#10
No magic at all, just some work.
First only analyse lost games, do not bother with won or drawn games.
As the game is lost, it must contain at least one mistake. Find that. Look from the end to the beginning. Then ask yourself why you played this mistake. Look at the time taken for this mistake. Was that enough time? What other moves did you consider? Why did you prefer the mistake? What was wrong with your reasoning?
My shortest games are 10 minutes. For me, any less is a waste of time due to my slow brain. Correspondence is boring to some, but you have loads of time to look at all options. What you learn can then be transferred to shorter time controls. I think you need to break from the cycle of quick games if you want to make progress.
Practice puzzles or tactics
Thanks for all the quick and really useful replies My initial post was half tongue in cheek (ie 29,000+ games is obviously an insane number of games to not improve), but also very much half ‘I actually like chess and would like to improve my ranking’.
The high volume, bullet and blitz is certainly in the realms of an addiction. It might not seem like much, but I have gone from playing 95%+ bullet, to almost none, over the last 12 months. Of the 15285 bullet games I’ve played, only 144 have come in the last 12 months, with over 10k of my 13463 games coming in the last 12 months (the game search seems to max out at 10k no matter what). So it’s at least heading in the right direction lol...
For what it’s worth, I have ADHD and the fast controls are more of an addicting fun reaction-only endeavour. Very little calculation beyond maybe 2-3 move tactics. It becomes a way to hyper-focus and more often than not involves procrastinating work tasks…
It seems the first thing to do would be to commit to longer games and reviewing a decent portion of them with the computer analysis tool (I do often quickly open the analysis board to check if a position was good or bad, but nothing much beyond that).
out of my 1 844 games 880 games were rapid classical and corresepondence
and 579 games were bullet blitz and ultrabullet and rest were variants and i have done 975 puzzles and 5 puzzle storms
But Prabhavsike, if I simply multiply my ranking by the number of games I've played, I get over 35 million of what is the very best type of points - Over 33 million more than you - checkmate! :P
The first priority is to eliminate blunders from your game. As long as you hang pieces, all the rest is futile.
Always check your intended move is no blunder before you play it. A great help is to enable move confirmation in your profile. Think about your move, play it, check it is no blunder, confirm. This will also help to balance impulsiveness.
Here is an example
Are you actually thinking? this might sound like a stupid question, but sometimes we just let our intuition do the job. Be sure you are thinking
ADHD isn't an excuse for poor play.
You need to treat chess more like a sport by breaking down the aspects of the game and studying them to improve.