English Chess Forum

Afternoon Team

How many FIDE events should a chess player play in each year to improve?

Weather is fantastic today and the melon plants are really growing well.

Hmm, while I suspect you would prefer a general answer; this sort of question is notoriously hard to be precise with given the ramifications of each person's development growth and style.

Speaking from personal experience, I'm not yet at the level where I can play in exclusively (or majority) FIDE events at the appropriate level. So if we scale the question to how many ECF events should a player play in each year to improve, I can share some experience.

Biographical and general ramble warning.

First off, I'm still improving - I'm not the sort of player who exploded on the scene as an undergraded junior then with coaching, grew up and graded up year after year. I'm more the sort who has very big mountain-climbing legs, but who takes a while to make those big steps. It isn't as apt an example; but when I had been woodpushing as a kid, I ambled along until the age of 16 with a grade no higher than 55 But I'm almost perversely proud of this now. In my first year of sixth form I began to think differently, thanks to Teach Yourself Better Chess (Hartston), and went straight up to 107 (j). I then spent a few years polishing and modifying the thoughts I had at that level, until the point where despite having the discerning eye to spot mistakes my opponents made from a positional standpoint, I couldn't exploit them tactically. I hovered and hovered and got a job, and so my time for the game diminished - but then I changed employer and started working focusedly on my tactical prowess. Aged 24 I broke the old 120 barrier, but also had learned enough about myself (a process I am still engaged in deeply, partly due to diagnosis of Anxiety Disorder, which is actually a good thing from the absolutive standpoint) to start to maximise my potential in some games. I got to 136 but in the second half of 2010 I went on a tear and was performing at easily over 150. At that point though I saw an upper ceiling of ability based on the way I was playing - very calculatory, and tactically-based. I decided then and there to strike while the temporal iron was hot and totally build from the basics again from a positional/masterthought standpoint, even if it meant sacrificing my gains of the time. This appears to have worked, and I'm very proud to say I should be pushing 160 in the new grading list for summer.

How did I do this?

A lot of it has come from being able to be ruthlessly, Ronnie O'Sullivanly, hyperperfectionist about faults, and egoless in admitting them (though the way I write this, I come across as far from egoless!! :/ ). I played my first FIDE event in 2010, and since then have attended the British yearly - this summer holiday is equivalent to playing 5 rated events in one go, and I also play in the county championship here. While we could say "Dan plays in 6 ECF rated events a year", this could be misleading as a statistic to the original question. What if I played an event where in each game, I got 15 moves deep in the opening while using zero time, and had a healthy advantage in each game with neither any tactical melees or deep positional problems? On the contrary; what if I played an event where I got ground down to dust in each game without a clue what happened?

Thankfully for me neither of these has yet come about, and I remain for the most part able to extract the thread of play from games. Some players, while able to see where they went wrong in an individual game (antipositional idea, naive tactic etc), won't be able to track the patterns of their sin throughout the season, or, more tellingly, won't have access/time to working on the solutions to these. I'm lucky really: I work part-time, and I'm young, and, as if that wasn't enough, we have a strikingly competitive club championship, so I can't really say that I'm on a lonely plateau of understanding with people above and people below.

Given this, I would imagine that to the player's own content, the more games played, the better; with the proviso that it's better to play the sorts of event that suit your nature, but to challenge yourself too. It's no good going all-in for a weekender if you can't summon the heavy energy required of you to battle at a good level for the whole five games. Likewise, if you find it difficult to be an intense individual, you may be unsatisfied with 9 rounder FIDE events where you only have to crescendo once a day. I guess this is part of the beauty of playing a full British tournaments schedule for me: I'm stretching my comfort zone by forcing myself to pace my play (except in go for broke 5th round banzais), and the sheer volume in time of the games ensures that whatever my thought-form and general ability at the time, I'll immediately have games I'm capable of annotating/learning from deeply, rather than having to be in a particular mood like you might be if you play an exhausting league game that would require an equally taxing session in your study.

Looking at the grade histories of many of Britain's grandmasters, many of them played like the dickens in their young youth - Nosher is known for having played hundreds of games a year when very young, and the internet can only exaggerate this phenomenon now. Of course those jealousy-inducing smart bods have an exceptional ability to see and extract the data/information from their games, so copying them by trying to play 300 rated games a year will leave you little joy. Don't go playing hours of blitz if you can't perform at close to your best. If you're losing a piece or pawn to misvision more than once every 6-7 games, that's probably a red flag. (Says the man who was involved in two separate six hour games last summer alone...)

