Chessable user CurtisM97 and his remarkable chess improvement

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Chessable user CurtisM97 and his remarkable chess improvement
Chessable user CurtisM97 and his remarkable chess improvement

Recently I had the opportunity to have a brief exchange with one of our Chessable members, CurtisM97 who has achieved vast improvements in his chess. Curtis is Memorial University of Newfoundland student intending on majoring in Psychology, and his Chessable study patterns are commendable. While not one of our power users who have managed to gather millions of points and studying hundreds of positions in relatively short periods of time, Curtis has made slow but steady gains.

At the moment of writing this, Curtis has learned 135 variations and his maximum daily streak is only 4. However, this is more than enough! You don’t have to learn 300-500 variations and log on every single day, we all have other commitments. Regular and incremental study sessions of chess openings is what’s important. Keep those tricky variations fresh in your mind and don’t try to cram it all in one day, take your time and slowly build up!

My own personal streak has never gone above 30 days, and that was with a lot of effort. I am surprised how some of our Chessable members have kept it going for over hundreds of days! Incredible!

Now, let’s find out a bit more about this amazing rapid chess improvement:

1) You have improved around 500 points in a year of online chess, that’s impressive, how do you feel?
I can only describe my progress as satisfying! I started playing the game because it seemed so satisfying to be good at. So starting with no knowledge of any chess fundamentals and then developing to the point where I am today is very pleasing to me.

2) A lot of work must have gone into this, and your game must have improved all around for such a brilliant change. Let’s break it down, how have you improved your chess openings?
I am very privileged to grow up in a time where information is accessible. Having a tool like Chessable on hand has improved my playing significantly, it really sums up what the Internet has to offer chess. Having so much information in one place has allowed me to develop a system for my own playing preferences, and that’s the only way I could learn openings without frustration.

3) Which openings do you play (if you don’t mind sharing!)?
I’ve always played 1. d4 as white, just because I was exposed to that when I started playing. As black, I play the Nimzo-Indian versus d4 and the Caro-Kann versus e4.

4) How have you improved your middle game?
Middle games are a little harder to get used to than the opening for me personally. I mostly depended on chess personalities on YouTube for middle game help. People such as IM John Bartholomew have helped me understand the middle game, as he is one of the most coherent commentators on the Internet. Other than that, Nimzowitsch’s book “My System” has helped me out a lot.

5) What about your endgame, have you worked on that at all?
Admittedly I haven’t really read a book that solely talked about end games. But I have taken as much advice from Grandmaster games and YouTube videos as possible, but I don’t think I could consider that study. I just know the very basics about end game fundamentals.

6) You gained over 200,000 points on Chessable, that’s pretty impressive. What would be your tips to new Chessable users about how to get the most out of the platform?
Studying chess is much like studying anything else. Chessable is a fantastic program for chess study, but you have to study at a healthy pace. Cramming yourself with information will not improve your play, you’ll just get overwhelmed! Develop a study plan, and review what you learned every day! There’s no rush. I’ve been using Chessable since release, so It’s not like I’ve gained 200,000 points over night, it came with time. Making a system for your playing creates consistency in your results.

7) What would you personally like to see improved on Chessable?
At this point in time, the only thing that could be improved with Chessable is purely aesthetic, but that’s being updated very frequently! For a site that’s only in an open beta, you’re getting much more than what you could ask of it.

8) What’s next for you? Any new goals?
Of course my only goal right now is to keep improving! At this point I’m more than happy with the rate of my success. It’s a long shot, but I’d like to increase 200 rating points by November of 2017. That would be my goal for the year. Although it’s only Internet elo, it’s a nice sign of improvement until I have confidence to play OTB in my local tournaments here in Newfoundland!

Thanks Curtis! It’s very inspiring to hear of your progress for our readers and us! As for your struggle with middle games and chess endgames, I am happy to say that adding more chess strategy, chess tactics and chess endgame books is one of our priorities that will hopefully soon be a reality. We also have some novel ideas on how to make studying those as efficient as possible, even more than our system already makes possible. Since those are the areas of my own game that could now use some improvement, expect to see something cool soon!

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