A 900-point ELO climb

In 2023 I was hanging out with a friend who was playing chess on chess.com. I asked if I could join. I made an account, played him, and lost miserably — and then kept losing for another hundred-plus games, by which time I had dropped to 400 ELO and started seriously wondering if I just didn't have it in my DNA to play chess. The friend, for what it's worth, had been playing continuously since we were both about five years old. I had not. The brute-force approach I'd brought into the games — try things, hope something works — was producing exactly the result that brute-force usually produces in any system with structure.

The principle that eventually got me out of 400 ELO was older than the account I was losing on. I learned chess from my father when I was five. He had no formal training — he taught himself by spending days thinking through positions and their consequences, then taught me to do the same. The principle he gave me was simple: think from all directions before making the move. I held onto that without realizing for years that it was the foundation of every disciplined approach to anything. The 2023 chess.com humiliation was what made me go back to the principle as an adult.

What I did from there was, looking back, a DMAIC project I was running on myself. I defined the goal — get good enough to stop losing to ordinary opponents — and named the problem as my own pattern recognition rather than my opponents' play. I started measuring by analyzing every game I played, won or lost, looking for what I'd specifically failed to see. I picked one Grandmaster's YouTube channel and worked through the foundational concepts, then picked exactly one opening for white and one for black and drilled every variation against a bot until I could play them without thinking. I learned the check for captures, checks, pins, and forks before any move discipline — a checklist for not blundering. ELO climbed from 400 to 800 from the opening study alone, 800 to 1100 from the checklist, and 1100 to 1300 from systematic middlegame and endgame work to stop giving back the gains. The mechanics that produced the climb were the same mechanics I use at work.

Which is the reflection. I tried to fix my chess the way I'd fix a warehouse operation, and it worked. That tells me something about how I'm wired. The engineering reflex isn't something I switch on at work and off at home — it's how I think when I think seriously about anything. Some people would find that exhausting, and some weeks I'd agree with them. Most weeks I think it's a quiet kind of luck: the discipline that makes operations work also makes a ninety-minute chess session at night feel like progress on something rather than noise. I don't know if a chess instructor would call this a healthy way to approach the game. I do know it produced a 900-point ELO climb from someone who hadn't seriously played since he was five.

The target now is 1400 by the end of this year. The work to get there is harder than the work that got me to 1300 — at this rating, opponents stop making the kinds of mistakes the early-rating climb is built on, and progress comes from your own play rather than theirs. I expect it to take longer than the previous climbs. I play because chess is the one place in my week where the result is entirely mine, and where the consequence of a decision arrives in fifteen minutes instead of fifteen weeks. My father is still self-taught. So am I.