I guess it also depends on what improve means in your context. It might mean 'being able to more frequently play to your highest potential, given current knowledge', or it might mean 'gaining an attitude and desire to increase the volume of applicable knowledge within games', or subsets of this - a casual improving player might do some endgames, a junior might bonk his tactics rating first and worry about all else later. For me, improvement means something tangible. I get a real sense of moving up the monkey bars when I play a game and can self-reference an earlier effort where I did something that I now understand to be positionally suspect, AND am now able to go in the right direction instead (since it benefits nobody if you know that out of 4 ways to travel, south leads to death by crocodile, but you don't know which way doesn't). Or to put it another way; sometimes in a game I may find myself moving fluently in the sort of position where earlier I'd break down. That's a real buzz.

Since there is no real way to answer this question quantitatively I will just pick an arbitrary number - 20 !

Peter D Williams wrote:Afternoon Team

How many FIDE events should a chess player play in each year to improve?

Weather is fantastic today and the melon plants are really growing well.

No easy answer and much depends on how much spare time you have. For ambitious juniors I would recommend playing events with increment so their first experience isn't a World or European event and preferably trying a game a day schedule or at least a 4-5 day event. I think playing in general is good, be it rated or unrated games but also making some time to look through games played and trying to learn something from each one.

In Peter junior's case I would be happy to see him play any chess at all as he remains a great talent.

Dan O'Dowd wrote:Hmm, while I suspect you would prefer a general answer; this sort of question is notoriously hard to be precise with given the ramifications of each person's development growth and style.

Speaking from personal experience, I'm not yet at the level where I can play in exclusively (or majority) FIDE events at the appropriate level. So if we scale the question to how many ECF events should a player play in each year to improve, I can share some experience.

Biographical and general ramble warning.

First off, I'm still improving - I'm not the sort of player who exploded on the scene as an undergraded junior then with coaching, grew up and graded up year after year. I'm more the sort who has very big mountain-climbing legs, but who takes a while to make those big steps. It isn't as apt an example; but when I had been woodpushing as a kid, I ambled along until the age of 16 with a grade no higher than 55 But I'm almost perversely proud of this now. In my first year of sixth form I began to think differently, thanks to Teach Yourself Better Chess (Hartston), and went straight up to 107 (j). I then spent a few years polishing and modifying the thoughts I had at that level, until the point where despite having the discerning eye to spot mistakes my opponents made from a positional standpoint, I couldn't exploit them tactically. I hovered and hovered and got a job, and so my time for the game diminished - but then I changed employer and started working focusedly on my tactical prowess. Aged 24 I broke the old 120 barrier, but also had learned enough about myself (a process I am still engaged in deeply, partly due to diagnosis of Anxiety Disorder, which is actually a good thing from the absolutive standpoint) to start to maximise my potential in some games. I got to 136 but in the second half of 2010 I went on a tear and was performing at easily over 150. At that point though I saw an upper ceiling of ability based on the way I was playing - very calculatory, and tactically-based. I decided then and there to strike while the temporal iron was hot and totally build from the basics again from a positional/masterthought standpoint, even if it meant sacrificing my gains of the time. This appears to have worked, and I'm very proud to say I should be pushing 160 in the new grading list for summer.

How did I do this?

A lot of it has come from being able to be ruthlessly, Ronnie O'Sullivanly, hyperperfectionist about faults, and egoless in admitting them (though the way I write this, I come across as far from egoless!! :/ ). I played my first FIDE event in 2010, and since then have attended the British yearly - this summer holiday is equivalent to playing 5 rated events in one go, and I also play in the county championship here. While we could say "Dan plays in 6 ECF rated events a year", this could be misleading as a statistic to the original question. What if I played an event where in each game, I got 15 moves deep in the opening while using zero time, and had a healthy advantage in each game with neither any tactical melees or deep positional problems? On the contrary; what if I played an event where I got ground down to dust in each game without a clue what happened?

Thankfully for me neither of these has yet come about, and I remain for the most part able to extract the thread of play from games. Some players, while able to see where they went wrong in an individual game (antipositional idea, naive tactic etc), won't be able to track the patterns of their sin throughout the season, or, more tellingly, won't have access/time to working on the solutions to these. I'm lucky really: I work part-time, and I'm young, and, as if that wasn't enough, we have a strikingly competitive club championship, so I can't really say that I'm on a lonely plateau of understanding with people above and people below.

Given this, I would imagine that to the player's own content, the more games played, the better; with the proviso that it's better to play the sorts of event that suit your nature, but to challenge yourself too. It's no good going all-in for a weekender if you can't summon the heavy energy required of you to battle at a good level for the whole five games. Likewise, if you find it difficult to be an intense individual, you may be unsatisfied with 9 rounder FIDE events where you only have to crescendo once a day. I guess this is part of the beauty of playing a full British tournaments schedule for me: I'm stretching my comfort zone by forcing myself to pace my play (except in go for broke 5th round banzais), and the sheer volume in time of the games ensures that whatever my thought-form and general ability at the time, I'll immediately have games I'm capable of annotating/learning from deeply, rather than having to be in a particular mood like you might be if you play an exhausting league game that would require an equally taxing session in your study.

