Improvement

Originally posted by MoneyMaker7
Why just talk about improvement? Face it...Unless you're under 16 you won't improve much anymore. Unless you commit yourself to a lot of study every day for a long period, you may be lucky and go up by 200 points at best.

hehe, not so far from truth(probably after you play something like 5000-10000 chess games you will reach some peak and maybe your statement is true after that)....
Even Kasparov got a 2650 or so rating performance in his first really strong tournament at the age of 16 (where he was sent by mistake) and after that he increased about 200 points more 🙂...Anyway, all the today SuperGMs 2700+ I bet that were having 2500+ before 18 years old.

Originally posted by vipiu
Even Kasparov got a 2650 or so rating performance in his first really strong tournament at the age of 16

I think he started at the age of 5, so he had already been playing 11 years at that point. strong coaching since the age of 8. -maybe most of us wouldn't be 2600 after similar training, but we'd be pretty good. given of course that we sustained the motivation through it all...

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But you've had online coaching from a very highly rated player, worked through many tactics puzzles (a form of study IMHO) and studied specific opening lines from books on top of playing many games here on RHP, at ICC and OTB. And that's just what I know about!

I've always thought your rapid improvement was a tribute to the benefit of choosing the right training methods. Although I agree your study isn't "excessive" and you favour playing games over book learning, but it'd be hard to argue your success is mostly down to just playing a lot of games.

If you were to note down more precisely how you've trained it will be of interest because no one can argue with your results on this site and OTB!

And this could also be why after playing for roughly the same amount of time you play board 1 and I play board 5...suppose it could be that you're more intelligent than me but I'm more comfortable with the other explanation.🙂