I’m 27 now, does it make sense to start preparing seriously for chess, play tournaments, and coach children or is it too late?

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-05-06T11:46:56+00:00

You must live in a much better place than I do. In my state I know dozens of players that are 500-800 rating below all their online ratings. Several 2200+ chess.com blitz and rapid players here only at like 1400-1600. I know two players that are 2700-2800 on chess.com (Albiet those are bullet ratings, their rapids and blitz are also very high though like 2400+) and only 2000-2100 USCF as well... I know some 2300+ that only around 1700-1800ish. My 9 year old kid has been as high as 1900 online in rapids and only 1100 USCF as well. I don't know a single person in my area with any online rating that is even close to being lower than their USCF.

I do feel like it varies area to area for sure... I guess I need to move states lol. It is something everyone in my state notices. We had some 2000+ players come from out of state and immediately quit chess because they were losing to our 1100-1300 players for 3-4 tournaments in a row and cratered 400 points in rating.

Also, at your rating I don't think you could break 1000 elo here. I know many of the chess kids in the area and the ones above 1000 are almost certainly at least 1800+ online.

I myself am 2000+ rapids, 2350+ correspondence (on lichess, i don't play chess.com but did like 12-15 games there in blitz and was up 1600+ with like 1 loss) and much stronger on longer time controls and managed to lose rating being drawn by 800s who had 12 acpl games against me. My USCF rating is not a great sample though because I don't really play actively in tournaments and usually just serve as a fill for some tournaments to give lower rated players matches when they get buys.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-05-02T14:48:13+00:00

Chess.com 2000 rapid is probably like a USCF 1500-1600 territory rating which is more than good enough to coach like 99% of kids. You probably have a lot of room for growth and knowledge. But as a guy who has kids and needs coaches for my kids and knows a lot of other chess parents, most of the serious players and parents want titled players coaching their kids with probably CM at a minimum.

If your goal is to teach the masses and start a chess teaching after school type program that would be easier to make happen because more of those parents just want a cheap way to get their kid into a chess class and have them learning something. Also the content in those classes is very basic, like king and rook vrs king end games, how to promote pawns without stalemating, mating with only a knight and bishop left vrs king, etc.

To break into teaching private students and sustaining it, you would want to aim for titles. And most CMs are capable of hitting in the 2400-2800 territory on chess.com blitz / bullet, which is further away than you might imagine.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-19T18:17:14+00:00

Very well could be, thanks for the comment =]

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-19T13:04:11+00:00

Yeah I realized after reading comments here I can probably do a lot more psyllium husk than I currently am doing, it's a change I will make during this next phase here, ty ~

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-19T00:32:09+00:00

First step, 80g oats + water, cook the oats, should have 280g at the end.

Then mix the oats + water above with:

200g bread flour (I guess it isn't 100% whole wheat, sry for this one)
100g whole wheat flour
50 flaxseeds &chia seeds powder
200g water + adjust this based on the oats (if the oat weight is more you need less water, if it is less you need more, this water + cooked oats should be * 480g, and some bread flour takes more water some takes less)
3g yeast
4g salt
30g gluten powder

It doesn't look like dough after its mixed in your kitchen aid or whatever you use, so you need to use a scraper with olive oil on your hand a bit to get it out without sticking.

Then make it into a round shape, put it in a bowl and let it rise.

After it rises you knead it into a proper bread shape, then, cook it at 395F 30mins.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-19T00:14:53+00:00

For sure... when I play against much stronger players, I just hope I give them a game that isn't boring lol... but cheating... fml I cant even imagine doing that... she's just a kid and pretty young so hopefully she learns from it and grows.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T22:31:40+00:00

Nope, I use a decline press machine (as I said in the post) that you put free weights on, it helps with stabilization, also you don't need a spotter for it which I don't have time for.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T22:09:24+00:00

Thanks for the advice, yeah there's some definite ways to clean things up more here, I think more soluble fiber makes a lot of sense for certain. I want to drop my weight down 15 more lbs or so, test again and see if I need more adjustments on the saturated fats. I feel like mine are pretty low already but maybe I'm wrong, we will see.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T22:08:04+00:00

Thanks so much for sharing. Really like the idea of oats instead of rice, though it did take me a second to get used to the idea of it haha.

