How to Win at Chess, and lose ELO points in the process

It's that time of the week again. Chess on Sunday with Anomad.

I played four Chess games today. I won two of them, tied another, and lost the fourth one and yet, I ended up with less ELO points than what I started with.

How can this happen?

Well, the chess.com algorithm places you to play against similar rated people, and those can be players with 1-100 point difference above or below.

If you beat a lower rated player you win less points than those you'd get if you beat a higher rated player than you.

I was set against three 900ish rate players so, even though I beat the first and the second one, I only got 11 points, I tied against the third one, got -2 points, and then I lost against the fourth one, and lost 10 points...

Yeah, shame on me, I know. But not everything is dark, at least I am getting way more experience and exposure of playing and talking at the same time, this means I'm getting better and better every day.

About this video-series

Chess is a beautiful game, and despite the fact that I'm not great at it, I'm also not that bad.

I learned how to play Chess when I was around 10 years old but I never actually took any lessons, I just played it every once in a while with my dad, and at one point I even got good enough to actually play in the school tournaments. I never won, my best place was second against a guy (or kid? We were like 12 or 13 at the time) who knew just a little bit more tactics than me, if I try to remember I think he knew about the concept of Forks, whereas I was just very good at calculating exchanges and overall positions, but if one of the players knows about Forks and discovered attacks and the other doesn't, then the game will be incredibly one-sided.

Either way, I kept playing over the years but I never took the time to actually get better. I would still kick every other guy who said "I can play chess" but whenever I faced someone who actually played I would get destroyed.

A few months ago I started to play again for fun and damn, I got so much better in no time by taking some online lessons at chess.com and I indeed understood more about the game.

I am currently learning code, more specifically JavaScript and CSS but every time I need some air or to clear my mind, I play a short 10 minute game of chess, which if you think about it, instead of playing three 10 minute games in one day, I could actually try and set a goal for me, stick to it, and upload the progress to Threespeak.

Right now I am at 1,060ish ELO rate on Chess.com and I intend to reach 1,500 by December 2022.
This is Chess for ThreeSpeak. No censorship, lots of bad words, open to anyone who wants to have a tab open of someone ranting at the screen everytime he loses a game, or chanting victory songs every time I get a win.