The grind has been so real; ~100 rapid games in just a few days. In that time I found where my biggest weaknesses were in terms of opening prep so I'm gonna focus on that now. I need to learn some new English lines as well as learn past the first four moves of the Normal French and whatever the weird 3. d5 Ne7 variation is. 2000 to 2100 is gonna be a much bigger step to take than any I've managed to make in the past few months, and given that I won at a rate of less than 50% in the games it took me to get from 1900 to 2000 (while I flew by my opponents all the way from 1500 to 1900), I think I'll have to really lock in for this next jump. But if I'm being honest, I really don't have the energy to play 100 games in such a short span of time again, especially since it takes so much more brain power for me to win at this level compated to before. So, for now, thank you and I'll see you all later. It's time to take a break. Huge thank you to coach Kevin, my personal coach/roommate Cameron, and this community for giving me the motivation (and everything else) to get to this point.

What would it be? 🤔 Drop a comment below!

What's the best response against d4 as black.. I don't what to do against it.. I play via kings Indian setup.. is there any other better options??

I'm gonna start by saying that two days ago my roommate (2200 rapid, 1900 USCF) and I met with a local National Master to help him prep for the upcoming state championship. Between two games I played against the NM, I lost one (I put up a valiant fight) and got a draw in the second one! Against a master!! I played a very closed and positional English that bored him into offering me a draw. He said "I'm pretty sure this is a draw, but it's going to take an extremely long time to finish this." Biggest single-game accomplishment of mine to date. Anyways, today I played a lot of otb chess with my roommate before we decided to study some Sicilian lines and I ended up beating him twice with the English (black still isn't my strong suit lol he smoked me with white). After a few hours of that, I spent the rest of the night practicing the positions we worked on on chess.com, and while at first it seemed I would end up with a net loss in rating I found myself on a hot streak, winning against two 2000s in the process and ultimately reaching 1900! I'll be taking over as chess club president at my university later this year (currently VP) so it finally seems that I'll be able to fill in the current president's shoes if I keep getting more consistent. I have big plans for the club and hope that I'll be able to recruit the highest rated player in the area to come here after he graduates from community college. At the moment my primary goal isn't to gain rating, but to become more consistent and to nail down an opening for black. If anyone has any openings for black that have similar positional ideas as the English (which may not exist) please let me know. Thank you all! As a side note, I think this is about where I'll peak for the time being. My opponents tonight missed a lot of easy tactics and even made obvious blunders, but I'm not often this lucky. The NM I played Wednesday told me and my roommate that I'm extremely underrated, however, so who knows; but when he said that I was still roughly 1800.

I know I just posted about hitting 1700, but I've been on a hot streak and tonight beat a 2200 rapid player which brought my rating up from 1799 to 1814. That means that I'm up 1200 points from where I was one year ago (600 rapid)!!