After months / years of flating in the same range, I recently hit my stride in my chess playing and ramping up to 2000 in Rapid and Blitz time controls. The top <1% of players on the chess.com platform.
While my rapid time contol has always been fairly good, my blitz playing has not. The recent upswing is due in no small part to simply paying more attention. Some quick notes, which I believe translate to other domains of real-time performance, such as tennis and music performance.
1. Be dynamically good. This is my biggest breakthrough. The human animal cannot and does not remain at a static fixed constant level of performance. It’s impossible simply to try to set the bar high and not deviate from that bar. Do not try to be statically good. The better approach is to push on both your strengths and diminish your weaknesses pro-actively in real-time as you are experiencing it. Do not wait for things to happen. Anticipate by looking ahead with the mind’s eye, speedily covering/recovering from mistakes, being tenacious and trying to turn the small advantages in your favor.
2. Approach. Do not enter the arena with the wrong mind-set. I used to play when doing all sorts of other activities, and my brain was on auto-pilot. That is the wrong mind-set for this activity. Warm up, enter the right mentality, perform, cool down and analyze.
3. Analyze. Analyze and prioritize for the long-term. (I’m still not doing this in chess properly, but need to do this to get to the next level). Fix the gaping weaknesses, one by one.
4. Embrace the struggle which may be long and do not opt for ‘easy’ attempts and ‘cheapshots’, if it means exposing yourself to a potential loss. They rarely work the higher you go.
5. Specifically for chess, I have started moving almost immediately on known positions (especially in the opening) and banking the time to analyze things when the game is at a crossroads in critical positions.
Hope that helps your game!
