Intro:

This is my chess improvement journal any input is greatly appreciated.

Background:

Picked up chess in my early 20's, played a dozen torneys or so, mostly G/30, G/90 had a uscf of about 1600 not sure how accurate is was. Picked up poker, played "pro" during the boom, dabbled with chess off and on, mostly off.
When i started chess in early 90's, before forums and tactic servers my main study plan was to study master games and openings, a plan i now know was not optimal or even strong. Chess was frustrating for me because i kept losing to people I felt i had a stronger opening and positional understanding than. I studied some tactic books but did not see much improvement. I just concluded that if u did not play chess when you where young you would never be good tactically.

Why now?:

Inspired by Allen C, and some posters on some chess forums (Temposchlucker, aoxomoxoa wondering, munic) i now think i can improve tactically at my age (40). I am super motivated to get better, especially tactically, because i enjoy playing but also being a fan. Would like to be able to follow matches and books better. I plan to spend my retirement years playing chess.

What i have done till now:

Last year i joined a chesstempo and established a blitz and standard rating. My standard rating est. my fide strength to be around 1600 my blitz rating (where time to solve is factored in) my fide was estimated at 1400.
Following the plan of solving easy themed tactics sorted by rating. IE created a set of forks non mates from rated 800-1100 in order. I have done 20.5k easy themed tactics like this so far. Mostly in the last 2 months as now i have a job situation that is allowing me to put a few hours in chess a day. My fide est. in blitz is now 1714 and my standard fide est is 1650.

My plan:

I plan to put at lest 2 hours a day into improving in chess tactics,(themed easy tactics) including opening and endgame tactics. Until i see a long plateau. I plan to memorize 1 game a week from Art of Attack in Chess, Attack with Tal or some game from Paul Morphy. I plan to play correspondence chess with mostly gambit style openings using an opening DB and planing deep attacks on analysis board. I am going to play lightning games, until i am used to the speed then switch to bullet when i get faster with same aggressive style.

My questions:

-How do i learn to analyze my games, is there a good book to teach not that advanced guys how to analyze their games?

-What is the best software to store, and analyze my games and do blunder checks. Best free one, any really good even if expensive?

-If i was you i would stay focused on tactics till you reach a tactic rating of ___. What is a reasonable goal for 6 months from now, a year? What is an amazing #?

-What software, website, resources, stories, blogs, books, anecdotes do you know related to tactics or chess improvement when older?

T.Y.

Wow, sounds like you are really motivated. I have spent 147 hours on chesstempo and have a 1830 blitz right now on it. Seems like I have plateaued though, as I bounce around between 1780 and 1870 blitz without making progress. Tactics Trainer on chess.com is also good.

Has your tactics improved? Do you do easy or hard tactics. Has your blitz rating on there improved a lot from where u started?

I save tactics trainer for a test to see if i am improving on new problems.

I set chesstempo on hard tactics, mainly due to the fact you get more rating points for hard ones.

The rest of the plan seems fine but:

1) I'd shy away from using an analysis board during correspondence games. You don't get to move the pieces during OTB play, which I'm assuming you want to become good at. The analysis board can be a crutch, and the work you do with it won't translate much to gains in visuo-calculation ability.

2) Feel free to play blitz, lightning, and bullet for fun, but it probably won't help you improve that much--worse, it might even breed bad habits. Your workhorse time control should be 30|0 or longer. Preferably longer.

3) It's a common misconception that attacks are guided by deep plans. The grand attack that appears in hindsight to spring from a grand plan, and is romanticized as such, is much more likely to be the product of short-term positional operations, each a few or several moves in length, strung together, one after another, in a way that preserves the initiative. The annotated games in John Nunn's Understanding Chess Move by Move should illustrate this concept (warning: it's very dense in variations!).

Thanks for the input. I was thinking about that. I was thinking i would play a dozen games or so and with 10 of them i would give myself 2 to 5 min to find the best move visually (5 on the computer 5 on my board) the 2 games that are in position or opening play often i use the analysis board to see what is out there. My calculation ability and board vision are not good. Should i use the board to check my work before i send my move or gamble?

Makes sense, i only play blitz and have not improved. I am good in openings though. Do you think the correspondence games are not enough for my long games? My plan was to play them and play lightning games because it is too fast for me, i have to speed up, i have to think on my opponents clock, it is active work for me.

If you want to simulate the OTB experience, you shouldn't use the analysis board to check your work. Also, 2–5 minutes is too narrow of a range; some moves can and should be made very quickly, others can take 30+ minutes.

They should be enough, but it can't hurt to get out to in-person tournaments and play long games there, or play the occasional 30-minute game online.

The strongest players in the world are all good at blitz, but for the most part, they didn't get to that point by practicing blitz.

The process of speeding up is more like: 1) become familiar with tactical and strategic patterns through a combination of calculation during long games and study/practice; 2) keep at #1 until you become unconsciously competent at spotting and implementing these patterns.

So tomorrow i finish my first week of organized intense chess study. Here is the 10 week plan i came up with lurking the forums. Anything you would change? Add? Keep in mind this plan is to specifically work on my tactics, board vision, calculation ability and attacking technique. I will do this for 10 weeks and reassess.

