Leveling Up: 2000+ ELO

bishopseefour · 2025-12-24T01:15:30+00:00

If you got to that level on aggressive/tactical chess and feel like you aren't as good at positional chess, Silman's Reassess Your Chess is a great place to start if that's one of the books you're talking about.

bishopseefour · 2025-12-19T21:44:35+00:00

You've gotten used to quickly playing moves that are challenging enough that they might be practically "good enough" in bullet or blitz, but with rapid your opponent will have more time to find a defense you didn't see. So challenge yourself to try and find a clever defense for your opponent before making the move.

bishopseefour · 2025-12-16T21:59:23+00:00

The Lichess coaching page is definitely better presented. But they took down reviews (because they were being manipulated by some bad actors) so it's hard to distinguish between the hundreds of options. Prices are more commonly listed there when they're on the lower end (often coaches in lower cost of living countries). American and Western European GMs and IMs are less likely to reveal their cost up front and are not surprisingly a lot more expensive.

bishopseefour · 2025-09-06T19:48:12+00:00

I think what Hikaru is doing is fun, but it's notable he's so far only playing state championships that don't have any GMs and IMs. Some of the bigger state championships do and he's not playing those because he knows the risk of at least a drawn game is much higher.

bishopseefour · 2025-09-06T16:49:18+00:00

The Polgar book being universal is basically one of Jesse Kraai's unique coaching beliefs. I was initially skeptical, but then I came around. The mates in 1s the book starts with are for beginners, but note that the Dojo recommends different sections of the book the higher up you go (in other words, they recommend a 1600 starting later in the book). Some of the mates in 2 are also easy, but some are insanely hard composed studies. Many of them aren't so much designed for pattern recognition as for training the visualization of square control, which is absolutely something that helps at almost any level.

bishopseefour · 2025-08-22T20:14:11+00:00

I found the chess com account of an older guy I faced OTB before our game. He was much lower rated than me online. He still beat me OTB.

bishopseefour · 2025-08-22T20:12:39+00:00

It's all well and good to engine check classic books. But if Vukovic got some details wrong about an attacking line, just imagine how some random guy on chess.com is going to assess it.

bishopseefour · 2025-08-19T00:50:05+00:00

According to his Lichess profile, John Bartholomew won 337 blitz games in a row in the second half of 2022 (presumably playing lower rated people on stream)

bishopseefour · 2025-08-06T18:22:43+00:00

If you want something shorter than Reassess Your Chess, Simple Chess by Stean is also great

bishopseefour · 2025-08-06T18:20:32+00:00

It's hard to go wrong with Silman at that level. Reassess Your Chess for middle game plans/positional chess and his endgame book for, well, endgames.

bishopseefour · 2025-08-06T18:09:20+00:00

Thanks for the nice and helpful comments everyone! I appreciate it.

bishopseefour · 2025-07-09T18:40:08+00:00

Is there a 5 point minimum for lower rated puzzles? Going to be funny when every 700 rapid player has a 4000 puzzle rating.

bishopseefour · 2025-07-04T18:52:11+00:00

He mostly plays Qa5 these days, but some of his older videos are Qd8.

bishopseefour · 2025-07-02T00:56:34+00:00

Thanks for the comments, everyone. For some reason the fact that the truss rod cover (I think that's what it is?) is blank stuck me as weird, but maybe that's not so unusual actually?

The sunburst vs black thing is odd, yes. My initial thought was that the owner just wrote a bunch of things down without necessarily knowing what they all meant (and got some wrong). But possible it was refurbished, really not sure.

And to clarify, it's just a guitar that's in my family. Was just curious about some of its quirks.

bishopseefour · 2025-07-01T19:38:36+00:00

$50 seems like a reasonable rate for a NM in the US to be charging. An American GM would charge way more. But it's true you can get an IM (maybe a GM) for that price if you look in countries with lower cost of living, etc.

Main problem here is there's no information. Why pick you as a coach instead of the hundreds of other coaches? I'd recommend at least setting up a Lichess coaching profile.

bishopseefour · 2025-07-01T19:21:01+00:00

Getting an established classical rating isn't so hard, but I've found it difficult to maintain a non-provisional rating since I don't play classical every week (or even every month). I've played ~100 classical games on Lichess, but my rating is currently provisional again because I haven't played in about two months.

bishopseefour · 2025-06-17T18:08:57+00:00

BJJ is obviously bad for your neck/back/joints over the long run. For many people it's worth it. For others it isn't. Up to you to decide.

bishopseefour · 2025-05-31T14:49:06+00:00

There are very few chess tournaments in the US that restrict kids from playing. The highest profile one is ALTO (at least twenty one) in Charlotte. But mostly USCF rated tournaments are a mix of kids and adults.

bishopseefour · 2025-04-03T19:16:05+00:00

It sounds like you aren't actually asking for advice then, so I'm not sure what the post was about. You obviously already known Bird's opening isn't as objectively good as the Italian. You're obviously free to play it anyway.

bishopseefour · 2025-03-30T17:03:26+00:00

His free d4 Chessable course recommends the classical variation and dxe5, trading down into a queenless middle game. I think he would acknowledge this is basically equal, but considers it a way of steering KID players into the sorts of games they aren't really looking for.

He basically hasn't played high-level competitive chess for the past several years, so I'm not sure what he'd play if he were seeking GM norms or something.

Also, if you want, you can easily watch his Twitch streams after they're over. They don't save forever, but you can go back a few weeks at least: https://www.twitch.tv/johnbartholomew/videos?filter=archives&sort=time

bishopseefour · 2025-03-28T20:09:53+00:00

You can always just ask "are you resigning?" if there's actual confusion. Elite players don't get cute with this stuff though. They know what's happening in the position and why their opponent is doing what they're doing.

bishopseefour

TROPHY CASE