Introduction

This blog serves to catalog my work, thoughts, successes, and failures in an attempt to achieve a lifelong goal: becoming a chess master. It is really more for me to look back on to help track my progress, but I will write as though more than one person is actually reading this.

Some basic information: A USCF National Master is someone who has achieved a chess rating of 2200. For comparison, the top players in the world have ratings somewhere in the area of 2600-2800. Win probabilities of winning a game against someone rated just 200 points more than you hover somewhere around 25%. It's about 5% when one is playing someone rated 500 points higher.

Right now, I sit with a provisional chess rating of 1269. (Chess ratings for someone who has played fewer than 26 games are considered "provisional" and the formula used to calculate those ratings is such that wins and losses can cause that number to jump around with considerable variation. After 25 games, a different formula is used that sees much less variation. This is all explained here.) This makes me a "Class D" player-- provisionally. This puts me in ca. the 64th percentile among all USCF members, and ca. the 55% percentile when you throw out scholastic members.

In other words, I'm average.

I'd like to not be average, hence this effort to put more time into my chess. All in the hopes of becoming a USCF National Master.

To do this, I need to set some realistic goals, and then put forward a serious study regimen.

First off, goals:

• I need to play in 2 tournaments in 2014, ideally bringing my total number of rated games played to 15 (I am assuming 4 games each tournament). My rating at the end of 2014 should be over 1300.
• I need to shed my "provisional" status by the end of 2015. This may mean playing in 3 tournaments of 4 games each, or perhaps 2 tournaments where I can get in 10 games. Or some other combination that puts me at having played 25 rated games. I hope to be at 1400 by the end of the year.

At this point, things become more difficult. Moving up once you shed provisional status is a slow process. Even at 100 points a year, I it would take 6 years after 2015 to make 2000, and another 2 years (again, assuming steady success) to make Master. That's... uh, 2023. I will be over 50. That's 10 years of studying, 10 years of work, 10 years of travel and tournaments. 

I got my PhD in less time than that, so I suppose it's doable.

Let's agree that this initial timetable is provisional (there seems to be a lot of that going around) and can (and should) be adjusted as I have a better sense of how I am doing.

There is a lot to take on, and it will be a long, slow, and steady effort. But it should be fun trying...