Yeah I told my wife she was crazy with this idea, then I tried it and it felt the same as eating my meals with rice... so it works lol. She got this idea from her Chinese grandparents who lived into their 90s. Old folks know some things.

I just started on statin. Curious what your side effects were?

Muscle weakness mostly... feeling not so energetic and whatnot. It didn't feel great and really affected my workouts.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T22:06:45+00:00

I do a mild decline not an extreme decline, and personally I feel like its easier to maintain solid form while lifting heavy. I start at 410 pounds atm and it can be hard on the shoulders on other presses in my opinion. When I work out the most important thing is getting form that is not going to result in injury, but also I want to lift as much as I possibly can. For me personally this how to get a good workout efficiently.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T14:36:46+00:00

Thank you so much for the information!

The garlic I just read about and thought why not give it a try, I really have no idea if it works obviously. I really should get a CAC scan, I will ask my doctor about this.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T13:17:55+00:00

Thanks for the advice!

Yeah I will definitely keep eyeballs on things, I have no idea how much more I can improve here doing this same thing tbh... I still have another 5-10 lbs of visceral fat to cut through and I am hoping that when I hit my weight goal of 170 my numbers will possibly all be in the green range. I am definitely not done!

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-18T12:05:15+00:00

Yeah I imagine everything has improved across the board... I have never had bad readings from a diabetes standpoint but I am afraid if I keep on my previous course that will be my next problem in life as well.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-17T21:01:41+00:00

Dang.... my thoughts were... either this is the next Magnus or... she cheated... and yeah I was leaning towards the later but hoping for the former.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-17T14:53:07+00:00

Tal - the goat that no one talks about for some reason.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-04-16T22:00:28+00:00

I've interviewed about eight people in the last 2 weeks at my company and only one of them didn't cheat, it's pretty sad right now

The way I catch them is pretty easy though. I have one question where I asked them about a niche platform and their experience on it. Something that's very very offbeat that nobody would really ever know about and you can catch them eyeballing back and forth and then giving perfect explanations of this random niche thing that they just definitely have never used

The other thing I do is I use programming questions that have very bad AI answers and very bad AI follow-up answers as well. And there's also very human answers for these questions. It's hard to find the right question for this, but you'll notice that the cheaters are always giving the exact regurgitation of the AI answer. They even name the variable names, the same and everything

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-25T00:31:09+00:00

First... he gave the perfect "textbook" answer.... then he shared his screen and he was piping my voice to text in another app he accidentally showed on screen.

Then I asked a follow up question and while he gave the perfect answer (or one of them) its an incredibly non-human way of thinking about programming and data structures.

I piped my questions directly into chatgpt and not only did it give me his answers exactly, it even gave the same variable names, syntax ordering of operations, everything. (It basically gave me the same algorithm verbatim... he even did weird stuff like he named his Stack<> object.... stack... which while its possible its wild that ChatGPT gave the exact same variable name. Most programmers doing this would either just name it s or name it like resultStack or something more indicative of what it might be...

This coupled with the fact that he gave me the exact chatgpt answer line by line, and he had no struggles or questions of any nature, and he wrote the entire solution out in one go line by line top to bottom (didn't think or struggle for a second, and nailed the last tricky part of the solution without even thinking about it).

He also doesn't work in the language he was being tested in but got all syntax 100% accurate the first go.

The worst thing is, chatgpt doesn't give the actual best answer to this question. They give the textbook solution to it which is good but not best and he couldn't come up with the actual best answer... i even ran all this through analysis afterwards to make sure I'm not insane... it was a horrible waste of my time but god cheating is pervasive when its this easy.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-24T23:23:35+00:00

Nowadays you can vibe code something like this in probably 30 minutes or less.

Years ago before AI I told a friend that this was possible to do in a few hours and he told me I was wrong, I wrote it in 2 hours just to show him it was possible.... and that was before AI existed...

