Fajar Purnama Chess Journey

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Recommendation

This is my experience not as an expert but my experience of bottleneck or stuck at improving in chess. Like all other general activities, learning paths varies and differs to each players. It depends on the motivation of each players and be honest to your motivations in order to utilize my recommendations:

• Motivation: What do you want? Are you practicing for local fun activities? Then just focus on experience and if you have time the little bit of everything. Do you want to master chess? Then you have no choice but go for chess education as well where you dive into the philosophies and theories. However if you only want to become an expert, then chess entertainment is actually enough.
• Experience: if you are new and became addicted to playing chess, then this is your initial best path where minimizing blunders and mistakes actually made me the top player locally or among general people who just play chess for fun as the saying goes that sparring is one of the fastest training growth. While to be the best is always playing the best move but Garry Kasparov said that as a human, chess is about not making bad moves. Which is why initially is best to play a lot and train not to make bad moves like blunders and mistakes.
• Entertainment: watching tournaments, watching top players play while comment live, and watching content creators about chess can actually unlock our next level where for me just this clears my previous wall and made me interest in really studying chess. When top players play and especially when streaming they give comments when they move. Lectures based on experience is better than any theories. They taught me stuffs I always ignored before like developing all pieces, keeping the king safe, and then adjusting the piece into comfortable positions pushed me to the next level. Finally after watching even more of their streams, just one more statement pushed to even another level and that is controlling the center.
• Education:
• Warnings: Experience alone hits a wall and especially true when grinding fast pace gameplay like bullet games without stable and consistent correct mindset. Bullet games without mindset is just an addiction. I played 100x more bullets and did not help my skills at all and instead can make my skill worse. What makes my skill worse are habits forming of not thinking and just not to make bad moves to win on time. Bullet is good to solidifying your understanding of chess but not improve them. If your chess understanding is bad from the start, what can you solidify in bullet? Studies find that the fastest way to improve is to analyze after every game like learning why your moves are bad and what moves is recommended instead and not to forget understanding why the new move is recommended. Chess engines gives the absolute best moves but sometimes cannot understand the reason behind those moves and therefore it is recommended to find alternatives move you understand and put the best moves on the shelve to study later. Here is my testimony after I took a long break from bullet for while and study. After minimizing my openings in order to study middle and end games more, I tested them playing classical, then rapid, then blitz. I played until the study are ingrained in my head where I reach a way higher ratings in classical, rapid, and blitz. I then return from my break to bullet and the result is amazing. Before I struggled with time and this time felt like I still have a lot of time left and win a lot. I enjoy playing bullet now way more than before where my visions felt wide compared to before where it felt narrow when I was struggling.

Beginning

It really just started when I was in primary school that thought me board games and one of them is chess. Nothing special here really just knowing the pieces, the rules, and the objective of the game. It can be counted that I did not really play chess here.

Routine Play - Blunders and Calculations

When I was in middle school, I started to play chess more often because there are friends who likes playing chess. We usually played it during recess or after school as entertainment. Finally, we began to get addicted to chess and play in parallel during classes.

This where I instinctively knew how to spot blunders and learned to be careful not to leave hanging pieces before making a move. Then I instinctively became aware of basic tactics like forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, and basic checkmates. The final instinct that I learned here is to calculate how prevent those basic tactics from happening to me and how to make those tactics happen to my opponent.

My message here to new player is that if you enjoy playing chess but still too lazy to study the theory, just play it often with friends and you will learn those basic tactics and calculations instinctively. Just this allows me to be one of the top players in my school and faculty in my university where I often won social (not competitive) tournaments conducted by them internally. However beyond this, no matter how often I play, I cannot get past a certain level where I may win most of the time against amateur players like myself but almost never won against professional players. My rating is stuck around 1200 ELO.

Concept and Philosophy of Chess

It started in highschool when I was invited to chess clubs because I often won social tournaments. While back then my only instinct is not to blunder, here I was taught the concept of activating my pieces where the more pieces activated the higher probability of winning. Just this concept alone pushed my rating to 1300. This kept me the king in my faculty in university but in university level where there are professional players, I did not stand a chance. After this I did not have time to continue playing chess because of my hectic university life.

I started playing chess again during my graduate school where I have more free time. It was an era of Youtube, other video platforms, and other social medias where content creators made chess videos showing grandmaster games and other exciting games while explaining the concepts and philosophies behind the moves. After that I found out that many world champion tournaments games are already broadcasted online with analysis and commentary. It is here I learned the name of Garry Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Wesley So, Levon Aronian, Vasyl Ivanchuk, Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, and many more. I watch documentaries for entertainment such as watching about Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Tal.

