How I took my USCF rating from 1547 to 1858 while in my 40s

Adult improvement is possible if you get out of your own way

If you’re a USCF 1500-rated chess player, give yourself some credit. You know a ton about chess. You must have spent a lot of time learning about tactics and strategies, possibly endgames, maybe even openings. On the other hand, you’re not exactly at the top of the chess world. You probably want to improve.

But improving when you already know so much is really hard. When you were a beginner, all you had to do to improve was learn what a fork was, or learn to put your rooks on open files, or learn to develop your pieces and castle before attacking. Now that you’re a 1500, you already know all that stuff. There’s probably not a single tidbit of chess wisdom that you don’t already know. Improvement is much harder to come by.

That was my experience. I was stuck in that rating range for a very long time. But I broke out of it, and raised my rating from 1547 at the beginning of 2022 to 1858 now, in April of 2023.

I first played tournament chess when I was 15 years old, in 1995. My peak rating as a teenager was 1584. I quit chess for college, then briefly came back at age 23. I bought books and spent time studying, and my rating went up... about 40 points. Then it went back down. It was at 1596 when I quit again in 2005, and this time I wouldn't be back for 16 years.

In late 2021, now in my 40s, I decided I would have another go at improving. This time, I would focus on analyzing and learning from my own games, not so much from books or other forms of content.

I quit playing blitz and changed all my online chess time to 15 10 rapid games. I also went to as many OTB tournaments as I could. I put each game in a Lichess study and analyzed it, first without looking at the engine analysis, and then afterwards. I began to learn some things about the mistakes I was prone to.

Unfortunately, the lack of blitz time turned out to be a disaster. In my slow games, I was missing really basic things about the position. Things like what pieces were attacking what. Things I used to be able to do in one second while playing blitz, I was failing to do in multiple minutes looking at a position in a classical game. It seemed blitz was exercising the brain muscles that did that, and I needed to keep those in shape.

And this is where I hit on the recipe that would ultimately result in a 300-point USCF rating climb: Play a reasonable amount of blitz online. Go to as many OTB tournaments as I could. And analyze every game like a detective trying to answer the question: Why am I so bad at chess?

(It's probably also important to mention that I made a conscious decision not to care about my rating for at least six months. I knew how hard chess improvement was, and was not confident my rating would go up at all. The plan was to play a lot of rated chess, and that was going to be awfully hard if it bothered me a lot anytime my rating went down.)

Pretty quickly, I figured out some stuff about my weaknesses. The two things that proved the most useful were:

1. Identifying and categorizing the specific situations in which I made preventable blunders

2. Realizing that I was ruining good games by getting into time trouble, and that the clock needed more active management than I was giving it

To give you an idea of the types of blunders I'm talking about, look at this position, which happened in an OTB game early in this process.

I considered playing Bxd5, and noticed that my opponent couldn't recapture with 1) the c4 pawn, because it was pinned, or 2) the e4 bishop, because that would undefend their knight. I double and triple checked those facts, and then played Bxd5.

I missed that they could recapture with the rook. Which they did. And then I was down a piece.

This is not just a blunder. It's not just preventable. It's embarrassing. I had to overcome that in order to be able to look at it at all. But the embarrassing blunders are the ones where the most potential for chess improvement is. If something on the chess board is very obvious to you after it's been pointed out, but not before, then that's absolute gold for chess improvement. It means you're almost there. You did the hard work of learning a chess concept. You just need to think of it at the right time.

Errors of shallow calculation like Bxd5 were clearly a problem for me. The good news is that solving a problem like that is easy - you just have to be aware of it. Any time I was considering a bold move like Bxd5, a move that required some calculation, I learned to ask myself: Are there any extremely obvious refutations of this? Like something my opponent can play on their very next move? I got in the habit of doing that check and others, and that prevented a lot of blunders going forward.

Time trouble was my other big problem. I had no strategy at all for managing the clock. The result was that I moved too slowly in the middlegame, got in time trouble later, and lost a lot of winnable positions.

I learned a strategy from "The Improving Chess Thinker" by Dan Heisman. Divide the number of minutes in your time control by 40, because 40 is the number of moves in a typical chess game. This gives you a target for average time per move. I started writing down my clock time after every move, because that's the only way to know how many minutes I spent on each move. After each move, I'd subtract, and find out if I was above or below the target for that move. As the game went on, I'd adjust my target depending on if I used more or less time than planned, and on whether it looked like a long endgame was likely.

This worked great. The downside - possibly some suboptimal moves in the early middlegame due to spending 3 minutes on a move instead of 10 minutes - were abundantly outweighed by the extra time I had later.

(If you move too slowly or too quickly, you should fix that before you work on any other area of chess improvement. The cost/benefit of this is off the charts. It's a much more straighforward thing to fix than anything about tactics or strategy, and if you don't fix it, you're sabotaging everything else you're trying to do.)

In retrospect, when I was a 1500, I already had the knowledge of strategies, tactical patterns, endgames, openings, etc., of an 1800. I didn't need to read more books, or do more Chessable courses, or watch more chess YouTube videos. I just had to figure out how to get out of my own way.

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