Looking at the grade histories of many of Britain's grandmasters, many of them played like the dickens in their young youth - Nosher is known for having played hundreds of games a year when very young, and the internet can only exaggerate this phenomenon now. Of course those jealousy-inducing smart bods have an exceptional ability to see and extract the data/information from their games, so copying them by trying to play 300 rated games a year will leave you little joy. Don't go playing hours of blitz if you can't perform at close to your best. If you're losing a piece or pawn to misvision more than once every 6-7 games, that's probably a red flag. (Says the man who was involved in two separate six hour games last summer alone...)

I guess it also depends on what improve means in your context. It might mean 'being able to more frequently play to your highest potential, given current knowledge', or it might mean 'gaining an attitude and desire to increase the volume of applicable knowledge within games', or subsets of this - a casual improving player might do some endgames, a junior might bonk his tactics rating first and worry about all else later. For me, improvement means something tangible. I get a real sense of moving up the monkey bars when I play a game and can self-reference an earlier effort where I did something that I now understand to be positionally suspect, AND am now able to go in the right direction instead (since it benefits nobody if you know that out of 4 ways to travel, south leads to death by crocodile, but you don't know which way doesn't). Or to put it another way; sometimes in a game I may find myself moving fluently in the sort of position where earlier I'd break down. That's a real buzz.

You make some very interesting points many thx for replying to this post

LawrenceCooper wrote:

Peter D Williams wrote:Afternoon Team

How many FIDE events should a chess player play in each year to improve?

Weather is fantastic today and the melon plants are really growing well.

No easy answer and much depends on how much spare time you have. For ambitious juniors I would recommend playing events with increment so their first experience isn't a World or European event and preferably trying a game a day schedule or at least a 4-5 day event. I think playing in general is good, be it rated or unrated games but also making some time to look through games played and trying to learn something from each one.

In Peter junior's case I would be happy to see him play any chess at all as he remains a great talent.

I would agree with that advice.

We may visit a chess club at end of May to play unrated chess games lets hope some chess players are in that day.

I tell Peter what you said many thanks

Peter D Williams wrote:How many FIDE events should a chess player play in each year to improve?

Here's the top juniors rating list for the last month, with number of games played:

http://ratings.fide.com/toparc.phtml?cod=259

My own less than rigorous research suggests that more than 50 rated long play games per year might be correlated with improvement. Fewer than 50 seems from the data to be a bit hopeless over the medium to long term.

I suspect that correlation might not be causative? Juniors tend to improve when really interested and that's when they'll be playing most too.

There's certainly a solid body of people who play 50 - and some a lot more! - a season without improvement.

MartinCarpenter wrote: There's certainly a solid body of people who play 50 - and some a lot more! - a season without improvement.

If you rank the ECF grading list by number of games, you find amongst adults anyway that activity and grade improvement don't seem to mix. I think it right to take a break every so often and try to figure out just why you lose or fail to win quite so many.

With a k factor of 15, you need to play approx 50 games for your rating to reflect your playing strength, so I'd pick 50.

Sean Hewitt wrote:With a k factor of 15, you need to play approx 50 games for your rating to reflect your playing strength, so I'd pick 50.

Does that not depend on how underrated somebody is? Or is it the case that 50 games allows someone's rating to keep up with their potential improvement

Andrew Collins wrote:

Sean Hewitt wrote:With a k factor of 15, you need to play approx 50 games for your rating to reflect your playing strength, so I'd pick 50.

Does that not depend on how underrated somebody is? Or is it the case that 50 games allows someone's rating to keep up with their potential improvement

If you are under rated by 100 points you'll gain 2.1 points per game on average, so after 50 games you would reach your correct strength. Under-rated by 200 points and you gain 3.9 per game on average. 300 points and you gain 5.25 per game on average. Of course, how many rating periods you play your games over matters because as your rating creeps up, so the rating points you gain per game goes down.

thanks for that explanation, I think I understand, but doesn't each game get rated individually in order when it comes to the FIDE monthly calculations, so I don't quite understand what difference the period of time between the games make

Andrew Collins wrote:thanks for that explanation, I think I understand, but doesn't each game get rated individually in order when it comes to the FIDE monthly calculations, so I don't quite understand what difference the period of time between the games make

If your rating is constantly going up then you will gain more points playing off a lower rating for the same performance but if you play over different rating lists then your rating will be going up. So if you play 50 games you will gain more if they are rated whilst your rating is at its lowest.

Andrew Collins wrote: but doesn't each game get rated individually in order when it comes to the FIDE monthly calculations, so I don't quite understand what difference the period of time between the games make

The point is that with 50 games, you are unlikely to be able to play that many over a month. When your rating is recalculated at the end of the month, it changes the base point for the calculations. So if you were 200 points under rated at the start and you gain 20 points in the first rating period, you are now only 180 points under rated and the gain each future game is lower. More frequent rating benefits your opponents, since they don't lose quite so many points.