Smithy's Monthly Update: March 2024 (We're Back, Baby!)

For the first two months of 2024, I have done almost zero chess training.  I predicted in February that I would do much more this month.  I was right.  I effectively re-started chess, and it feels really, really good.  And I also managed to keep most of my life in balance as well, a real win-win.

Here's the breakdown.

[Edit: The glut of joke emails in my inbox has reminded me that today is April Fools.  Let assure you that, despite the unfortunate timing, this is legitimately my monthly update.]

My Stats

All told, I spent just under 14hrs on chess in March, surpassing my goal of 10hrs.  Of that total, 10hrs was on Grandmaster's Positional Understanding alone, 3hrs were on my easy tactical warm-ups and pattern recognition, and 44min was on the "ChessMood Method" of studying openings ... something I think I did twice.  It wasn't a priority.

Here's the calendar breakdown:

We can see that my time was not distributed evenly.  Indeed, I had my busiest stretch at work yet, relegating my training to weekends and whenever I had free time.  I count this as a victory.  If I can still manage to do some chess when work is crazy, then I should be able to do even more when things are more normal... unless this becomes the new normal.

My Training

As mentioned, my goal was to get through GM Smirnov's Grandmaster's Positional Understanding course in roughly three months.  I then promptly took two months off of chess, so yeah, that didn't happen.  I have gone through all of the videos and 35 of the exercises, which is roughly 15% of the total.  

Even without my little hiatus, I grossly underestimated how long this would take.  In all of 2024, I have put 16hrs into this course ... and I am 15% of the way through it.  It doesn't take a math genius to see that that works out to 100hrs to complete the whole thing.  The first time I did this course, it took me three months of working on it roughly one hour each day, so that checks out.  I assumed I could do it faster ... and I am re-learning why we should never make assumptions.

Why is it taking longer?  Two reasons.  First, as mentioned previously, I'm a much stronger player, and so I am able to understand more of the nuances. Before, I would look at a position and not see the hidden resources; now I see them more clearly and spend more time checking whether they work or not.  Positions that would normally warrant only a brief look now take a deep dive, in other words.

Second, the opposite is sometimes occurring.  That is, I see a position and instantly see the main thematic idea.  Awesome, let's move on.  Other positions, though, I am completely wrong.  I then spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out why I failed.  It's not enough to turn on the engine and see the answer.  Rather, I am trying to reverse-engineer the thinking process: what should I have done / noticed / calculated in order to see the suggested move?  I try not to move on until I figure this out.  I want to get to a point where I look at a position and the main strategic ideas are obvious ... or at the very least not blind.

For example, in this position, I was completely blind to the best move.  I'm not going into detail in the analysis, but suffice to say that I spent time looking at a bunch of absolutely nothing moves, moves that completely missed the mark.  Why didn't I play the obvious, correct move?  What did I focus on instead?  What should I have focused on?  How can I use that information so the next time I get a similar position, I'm drawn to the right plan and not the wrong ones that came naturally to me?  In some ways this isn't so much chess training as it is Smithy training, if that makes sense.  It's very tiring, but also very rewarding.  I can almost feel my brain re-wiring after a hard session.

I have done absolutely no playing in 2024, and honestly, I have no immediate plans to do so.  I am currently in "truth mode" rather than "competitive mode", if that makes sense.  I'm more interested in figuring out the right answers than I am in checkmating my opponents.  Once that changes, I'll start playing, but in the meantime, it's all-in on analyzing the GMPU positions.

Highly enjoying it, by the way.

Non-Chess Update

So far, 2024 has been the year of writing: literally yesterday, March 31st, I wrote my 60,000th word and hit 100 total pages of my ever-growing story. 

Even better, I did this while still doing other things I love.  I played the piano, I read some books, I had  some work and social events (honestly, these might not fit squarely into "other things I love", but I'll allow it), I did more fitness activities and, of course, I did more chess.

