Since I have no more tournaments planed this year and I will only play weekly club games, I decided that it is a good idea to create a training plan for the next three months. I want to share my progress with the plan and also show some interesting positions I came across during the week. In this first (or zeroth) post I write about my general training plan, the resources I will use and my goals for the first week.
Overview
After my last tournament, I noticed that I got into trouble early on in games against higher rated opponents. The problem wasn't really my knowledge of theory but that I missed my opponent's moves (which were often quite obvious) and that I didn't evaluate the positions correctly.
Due to this I want to spend most of my time during the next three months on my positional understanding. Additionally, I want to improve my thinking process when considering different variations.
One important aspect in this study plan will be a focus on the necessary skills and not only the knowledge. To improve my skill, I will play OTB league games, the Lonewolf 30+30 league and also 15+10 rapid games. In these games, I will pay special attention to the new things I learned in order to turn that knowledge into skills and improve my play.
Resources
An important part of the plan is to analyse my recent OTB games. My goal is to analyse all games from my last two OTB tournaments.
As external resources are concerned, I always struggle with picking a limited number of books since there are so many different options out there. For this training plan I have selected the following four books but I might cut one of them if I feel that my time is fragmented too much
- Build Up Your Chess 2 (Artur Yusupov)
- Mastering Chess Strategy (Johan Hellsten)
- Chess Structures - A Grandmaster Guide (Moricio Flores Rios)
- My Best Games of Chess 1908-1937 (Alexander Alekhine)
Goals for week 1
I want to focus on time goals instead of setting targets for the number of tactics I solve or games I look at. However, for some things (like playing games) I feel that setting a certain number of games as a goal is more useful. So how I measure my goals will be a bit of a mix. My goals are:
- 30 minutes daily on tactics
- 3 hours on Yusupov
- 3 hours on game analysis
- 1.5 hours on going through Chess Structures
- 1 hour on solving positions from Mastering Chess Strategy
- 1 hour of reading Mastering Chess Strategy
- 1 hour of reading through Alekhine's games
- Playing 1 Lonewolf game
- Playing 5 15+10 games