Raising 300 points in 6 months, despite having a full-time job

Many players think it’s near impossible for adults with a full-time job to raise their rating.

Meet Kevin Hall. He raised 300 points in 6 months while working a full-time job and being a Dad of 5 dogs!

What was his secret to growth?

The first step was recognizing the need for change.

“I had got to a place where I was really frustrated. It seemed like I had run into a wall. I had got to a place where I knew that something had to be changed. The way I was doing things, just analyzing my games on chess.com, playing way too much chess... It just wasn’t bearing fruit. I wanted to have growth, and it just wasn’t happening the way I was trying to do it.

It was time for changes… Then I subscribed to ChessMood and completely revamped the way I was doing things.”

He dared to step out of his comfort zone. This meant changing his approach to chess — from spending too much time playing to learning, switching from 1.d4 to 1.e4.

“I switched from spending most of my time playing to learning. I spent a lot of time learning openings.

Earlier I used to start with the London system only. Everybody goes to that. So going from Queen’s Pawn openings to King’s Pawn openings was a big change.”

And it always gets worse before it gets better, right? I had this completely new way of thinking and gave another thought to how I was starting my matches. So I went backward before I went forward, and I expected this to be the case with the new openings. Switching from the London system to 1.e4 was a crucial step.”

Kevin regularly attended the streams where he saw how a Grandmaster wins against players of his level using the same openings he has prepared. At the same time, webinars helped him fix his mistakes.

“I learned things fast because I wasn’t learning the theoretical part by watching the courses only, but I also made sure that I was showing up to the streams and webinars.

It’s very helpful to see how you beat players of my level and above with the openings I learn at ChessMood. Also, I like the webinars where we go over ChessMood Family’s mistakes in the openings. A lot of that made a big influence.”

You can check out his complete interview in the video below.