How I Made My Biggest Leaps, a semi-autobiographical post that shows what I was doing right before I made leaps in my ability.  I never imagined this would be interesting to other people, so I'm pleasantly surprised how well it has done.
   

And with that, 2023 is a wrap.  I wish everyone well.  Thank you for reading.  Now let's all go and crush our 2024 goals!  All the best,

~ Smithy