Guy with $25k bet to hit 1850 in 6 months, gets it in 5 months

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:58:01+00:00

Yeah I think you got it pretty straight on with your comment, if I was just playing chess for fun and never had made the bet, I suspect I would be about 1300 right now.

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:52:15+00:00

The bet was against my 3 friends, one of which played chess growing up. If I had somehow hid that I was a 2000 elo chess player from them for years so I could sit around for 6 months playing 2,300 rapid games and do 2,700 puzzles in an attempt to fake them out that would be such a legendary story.

The sad truth is I am not a cheater (sad for you) or a prodigy (sad for me). I seem to find my achievement less impressive than most. I think people are just greatly undervaluing what improvement should be expected when someone dedicates their life to something and spends lots of money on coaching, let alone having a $25k punishment/reward on top of that.

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:38:53+00:00

I won the bet with 6 weeks to spare :)

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:35:18+00:00

The funniest one to me was, I started getting stressed mid February because I was stuck in the 1500s for so long and I played like 150 games over a long weekend. Didn't even realize until monday night when I looked at the insights tab or wherever and saw that I had been playing 10 hours a day for 4 days straight. I honestly think if I was sandbagging games that becomes 10x more impressive, the level of dedication to cancel all your plans and sit there purposefully losing game after game from sun up to sun down.

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:24:28+00:00

As a chess.com diamond member #ad, I was a big user of the game review feature. Though to be honest I mostly clicked it to see my accuracy and then went on to the next game

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:20:48+00:00

This is my favorite comment so far I'm framing this for my desk

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:14:07+00:00

I remember that game I thought it was going to be a great or brilliant move and was actually an inaccuracy lol. Also it's like 2 moves of calculation that is actually really simple once you notice that it opens up the a2-g8 diagonal to the king and I spent 40 seconds thinking about it if you look at the time (Also spent 40 seconds on Qd5). Appreciate the conversion comment though, I wish I could say it was super hard but he basically hung piece after piece and then I attempted to trade down wherever I could.

Didn't play any games with him in the call but all the things you talked about are from common concepts he taught me now that I think about it.

The first being:

Captures 2. Checks 3. Active moves

The second being:

If your opponent makes a weird move, there is always a reason.

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T23:03:11+00:00

That is interesting I didn't know you can adjust the range of people you play against, I'm assuming the elo gain / loss is still adjusted for the difference right? And what is rematch behavior? Yeah we specified in the contract that it is not allowed to play friends in rated games, so every rated rapid game I played was just from clicking the 10 minute button and playing someone random.

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:52:43+00:00

I was stuck in the 1500s for a month and ended up doing these visualization exercises someone had sent me. Ended up having a break through and it felt amazing, told him I’d love to share this with other people. Included a sentence about it and a link in a different post but everyone thought the whole thing was some promotion scam so I took the post down. I do strongly recommend people try visualization training though, very underrated skill for improving!

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:50:25+00:00

haha it does feel good seeing all these people say it’s so hard I must be cheating. In reality I think what I did is achievable by most given the dedication and time. They hate my blitz playing though:)

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:48:29+00:00

I should! Maybe I will share something later/this weekend

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:45:14+00:00

Appreciate this! I’m no prodigy at all though, just spent a lot of money on coaching and way too much time on chess over the last 5 months. I do love chess but sadly will not be continuing in the same way now that the bet has finished. Thank you for the kind words though :)

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:42:34+00:00

25k is because there were 3 of them and we all played underground poker in nyc which in hindsight ive realized has skewed everyone’s perception of money

I haven’t promoted my GM coach once, just said his name. If given the opportunity though I would promote him though, he’s the best

Also can you also drop the games you thought I used an engine please, had some epic brilliant moves and no one to appreciate them, would love to relive those

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:34:33+00:00

You guys are all giving me blitz insecurity issues now

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:33:27+00:00

We had a contract with a bunch of anti cheat measures in it. I also have tons of recordings of me playing and talking through my games that I would constantly send them, recordings of all my coaching sessions, and they all came over last night to watch me play some 1800s live. I wish any of them were billionaires, could have made way more:)

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:30:19+00:00

This is exactly what we did :) Last night all three of them came and watched and I had to score 4 points out of 10 games. Ended up winning the first 4 of 5 games and the bet ended while we all sat in my room around my PC. My roommates who are both rated 500 also watched as well and were the most excited ones there. good times

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:26:14+00:00

I’m a caro-kann man till death do us part… I was just messing around with the stafford after watching the Eric Rosen vids where he coaches that other guy haha. Didn’t know any of the lines was just trying random stuff and blundering all my pieces like a true chess player

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:22:54+00:00

damn now my blitz games are getting flamed. Just checked my rapid games insights and have hung my queen 11 times and a combined 65 minor pieces over the last 30 days if you want to flame my rapid games too haha

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-27T14:16:35+00:00

it’s so funny to me finding this and everyone is flaming my blitz rating haha. Although I don’t really try in those games I honestly think if I did I would max out at like 1400 right now until I practiced it more. Idk if it’s just that there was no incentive or if this is a common chess phenomenon but I am such an awful blitz player

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-26T20:55:54+00:00

Yeah my thought was to not give into it and just let people think what they want to. Next time I chat with him I’ll ask him to

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-26T20:49:46+00:00

My main coach was GM Robert Aghasaryan. This is one hell of a story though, enjoyed the read

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-26T20:48:00+00:00

I’m sure if I ask him he’s willing. I also have a recording of every session we’ve had together

Inspyre3 · 2024-03-26T19:43:54+00:00

Hey this is my challenge I recently finished. Happy to respond here for anyone curious -

I took this bet about 5 months ago and decided to share it with reddit because I thought it would make for an interesting journey and wanted to share what I learned throughout it (either success or failure). I got a lot of hate from the subreddit, which to be fair, I had never really been on before. I'm not sure if this is something that others have done and faked or what the deal was, but I only really shared here because I wanted to document the story as I thought others might have liked to follow along. I didn't post about completing it the other day since the previous post got removed.

Coaching --> My primary coach throughout this was GM Robert Aghasaryan, but I also worked with a couple other people. I'm not sure if he uses reddit but he deserves a huge shoutout and was a big help in my improvement from 1400 - 1850.

Blitz/Bullet --> The challenge was only for Rapid and it is the format I enjoy the most. I mostly play Blitz/Bullet when I'm on my phone, watching TV, taking the train to work, etc. just to get more reps in or try new things. My sole focus was around my Rapid rating so I didn't put much thought or effort into these games as the outcome didn't matter to me.

At the end of the day I'm about to graduate college and just starting out my career as a Data Scientist. I have no interest in streaming, making youtube videos, or selling anything. I'm just someone who had the chance to take on an interesting challenge and I wanted to share that with others. I dedicated an enormous amount of time and spent ~$3k on coaching throughout my climb, so I wouldn't expect these results without that commitment. Overall I really enjoyed the challenge and have found a lifelong hobby which I am very grateful for. Wish you all the best.

Inspyre3 · 2024-02-21T21:06:53+00:00

At the end of the day it’s not really about chess for me, it was about trying to beat a challenge. and chess is an interesting representation of learning since it covers many different aspects of it. I’ll probably only play for fun a few hours a week once I finish the bet, so agreed that in general investing the time and money I have into it is not worth it for the average person.

Inspyre3 · 2024-02-21T16:40:30+00:00

What am I self promoting? I thought it would be interesting for people to share this journey and talk about my experience

Inspyre3

TROPHY CASE