Road to NM: Week 4 — Building a Bridge to 1600 Quick Rated

Intro

Welcome back everyone to week 4 of the Road to NM series, where I walk everybody through my journey on the road to "hopefully" NM by the end of the 2027-2028 school year. (May 2028) This week was a great week for me in multiple ways, starting with the first and most important part of hitting 1600 in Quick Rated OTB, and getting my first or second highest rated official quick win also. I'll explain all of this and everything else that happened in detail later in the blog, so let's get on into it.

OTB Play

There was both a great and positive aspect to the way OTB play went for me this week, and a negative one. I had a good performance in the weekly rapid event, but as I said in the week 3 blog, I had been planning to kick off my classical OTB fall season this weekend, but unfortunately there was a scheduling conflict to where I couldn't get a ride there, and I was unable to play in the tournament. My season will now kick off with a quads tournament on the 15th, and then I will be playing in tournaments at least the next two weekends after that, i'm not sure about the tournament dates for September yet except for one, so i'll have to see when they end up being. It will take some time for me to adjust to the consistent classical OTB play (classical is relative, all of the tournaments i'm playing in for the most part are dual-rated USCF) because I've never played in more than one classical tournament in a month and have only played 1 in the past 4 months so it'll take some time getting back adjusted to it, fortunately I've still been playing in the weekly rapid events as of late and that has still given me some decent experience.

Now, it's time for probably what you actually wanted to see, my games from the tournament this week, the first 2 which I won were pretty interesting, and the second round I won against my opponent who is 1906 in classical! A really good win for me, so I have that and the first game annotated a little more heavily, the third game I lost, and it honestly just wasn't an interesting game, I played a 2000, and had a brain lapse on move 6 and hung a pawn and my opponent converted cleanly from there. So anyways, here's the games now.

I also added the ending of this game, with the rook pawn Lucena position, here it is

And then finally the third game

Overall I think my performance wasn't bad, the first game was sloppy, and I made a catastrophic opening error in game 3, but otherwise I think I did pretty well, (I mean beating a 1900 feels fantastic to me) and from the three games I gained a total of 23 points, raising my quick rating to exactly 1600, a nice milestone. I likely won't be able to play in the weekly rapid tournament this week, we'll see, and this weekend is my last weekend off before my fall OTB season kicks off with 3 back to back tournaments on seperate weekends.

Online Play

I didn't play much online this week, as it was probably the last online play (outside of casual training games with sparring partners) I'll do for a while, so I can focus on OTB improvement. I assistant coach for a guy here in my hometown during the school year, and he hosts a summer camp for chess over the summer, and their last day of camp was this past Friday so I played in that tournament, berzerking 10 5+5 games and actually losing 2 of them (they were all like 1300 lichess or lower except for one 1350) and losing 25 rating. It isn't a big deal, because when I come back to online play I should hopefully be a much better player and able to gain a fairly significant amount of rating.

The other big thing I did was participate in the Summer Bullet Marathon. The decision to do this was just pure competitiveness getting the best of me and wanting really badly to get a top 500 trophy. However, I do not have the time, energy, or overall skill to reach the top 500 with my bullet abilities. I still played a lot though, I played a whopping total of 219 games before realizing that it just wasn't worth it to grind for a trophy that i'm clearly not good enough yet to get. I didn't do that well overall, and finished just inside the top 2000 with a score of 160.

Study

I made some big decisions in regards to studying this week, that I think will all benefit me and my OTB journey in the long run. First things first, I deleted lichess from my phone, the app was outdated anyways (and my phone for whatever reason cannot download the new version) and something I noticed I had been doing was whenever I would be about to go study endgames or tactics or whatever I needed to study, I would just be like "Eh, but I can just play a quick blitz game too and that's a lot easier." With the lichess app off of my phone, I don't have that excuse anymore, and in the 4 days since I removed the app, my study time has gone up a good amount which is great and the whole reason I decided to do this, to other serious improvers, I might recommend doing this for you because so far it has been really helpful for me.

My studying time will have to drop a little bit at least because school starts for me August 5th (the day i'm posting this) but I think I can still do a good job of getting good study time in and continuing to improve and grow along my goal that this whole series is based around, the NM title.

Outro

Thanks for tuning back in to week 4 of the Road to NM series, if you enjoyed it please be sure to leave a like so that others can see it, and if you don't want to miss out on the next blogs in this series, follow me so you can get notified whenever I release a new one (I'm not like subscriber farming or something like YouTube, gaining more followers doesn't benefit me in any way on lichess plus I can't even see how many I have) Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you guys next week to recap what's gone on in my Road to NM, see ya!

P.S. If you've noticed so far in this series, I've put a famous player from either the past or present each week, and I chose Magnus this week since endgames played a big part in my milestone (even if it isn't a big one) this week. Feel free to vote on what famous player you want to be represented on the cover next week in the comments.