and here I was happy to get up to 1000 in Chess.com after 2 years (only to then just hover around forever). Knowledge is power etc etc but at one point nothing replaces studying.
I've found that anything under 15 minute clocks just feels like brain poison to me, though. Your brain goes completely into pattern matching mode and lose out on the actual interesting tactical analysis you can do when you're taking a bit more time. I have been queueing up daily games instead and it's nice. Games take a month to resolve but if you just continuously add to the queue that's good.
EDIT:
> I learned a bunch of openings with White for 6 months or so, also via Chessable. Amazingly I won more games with Black, where I had learned nothing, than with White. I got frustrated with this, and switched my openings entirely. It had literally no impact on my rating, and I continued to improve.
I felt this so much recently. I got kind of obsessed with the Evans gambit, and would still lose to people who would play into the gambit and let me go down the lines I knew well. I'd just flummox later on. The game below a certain point is really just "don't blunder as much as the opponent"
Sounds good to me! Ratings are a treadmill. As you get better so do your opponents. You'll always have a ~50% winrate.
I'd rather have a stable rating over time, at a level I can maintain comfortably, than have to expend ever increasing levels of energy to maintain a higher level; and probably end up having less fun. (maybe it's more like treading water. You can get more of your body out of the water, but each inch requires exponentially more effort to maintain)
That said, I started doing a lot of puzzles a while ago, as well as doing the basic mating pattern practice on Lichess. My rating jumped up a few hundred rating points. Turns out that I was missing a bunch of the basics.
Now I hover around average on the server for Blitz (~1500), and slightly above for Rapid (~1700) and that's awesome.
Your analogue is probably true to a certain extent, but in reality maintaining your current form in any domain of expertise is easier than achieving that form in the first place.
I only really have video games as an easily quantifiable example, but playing in top 1% of League of Legends doesn't really require anything more than a couple games a week to maintain that level. I have the knowledge, I know what to do, and I can execute on that. Perhaps this would be harder in a domain that leans more on physical or mental condition which tend to decrease over time, but probably not so much in Chess and the like.
I've accepted that I'm worse at chess than other people in some innate sense, but puzzles have been nice. I really enjoy the chess.com lessons as well, and listening to someone explain stuff is always pleasant. I might not absorb much, but it's better than nothing.
It's not brain poison, if you're at the level you're at. Pattern matching is incredibly important, and dishing out many games to learn those and avoiding blunders would probably help you a lot.
Have you tried mixing up games with daily moves with rapid and blitz? Mixing “do it right” with “do it fast” training is more effective than doing only one of both.
One thing a friend of mine mentioned about studying, is that you can get in a weird cycle where you end up reinforcing answering incorrectly to a thing over and over.
I think that blitz reinforces my bad habits of approximate pattern matching and ultimately makes me play worse in my other games. If I want to "do it fast" I can just open my dailies and play them fast! But this is a me problem, I routinely play board games etc too quickly, and lose because of it. I do not need help with "do it fast".
I've found that anything under 15 minute clocks just feels like brain poison to me, though. Your brain goes completely into pattern matching mode and lose out on the actual interesting tactical analysis you can do when you're taking a bit more time. I have been queueing up daily games instead and it's nice. Games take a month to resolve but if you just continuously add to the queue that's good.
EDIT:
> I learned a bunch of openings with White for 6 months or so, also via Chessable. Amazingly I won more games with Black, where I had learned nothing, than with White. I got frustrated with this, and switched my openings entirely. It had literally no impact on my rating, and I continued to improve.
I felt this so much recently. I got kind of obsessed with the Evans gambit, and would still lose to people who would play into the gambit and let me go down the lines I knew well. I'd just flummox later on. The game below a certain point is really just "don't blunder as much as the opponent"