My rating continued to climb after my last post, going from the mid-300s to just over 500. Recently, though, I seem to be in a plateau around that half-thousand figure, and it’s frustrating. Why? Well, the first reason is due to a misconception of mine. As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the Chess Dojo training program, which is sensibly divided into rating ranges, with different assigned tasks for each range. I’m in the lowest, which is labeled 0-400. I was eagerly awaiting getting to 400 on one of the online chess platforms, chess.com. It would feel so good to “graduate” and not be in the lowliest cohort anymore. But I had neither read the fine print nor remembered that everything involving chess has to be complicated. There are a zillion different rating systems in chess. It is not like, say, batting average. Even chess.com and lichess.org, our main playing spaces, do not agree. My ~500 on chess.com is not greater than the 400 of Chess Dojo, which uses FIDE, the system of the International Chess Federation, admittedly a more legitimate standard to use. However, the fine print says that the 0-400 band covers ratings of up to 650 on chess.com.
I know, your eyes may be glazing over and you are thinking that this is too much obsessing about numbers. But the other drawback of a low rating is that it is a little lonely at the bottom. Although you can learn from facing opponents who have ratings significantly lower or higher than yours, and you should of course play them occasionally, the ideal chess opponent is someone near your level. It’s just the right degree of challenge, and both players have a chance of winning and gaining a few rating points. As I write this, there are about 65 people enrolled in the 0-400 band of the Chess Dojo training program, which has been hugely successful–more than its creators envisioned–recently attaining its 1,000th participant. But only 15 or so members of that lowest cohort have a chess.com rating below 600, like me. Why? Well, Chess Dojo lets you sign up for whatever cohort you want, and they provide such good training of the fundamentals of chess that people want to spend time at the lower levels to make sure their chess foundation is solid. That’s all good. But one of my hopes for the program was to find serious people around my rating to play with–instead of those wonderful random strangers I play online every day.
Our rating band recently had a tournament. Only six people, or about 10 percent of the cohort, entered, and during the three-week period of the tournament, two of those “graduated” to the next level up. So I played one person at my rating level and two who were considerably higher. I finished last, with 0 wins. This sounds like I am blaming my poor performance on the rating differentials, but I am not. My teacher has said that I can defeat anyone–especially those with ratings up to 1,000–as long as I don’t blunder, and that has given me some wind under my wings. I went into the tournament games thinking that I could win any game, but in each case I eventually blundered. I did capitalize on a blunder made by the opponent at exactly my level, but not enough to win. The tournament was actually a great experience for me. These were the longest games I had ever played. Although the training program suggests that people in the 0-400 band play games no longer than 30 minutes per side, the tournament games were 90 minutes per side. One of my games lasted for 2 hours and 20 minutes! This is excellent training for over-the-board tournaments, which generally have long time controls. But I think my brain needs more practice before it can correctly calculate “if he takes this, and I take that, and he takes this, and I take that. . .” for more than an hour at a stretch.
In any event, a new tournament for our band has been announced, and I will soldier on, no matter the ratings of the other entrants. If I defeat someone with a higher rating, I get more rating points, so maybe I will graduate one of these days. At least I know I’ll be playing with people who care enough about their chess improvement to pay to join a training program, and when schedules permit we meet online to do a post-mortem of the game and/or compare written analyses, essential pieces of any chess improvement plan.
Be First to Comment