A Little Background
I've spent my fair share of time jumping around between a variety of different games over the years. Long phases where all I would do for fun is play the same game for an extended period. Lots of them were multiplayer games I would play with my buddies. Destiny, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and even Forza. You name it and I probably had a phase in my life where that's all I played. While I miss some of those games specifically R6 and Hearthstone those two will always hold a special place in my heart. I've found that once you fall off of them it's super hard to get back into them unless you have a ton of time to play and catch up on whatever the current meta is. Maybe you'll figure it out but once you do it's time to learn everything again and that has always been my fundamental problem with games like that. Live service games hold you hostage and just won't let you go and if you decide to leave there's no going back. Now that I have a family and full-time job it's even harder to play catch up.
Back when my buddies and I would play games all the time there was always a weird phase in between each one where there was nothing to play. What we were playing would get boring and stale. Either the meta would be un-fun or the content would just dry up as we had done everything we could do. During those dry periods, I always found myself playing a few games of chess. Usually, on a Lichess account, I didn't care about but non the less I was still playing. I was playing chess on and off since 2016.
February 2023
The beginning of February in 2023 was when I started getting back into chess. I was browsing around Tik Tok and Gotham Chess kept showing up on my FYP. I had watched his content in the past and completely forgot he existed. Instantly the algorithm sucked me in. Almost every other video was a chess video and I thought to myself "You know what? Why not give it another go! I don't have much free time for other stuff but I could squeeze a 15-minute game in here and there". Oh, boy was that a mistake. I was sucked into it almost as hard as Destiny grabbed me. I played a handful of 10 minute games and half a dozen dailies and I found that I kept losing. No matter what I was doing I would lose the game and my rating was already pretty bad. There was no way I was about to have my rating bottom out at 100 so I started grinding. There's a large collection of free chess content online and I consumed almost all of it. Every youtube video, a variety of chessable courses, and the one thing that made all the difference was playing a slower time control. I switched over to 15+10 and started actually anylazing my games. Turns out that when you take the time to dig into what you did wrong it changes things.
Progress Statistics and What's Next
Since the beginning of February, my rapid rating has gone up 151 points. From 268 to where it's sitting right now at 419. Currently, I have a 56% win rate. Which is right where I would want it to be. Realistically I'd want it to sit at 60% but 56% is still really close to where I need it to be. Another thing that probably doesn't help Is I'm not playing any specific opening. I generally just play e4 Kf4. Then I just freestyle it from there. It's not the best thing in the world but hey if it ain't broke don't fix it. I'm also sure that I would have a lot more growth if I had time to play more games.