Road to NM -- Weeks 12 & 13: Anticipation

Intro

Welcome back for weeks 12 & 13 on the Road to NM series where I account my progress on the road towards the NM title (hopefully) by the end of the 2027-2028 school year (May 2028). In this blog I analyze my tournament games from the week if I had any and outline my thought process so all can see what I'm thinking in each game and giving all of you guys the chance to walk along side me on my route to the NM title. Feel free to say any comments you have about either my games, study plans, or just general advice or thoughts about the blog in general. Also, if you've been keeping up with the series you probably have seen that there is a different famous chess player as the cover each week either from history or current. If you want to help decide the person on the cover, comment the player you would like to be the cover photo (it must be someone who hasn't been featured yet) and the most commented player/comment of a suggested player that is most liked in the forum (ex. if someone posts Magnus Carlsen and it gets 6 likes but 3 people post Pragg, Magnus would be featured *if he hadn't been the cover yet*) Also, likes do not add up over multiple comments to keep from people stacking on comments with each other to win the featured player each week. So anyways, let's get into all the stuff that happened this week.

The First Joint Weeks

Sorry if you were expecting 2 blogs over the past 2 weeks, but there really hasn't been enough content for me to cover for me to do this, however I will have tournaments on both the 17th (a quads tournament) and then the 24th which will be the biggest tournament I've ever played in so that'll be a big one to recap, but these weeks we don't so there won't be too much to go over but i'll go over what I can.

Online Play

With a lot of extra time on my hands not having to prepare for tournaments and do much other stuff, I played a lot of online these past 2 weeks. However, my play has not been as good as I would have hoped, I did get a new rapid peak of 2039, but after that i dropped significantly in both blitz (i'm awful at blitz if you can't tell by my profile) and rapid, dropping down to the 1970s in rapid. In bullet I gained around 50ish rating before losing some of it and being 20ish points in the positive on the week. Before everyone rushes to the comments to say "Playing bullet and blitz won't help you for NM" I know I know, I just was more of doing this in my other free time that I didn't feel like studying this week. Here's the game that got me my new rapid peak, though i've left it unannotated.

Study

Here's the stuff that matters so that way I don't get yelled at for not doing the work I need to to reach my goal. I trained a lot of tactics these 2 weeks, since I didn't have really any tournament games to analyze, so I did all sorts of tactics, including those on Lichess (my puzzles rating is abysmal for my rating, so my goal by next week is to have it up to 2200-2300. I didn't do much positional study these weeks, but I did also play and analyze my games against the 1800 level Fritz on chessbase and had some really good performances (unfortunately I can't show these games since I don't have chessbase premium to export these games. Overall, it was a pretty productive week, and i'm really getting excited for the next 2 tournaments I have lined up especially the one on the 24th and I can't wait to recap the games and hopefully I get some big rating gains.

Outro

Sorry there wasn't too much content for these weeks, it's often a little slow without tournament games, but I'll have plenty to show you next week and especially the week after that. Again, thanks so much for tuning into the Road to NM series, if you enjoyed it please give it a like so more people can see it and if you don't want to miss out on new additions to the series be sure to follow me so you get updated when a new one is released (I'm not follow farming, it has no benefit for me and I can't even see my total follower count)

For those who were wanting to see the funny rapid game, I didn't notate it and was hoping to get it from my opponent because they said they had it, but unfortunately they weren't able to give it to me in time but all it was was just a silly game where we mirrored each other for like 23 moves before we made a bunch of bad plays and I got into a winning position with him in serious time pressure but somehow managed to throw it not even to a draw but a loss. Anyways, thanks again for viewing and i'll see you guys next time!