Here I learned about seeing the whole board, the grand design, and priorities. Believe it or not, back then, not to blunder was my highest priority instead of paying attention to the king either my king’s safety or my opponent’s king. I wrote priorities which that pushed my rating to 1400 - 1500 ELO:

1. The King is worth everything while Queen is worth a lot, then Rooks, then Bishops and Knights, and finally Pawns.
2. Verify before making a move whether our king is safe, leaving pieces hanging, and whether we are blundering something.
3. For long games, identitify opponents weaknesses and always be aware of their king’s safety, hanging pieces, their blunders, etc, and vice versa.
4. For short games, focus on quick solid development and king safety.
5. Activate all pieces as soon as possible, connect the pieces, and avoid wandering them especially the Queen.
6. Do not waste move and try to control the center of the board where if the opponent tries to focus on your castled king then blow the center as geometrically in chess the center is the quickest pace.
7. Do not castle as soon as possible but not too late either or quickly mate the opponent’s king before they mate yours.
8. Beware of traps for example free pieces are not always the best move where there can be better moves.
9. Try to trade pieces when you are ahead in material and avoid trading pieces when you are behind in material.
10. If you cannot find weakness, try to make one such as creating pawn structure weaknesses and concentrate attacks on certain areas.
11. If all above is done then push your pawns but try to not weaken your pawn structure.
12. If you are stuck, try to improve the position of your worst piece or try not to make your position worse. This is known as Positional Play. Instead of forcing a bad attack, I learned to use Prophylaxis—preventing my opponent’s plans while slowly improving my own structure.

Then, I became interested in different kind of openings and want to learn them all where learned the names of all 20 first move openings. This actually opens more concepts for me and as I explore apps like chess.com I found they have interactive study materials and progresses. It is here I learned the terms positional play, pawn structure, weak squares, outposts, prophylaxis, etc eventhough I only know their definitions and touched the surface but pushed my rating to around 1500 - 1600 ELO.

Focus on Few Openings

Hikaru Nakamura once said in one of his videos that it is better to focus on few openings and master them rather than learning many openings superficially. Following this advice, I focused on mastering the Queen’s Gambit as white and Sicilian Defense as black. I made a chess move explorer web application to track my studies. This is my current progress as of this writing where I start playing chess again after graduating graduate school and start working. I also learned about other than chess like my physical condition, mental state, and emotion awareness. My current focus are:

• Still do not abandon exploring and try all kinds of opening in daily games that takes many days.
• For Classic, Rapid, Blitz, and Bullet as white:
  • Englund Gambit Accepted
  • Queen’s Gambit for all other variations.
• For Classic, Rapid, Blitz, and Bullet as black:
  • King Indian Defense against Queen’s Pawn Opening
  • Accelerated Dragon against e4 c5 Nf3 Nc6 d4 cxd4 Nxd4 g6
  • Siscilian Kan against all other King’s Pawn opening
  • Queen’s Pawn Opening against all other openings
  • Sometimes Slav Defense in bullet when I accidently play Queen’s Pawn Opening against white’s Queen’s Pawn Opening.

3 Main Phases of Chess

Opening Game

Middle Game

End Game

Single Opening for All

I have beaten the highest bot on chess.com rated 1800 with strategy above. Now I need to focus on chess concepts and philosopies to climb higher. Therefore, I further reduce my openings to universally following where I really want to only play one opening for everything:

White

King’s Fianchetto: 1. g3 … 2. Bg2 … 3. Nf3 … 4. o-o

Favourite

Catalan: 1. d4 … 2. c4 … 3. g6 … 4. Bg2 … 5. Nf3 … 6. o-o

Exceptions

Pawn push: 1. g3 e5 2. Bg2 e4 3. anything except Nf3

Myers Defense: 1. g3 g5 2. Bg2 g4 3. anything except moving Ng1

Black

King’s Indian Defence: 1. … g6 2. … Bg7 3. … Nf6 4. … o-o

Safer

Nimzowitsch-Larsen Attack: 1. b3 g6 2. Bb2 Nf6

Polish Opening: 1. b4 g6 2. Bb2 Nf6

Exceptions

Pawn push: 1. e4 g6 2. e5 Bg7 3. anything except Nf6

Grob Opening: 1. g4 anything except moving Ng8