Six ways to boost my chess.

Some Grandmaster navel-gazing.

After the 20 rating points I dropped in Hungary and the five I dumped in the South Wales international open, I am on the verge of joining the bargain basement Grandmasters who are under 2400.

It got me thinking- how can I turn the tide? For an older Grandmaster unless you study for several hours a day which doesn’t seem to be realistic given my fatigue issues, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to avoid losing rating points beyond the nuclear option, of stopping playing altogether.

Lets define rating deflation in bare terms. Imagine that there are a pool of 1,000 grandmasters who are all rated 2400 and none of them are underrated and none of them are overrated. Just imagine that as a theoretical concept, however unlikely the scenario is. You then add to the pool, 1,000 players who are rated 2000. Of those players, 700 are underrated and 300 are overrated.

The initial 1,000 players will inevitably lose rating playing against their (mostly) underrated counterparts, and the more they play the more they will lose. This is essentially what has happened within the FIDE rating system. Older grandmasters have been exposed to an army of new players who have come into chess post-Covid, and we have lost rating, with very few exceptions. The more active you are as a player, the more you lose. It really is that simple.

So if I want to keep playing a lot but don’t want to end up at 2280, perhaps I could do the following things:

1. Work/prepare harder. When we think about one of the few players who fought against the tide in Viktor Korchnoi, it was because he was able to maintain a relentless work ethic into his latter years, driven by an overwhelming desire to achieve. A lot of my motivation seems to be activated in a negative way; I look at players around me in rating, and think I’m so much stronger than them that it’s silly. I know they shouldn’t be anywhere near and it irks me. But you can prove as much by brute force. Outwork those around you, even if realistically you can’t outwork that 14 year old kid in India who is doing 10 hours a day on chess.

2. Take the passion out of it. I seem to overreact when something goes wrong and often I’ll even curtail games too early, by taking a repetition, if I don’t like my position or if I fear my opponent. The best players are colder and more objective.

3. Make Michael Adams my template. For me, one of the reasons Michael Adams has been so successful is because like a lot if not all elite players, is he is very consistent. Everything he does including how he walks, how he sits at the game, his body movements, his posture, it’s all done in the same way. In particular I could learn from Adams’ cool objectivity, his sangfroid. At the board too often, I’m a bundle of nerves, which leads me on to my next point.

4. The reason I believe that I become so nervous during games is because deep down I don’t believe in myself and my analytical method. When I’ve played and analysed with players like David Howell and Adams, it quickly becomes clear that their analysis is on a higher level, and I think a player stands and falls on the quality of their analysis. So one way I can improve is by raising the quality of my analysis and delivering on that more consistently. I think playing a lot will help.

5. Get a big bag of food for the game. Games that finish early, it strikes me how hungry I am afterwards. So get a big bag of food full of nuts and chocolate and fruit and hope that it keeps me going, and don’t be afraid to have a big meal before the game including a Kasparovian bloody steak, to keep the energy levels up if the game goes a long way.

6. Try to calm down. My primary weakness seems to be a tendency to play too quickly. Perhaps this stems from being nervous, or from playing too much blitz online, or from too much caffeine. This inability to sit on my hands seems to bleed into game play itself, as I tend to favour more forcing play over more wise, patient decisions.

Of course as a chess player and competitor it is easy to be too hard on yourself. I do a lot of things right and have achieved a lot of success as a player. But it’s the belief that I could do much better still, and that I have been an underachiever in terms of winning titles like the British championships, that drives me on. We all want to become the best version of ourselves and I know that at the moment that I’m not quite good enough. As well as the issues listed above, I need to become better technically. When I reach some kind of equal endgame, my level dips considerably compared to some torrid middlegame, or at least relatively compared to other players.

My ability to resolve these issues over the next few months and years will be crucial in terms of achieving my full potential as a player. If I don’t, my career will slip into mediocrity and full of regret that I gave my opponent’s too easy a time and didn’t grasp the chances that were offered to me.