It's 9:45 in the evening, and this week off work has been nice. I wondered if I could get some feedback from your folks on chess personalities.
I've noticed 2 basic types of personalities in chess. Those who play the game primarily for enjoyment, and those primarily driven to be stronger players than they are now.
To those who play the game primarily for enjoyment, I'll admit I admire you folks. Though you may crack the occasional openings book, or sit through the occasional online tactics training course, you generally play chess as an enjoyable pastime. You folks enrich the chess world with your participation, and occasional brilliancies. Frankly, I wish I was more like you.
To those (slightly deranged) folks like myself who are driven to be stronger players than they are now, I can offer two thoughts to make your rocky climb a bit less stressful. 1. Do something everyday: Tired of tactics exercises? Play over a few GM games in your opening repertoire, or load some of your past games into an engine, and let it instruct you what lines of play you could have gone with, or grab an old Informant, and start working through the endgame exercises in the back of the book - but do something everyday. 2. Embrace the lag time. It's going to be several weeks or months of consistent study and play before you start to see improvement in your tournament play, so don't get discouraged if things don't take off right away. As a mid level player, I'm probably not the best qualified one to hand out advise, but my cat isn't interested, so I thought write about it here. Any thoughts?
You need a new cat.
There should be enjoyment and improvement but when one stops often the other follows. I don't understand the 900 rated with a million games played and counting, my highest rating was around 1770 and at that I knew how far behind the good players I was. Don't have the desire to study chess so as the rating didn't improve the enjoyment level dropped so stopped playing.
I'm enjoyment as well.
I accept I'm never going to be a great chess player.
I can't visualise positions far enough in advance and I'm far too lazy to try.
I have improved with the experience of playing on here but I realise that eventually I'll reach my limit without a lot of study which I haven't the motivation for.