Diving deeper into writing, it was a month of extremes.  It was simultaneously the month where I had the least productive days (7 of my 10 shortest days in terms of word count) ... but also some of my most productive (I have topped 1k words a day eight times, and six of them were this month):

I estimate I'm somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way done, so another 3-6 months.  It's hard to describe how happy this makes me. There's a special thrill to see those page counts slowly add up and realizing that every day I'm adding another small piece into something that I can tell, in my heart, will be something special.

My Best Writing Day

On March 2nd, I had one of the best writing days of my life.  I wrote 1,599 words... in about forty minutes.  I normally write 500 words an hour.  Absolutely everything came together.  I fell into a flow state and emerged with a complete scene on the other side.  I then felt giddy for about two hours after that, as if I couldn't believe what had just happened.  It was pure magic.

For context, my story is about Lexi, a young homeless child, and we get to watch her try to survive all the dangers of living on the street.  Why is she homeless?  Well, spoiler-alert for the first five pages, her mother is violently killed and Lexi has nowhere else to go. Unsurprisingly, little Lex is plagued by nightmares of what she saw that day ... and then about three weeks ago, an idea hit me.

Basically, the story follows Lexi and what she is doing now, and the nightmares can represent her past, what has happened.  It starts shocking and violent, her mother dying.  The next nightmare, though, is the event right before that death.  It is is less shocking, less violent.  This then continues.  The nightmares become, on the surface, barely nightmares at all.  Nothing much happens ... but the reader can see how each one prepares for the next, worst nightmare to follow.  The horror is seeing how, ultimately, such mundane little decisions nevertheless start all the dominoes to fall, leading to its ultimate, inevitable conclusion.

March 2nd was one of these nightmare scenes, and it absolutely came together.  Mostly hints of violence, but the hints are loud and clear given the previous scenes.  It's foreshadowing in reverse.  It worked perfectly.  I'm writing this in the afterglow of that writing session, and I'm still a little in awe.  Have you ever had an amazing chess day?  Where you won all your games, where all the moves were obvious, where blunders and tactics jumped out, where everything you touched turned to gold?  That's the chess equivalent of my writing day.

The hard part will be showing up tomorrow and trying to top this. [Editor's Note: I went into a week-long funk where most of my writing was much lower quality... but I'll still take it!]

One Potential Warning: Blog Slow Down Imminent?

All the above is pretty awesome, but there's one cloud in an otherwise blue sky: I've cut way back on blogging.  Basically, I try to write something every week, and I have a small surplus of articles kept in reserve.  Well, in order to spend time studying chess, writing Lexi and doing everything else I do, something had to give.  That was blog writing.  I haven't written a new piece in three weeks.

I have enough reserve posts to make it through most of April, but that's it.  I might have to change the schedule, reduce scope, split certain ideas into multi-posts or just otherwise not post something every week.  I'm not completely sure, but if it happens, don't be surprised.

Indeed, I started this blog as a way to get me to write more.  Now that I'm literally writing a novel in my spare time, that reasoning doesn't have the same impetus.  I also think it's better to produce content that I actually care about, rather than just content for the sake of content, so I don't want to force myself to do it.  Anyway, wanted to put that out there: things might slow down.  Or maybe they won't.  We will see.

Conclusion and Next Steps

March was a huge success.  I will not change anything from a chess perspective.  I will stick with the same goal: 10hrs of chess.  If work is less busy, then I will have every opportunity to do more.  If it's still busy, then no worries, I know I can probably do 10hrs.

I am slightly concerned that GMPU is taking too long.  If this truly takes 100hrs to complete, then that might take me the rest of the year.  That's a very long time.  At the same time, you can't rush it, and I will continue to do it as long as I feel like I'm getting benefits (which I definitely am).

Also, as an aside: I'm proud of myself.  I did not buy GM Ganguly's recent new course.  Not because I didn't want it, but because I knew I had no time to study it.  I can always buy it later, and I'm not adding to my backlog.  If it takes me 100hrs to go through Smirnov's courses, then I don't really need to add any more, do I?  No more rampant consumerism from Smithy ... at least for now.

See you next month with hopefully even more momentum on my side.