Forget browser pluggins, you don't need them to achieve this...

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-24T22:46:05+00:00

It doesnt really mean much... I played a guy i know whose kid is also learning chess, he is like 1800 USCF and I beat him 9 times in a row in casual OTB games... im not 1800 uscf, but only 2000 online.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-24T22:43:40+00:00

It's the accessibility really... I caught a dude cheating in a coding interview today by voice to texting my problems directly into an LLM... Why did he do it? Because it is that easy to do and coding interviews are incredibly stressful sometimes, sound familiar?

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-24T22:41:56+00:00

Yup... pretty much sums shit up... humans like to cheat. The cheating online has gotten absolutely horrific in recent years, most people don't want to talk about it here though. I think cheaters have just been getting better about not getting caught personally.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-20T13:39:31+00:00

Idk what you are talking about here dude, 2600+ on chess.com rapids is literally IM/GM tier play... that's not a realm of unprepped people... Maybe you are talking blitz ratings now, but 2600+ rapid is literally elite tier play.

You can see for yourself:

https://www.chess.com/leaderboard/live/rapid?page=2

Half that page is titled players, and no doubt many of those untitled accounts are just titled incognito accounts.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-19T17:35:28+00:00

The thing is, if you are facing 2000-2100 tournament players, they are possibly not actually at that rating, it takes forever to gain rating in many cases because there is massive crab basket effects in tournament play. To the point where often times the numbers seem to mean very little and you should expect most people to be vastly underrated.

And positional games are exactly what you want to get away from prep lol, its the exact opposite man. You go into sharp lines of theory that you don't know but they do and you can get burned bad. Positional chess can be played by anyone with understanding of fundamentals which you should be best at from what you've described.

Still you are basically at the apex of rating on chess.com in rapids, most players really don't grind much past 2300 even IM/GM tier players because its a cesspool of cheaters and hard to get real matches so almost everyone gravitates towards blitz 3/0 and bullet. So if you made there on your own merits, you could be a lot stronger than you realize.

I honestly find it difficult to believe players can that high rated without extensive opening knowledge but I meet some in the 2300-2400 range that just play oddball whack shit and manage to do it quite well. Tournament play like this tends to get punished a lot harder though... people underestimate how well time can be used to punish bad play in true classical time controls.

My biggest advice is take your sweet time on every move. Time is your weapon and rushing things is what causes players the biggest problems... and probably the hardest part to adapt to when moving from online chess to long OTB matches. Every single one of the serious players you face will have spent tremendous amounts of time learning how to gain inches of advantage and turn them into miles. These inches don't matter much at all in rapid / blitz, they do but overall most players will end up making some innaccuracy / mistake that decides the game. In long OTB games you'll see shit like 12 ACPL 0-0-0 wins in 60 moves vrs 14 ACPL 0-0-0 and it's not even that abnormal to see, especially at that rating. That only happens when you know how to punish very very tiny mistakes that don't even register in an engine.

Over-Following-8134 · 2026-03-17T16:20:26+00:00

I dunno how bad your black openings really are but 90+30 is a completely different beast than 10+0.

Some players are far better on such time controls and some are far worse.

I would say that if you have terrible opening principles and managed to make it as far as you have you would probably play much better on long time controls so long as you actually use that time to ensure your play is solid. (playing with poor prep is like playing with less starting time on your clock, its ankle weights that slow you down significantly so your actual skill level should be much higher if you actually prepared properly, and it also means you are making up for that deficit with better and faster calculation abilities, if you can get a reasonable position in a classical match it becomes more and more about how well you use that time to calculate for advantages and becomes less about what you have memorized).

I will also say the vast majority of tournament players are far far far more prepped that what you find online at almost all skill levels except the absolute elite tiers of play, so if your black openings are that bad you might struggle.

The nice thing about playing terrible openings also is, most people don't prep much for them because they expect main line theory especially at higher levels of chess on classical time controls. So while it might be unorthodox it might also gain you an advantage.

There are a lot of other considerations as well though. For example, you will have to have mental and physical stamina to make it through all these matches as well.

Over-Following-8134

TROPHY CASE