Russell Sherwood Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Occasionally, I get asked by 2200 rated players, what they can do to move on and challenge for the IM Title.
There are two ways to do this – the “Easy” and the “Hard”.
Easy Way
Here we simply, somehow, get invited to two Cat 9 (2450+) rated events where the IM Norm is a 50% Score.
This is a path open to very few as (a) The National Federation nominating a player must have a massive amount of confidence in the player (b) The National Federation would be putting the player ahead of others “in the queue” and (c) The cost of these events is significant.
Hard Way
There are two pathways here:
Outstanding performance – for example, gaining entry to a Cat 3 (2300 average) and scoring around +5. To call this hard is an understatement, but it does happen. To do this the player needs to apply many winning techniques covered in past articles and a healthy dose of luck.
Raising Rating – This is a more common approach and the method here is to push one’s rating up to the low 2300’s. How is this done? There are a few methods, but the one most likely to generate success is to enter Open events with the aim of beating the lower rated players. This requires both a large volume of games to be played and a different approach to be taken (to beat the lower rated players).
The approach required is different to that for clashes with higher rated players, which tends to reinforce the draw likelihood. What is the approach – that is something for another article!
There is also a clever path, which is only open to new players or those willing to play a massive number of games , which will be covered in “What have the Dutch done for us?)
2200CorrespondenceChessIM TitleMovingonUp
