Fajar Purnama Chess Journey

Beginning

It really just started when I was in primary school that thought me board games and one of them is chess. Nothing special here really just knowing the pieces, the rules, and the objective of the game. It can be counted that I did not really play chess here.

Routine Play - Blunders and Calculations

When I was in middle school, I started to play chess more often because there are friends who likes playing chess. We usually played it during recess or after school as entertainment. Finally, we began to get addicted to chess and play in parallel during classes.

This where I instinctively knew how to spot blunders and learned to be careful not to leave hanging pieces before making a move. Then I instinctively became aware of basic tactics like forks, pins, skewers, discovered attacks, and basic checkmates. The final instinct that I learned here is to calculate how prevent those basic tactics from happening to me and how to make those tactics happen to my opponent.

My message here to new player is that if you enjoy playing chess but still too lazy to study the theory, just play it often with friends and you will learn those basic tactics and calculations instinctively. Just this allows me to be one of the top players in my school and faculty in my university where I often won social (not competitive) tournaments conducted by them internally. However beyond this, no matter how often I play, I cannot get past a certain level where I may win most of the time against amateur players like myself but almost never won against professional players. My rating is stuck around 1200 ELO.

Concept and Philosophy of Chess

It started in highschool when I was invited to chess clubs because I often won social tournaments. While back then my only instinct is not to blunder, here I was taught the concept of activating my pieces where the more pieces activated the higher probability of winning. Just this concept alone pushed my rating to 1300. This kept me the king in my faculty in university but in university level where there are professional players, I did not stand a chance. After this I did not have time to continue playing chess because of my hectic university life.

I started playing chess again during my graduate school where I have more free time. It was an era of Youtube, other video platforms, and other social medias where content creators made chess videos showing grandmaster games and other exciting games while explaining the concepts and philosophies behind the moves. After that I found out that many world champion tournaments games are already broadcasted online with analysis and commentary. It is here I learned the name of Garry Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Wesley So, Levon Aronian, Vasyl Ivanchuk, Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, and many more. I watch documentaries for entertainment such as watching about Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Tal.

Here I learned about seeing the whole board, the grand design, and priorities. Believe it or not, back then, not to blunder was my highest priority instead of paying attention to the king either my king’s safety or my opponent’s king. I wrote priorities which that pushed my rating to 1400 - 1500 ELO:

1. The King is worth everything while Queen is worth a lot, then Rooks, then Bishops and Knights, and finally Pawns.
2. Verify before making a move whether our king is safe, leaving pieces hanging, and whether we are blundering something.
3. For long games, identitify opponents weaknesses and always be aware of their king safety, hanging pieces, their blunders, etc, and vice versa.
4. For short games, focus on quick development and king safety.
5. Activate all pieces as soon as possible.
6. Try to control the center of the board.
7. Do not castle as soon as possible but not too late either or quickly mate the opponent’s king before they mate yours.
8. Free pieces are not always the best move where there can be better moves or that can lead to traps.
9. Try to trade pieces when you are ahead in material and avoid trading pieces when you are behind in material.
10. If you cannot find weakness, try to make one such as creating pawn structure weaknesses and focusing attacks on certain areas.
11. If you are stuck, try to improve the position of your worst piece or try not to make your position worse. This is known as Positional Play. Instead of forcing a bad attack, I learned to use Prophylaxis—preventing my opponent’s plans while slowly improving my own structure.

Then, I became interested in different kind of openings and want to learn them all where currently I tried almost all popular openings. This actually opens more concepts for me and as I explore apps like chess.com I found they have interactive study materials and progresses. It is here I learned the terms positional play, pawn structure, weak squares, outposts, prophylaxis, etc eventhough I only know their definitions and touched the surface but pushed my rating to around 1500 - 1600 ELO.

Focus on Few Openings

Hikaru Nakamura once said in one of his videos that it is better to focus on few openings and master them rather than learning many openings superficially. Following this advice, I focused on mastering the Queen’s Gambit Declined as white and Sicilian Defense as black. This is my current progress as of this writing where I start playing chess again after graduating graduate school and start working. I also learned about other than chess like my physical condition, mental state, and emotion awareness.