u/bazballerFM

In short i play a lot of competitive chess, mostly online and have been in love with the game forever, and have beaten certain titled master players as an amateur. I just discovered there is a scene for competitive scrabble and my country has national titles for both expert and masters. It is a long road but i love these sort of journeys. I was looking if someone could help me by pointing to resources?

I have looked around myself and i have understood that, one of the first things to do is to memorize CSW24's 2 and 3 word lists. I am onto it. But what next? I saw some expert players make some beautiful bingos and it made my jaw drop as to how cool that was. Moreover what is the website that hosts the most number of players for online play? Ideally i would like to begin playing with bots and then play with real players to figure out my current strength and then analyze my plays to improve.

For context, i do not mind studying a lot. I am not looking for instant results, i am looking to play scrabble throughout my life in tournaments alongside my chess journey.

I know some basic endgames like K vs K+P and Phillidor and Lucena positions. But i am prone to always mishandling endgames i get in my own games. I feel i am lacking concrete moves in critical positions because i my strategy is just "make the king active and pray." Particularly in pawn endings when both sides have pawn all over the board, i manage to lose even the most drawn positions. I do fairly okay in Rook endgames, but that is about it.

Minor piece endgames or just pawn endings are the bane of my existence. I also lack the understanding to figure out whether an endgame is losing or drawing. How to improve this aspect of my play? I have never actually studied this part of the game in a structured manner. Any suggestions are welcome. Ideally i would like to become a very strong endgame player in the future so i drop less points. Im around 2150-2200 Rapid on both sites.

Some of you may have read my previous post on doing the Polgar 5334 mates. In it i stated i will be tracking my data of how many rating points i gain through the training method i am embarking on. I have been tracking my solving progress with time for each session. But i need to supplement it with serious and long time control games. For example 30+30, 45+45 or an hour each.

I am looking for people who can play a long time control game once a while, it could be weekly, or monthly. But after that i want to analyze the game without an engine, write down my thought process and then send them to you for your ideas. If you are willing to share your own analysis of what you were thinking on during the critical stages of the game i would be grateful.

This approach is to improve in game decision making. The rapid time controls are not long enough for me to consider candidate moves of a quiet/positional nature. I have a habit of playing too fast and i deliberately want training games where i will be forced to slow down. So i want to note down how much time i took on each move. If you are interested, i am even happy to do opening sparring with you, where we decide on a fix variation and then play from there.

I am 2150-2200 Rapid in online play both sites. But the games will be unrated on a fresh training account that i have made. So i can track data easily once i begin playing rated games on this account.

Here is what i mean by analysis without an engine. I want to look at a critical position, and write down the variations of the candidate moves i considered, my evaluations of them during the game and why i chose the one that i thought was better. That and on which move i went out of book. These are the two most central things i want to get out of it. Happy training!

Super inspired by GM Jesse Kraai's love for the book i have decided to tackle it head on. I know Chess Dojo has particular mates assigned to particular rating ranges, but i really like the mammoth task of finishing the whole of it, plus in his personal experience Jesse has said throughout his life he went through this book cover to cover multiple times. I like this sort of study, something that is repeatable and cannot be finished unless you have genuine love for the game/book. If anyone is insane enough to join me on this journey i would really enjoy it! I could send you my progress every 3-4 days to be accountable. If not, that is fine too! I know it is a quite a "out there" ask so i totally understand. See you in about 8 months? (Shot in the dark estimate) when i am done with my journey.

I will return with an Excel spreadsheet of my current rating, percentage of puzzles i got right, what kind of puzzles i got the most wrong (bishop mates, knight, endgame etc etc) and my rating gains (if any). After this mission is successful then i will move to a similar book project, 1001 tactics series of books, maybe yusupov? With the same tracking of data of serious games with a fixed repertoire.

This is not meant to be my only training but rather be a supplemental part of my daily tactics/calculation training. Have a great day!! Let's smash them goals.