So i am using the method of tactical training of doing easy themed tactics and spacing the repetitions to try to store the patterns in my LTM. There are a few bloggers who are using this system with mixed results. Some showed good improvement some not much. These guys are all much higher rated than me, so i am interested to see how much a more novice player can improve with these methods derived from cognitive science. (i only studied this stuff online).

The plan: My plan is for 10 weeks or 5 separate 2 week blocks. The majority is tactics training. What i do day 1 i will also do day 15, 29 ect. So for day one down here you see I ran a search on CT for "fork, double attack" sorted for non-mates rated 800-1500 in ascending order. I also sorted for white to move. I got back 2000 problems. Because that set was so big it took three days. Day 1, 2 and 3. I am going to repeat these 2000 problems 5 times, 14 days apart. (ie day 15,16,17). The goal is to build a chess memory of these patterns. The time is CT hours which is solving time, they don't count loading time or looking at the solution after. The problem is how many i got right/how many attempted.




TACTICS TRAINING:

DAY Motif time prob

1. Forks 1.7 hrs 510/533

2. Forks 4.1 795/817

3. Forks 0.9 247/295

4. Pin 3.5 665/702

5. Pin 3.6 543/602

6. Counting


This is current as of today. It will be 14 days of original problems and repeating that cycle 5 times. My state of mind when solving these puzzles is to try and solve them with my mind quiet. For example, i try not to say to myself "he cant capture my bishop because he is pinned" i want to look, see it and do it over and over till i know the "rules" subconsciously. I only give myself a max 30 seconds to find the idea (most only take a few seconds, they are low rated problems). I try not to calculate just try to find a pattern i remember.
How i feel about this training so far? I have been doing these type of easy problems for 2 months now (23k problems), and i think it is great. My tactic rating has shot up, (1400 to 1700 fide est) but that might not mean much because i had been inactive for so long, anything would have raised it.



STRATEGY TRAINING:

Week 1: Read and study chapter 1 in the 'Art of Attack in Chess'

Week 2: Use chess opening trainer to memorize by route the
the games in chapter 1.

Week 3: Go over the games in chapter one in more detail.

Week 4,5,6: Chapter 2...ect


CALCULATION:

Aside from 2 lightning games a day, my only play is going to be in correspondence play. I am using an opening db to decide what kind of lines i want to play. For now i am focusing on romantic openings and quick counter attacking lines for black, when allowed. On the more closed and dry positions I treat the games like a G/30 and find a move in an appropriate amount of time noting down my opinion of the position and my "plan". For the more tactically complex positions i am setting up my board and doing the analysis in my head and writing it down. I am only going to do post mortem on my sharper games for now... need my time for tactics.

Board vision:

I do a couple 15 min sessions of board vision exercises at chess gym each day.



Sound good?
I might be able to get a couple hours of coaching a week, like 1 or 2 only. What should i work on with a coach if i only have 2 sessions? Analysis of my games, amirite?

sounds like a pretty intense plan, I like the idea but I have some comments on it



The main reason this became popular imo was a book/articles "400 points in 400 days" by Michael de la Maza, who started at around 1400. So I'm surprised it's being mainly used by players much higher.

I think this might be rooted in a misunderstanding of the relationship between the complementary skills of calculation and board vision. Yes, you practice these problems to improve your board vision, but you improve that by calculating the lines! Good 'board vision' allows you to spot the right ideas more quickly and more consistently, but 80% of the time you spot something you will still need to calculate a couple of lines, even if you are a GM. So I would prefer to take your time and get the problems right.

Playing through these games and studying the annotations (mostly light, but that is fine) is an excellent idea. I'm not so sure that committing a week of your "strategy study time" to memorizing the games is a good investment, though.

I think analysing CC games with the help of the analysis board is just fine - you build a slightly different skill from playing a live game, but a very useful one. Not everyone agrees.

I think you should do at least a perfunctory post mortem in every game - I expect you won't be finishing a game every day, so it's not too time consuming. Especially in a CC game it's valuable to ask why you made a mistake.
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The main reason to start with analysis of your games is that it allows a coach to tailor their recommendations to you. After all if you tell the coach "I want to work on tactics" and he gives you a worksheet of 100 tactics problems, you will feel cheated because you could get the same for free online.

I myself also always wonder about the right way to improve. I just found this post about chesstempo http://rockyrook.blogspot.fi/2014/01...mpo-stats.html
From there I found this guy http://chesstempo.com/chess-statistics/aoxomoxoa
In approximately 5.5 years his blitz rating has improved only about 50 points. Apparently it's very hard to improve this way.

Yea, i know about that too. I am about 1600 so i feel pretty confident i can go up a couple hundred points with with sufficient volume on this program. The reason i focus on these players (Temposchlucker, aoxomoxoa wondering, munic, uri blass) is they are in there late 30's early 40's and trying to improve tactically and overall at an age where very few people get better statistically. Their FIDA and tactics ratings are in the 1900-2100 range. I think it is shown statistically that very few players, even in there 20's show big improvement in tactics when time to solve is factored in after there first few thousand attempts. Munic showed the most improvement (i think from 1900 to low 2000ish or so) he followed almost religiously spaced repetition with low rated tactics only, repeating more often the one's he missed or took long.
I am basing my plan on munic's methods but putting much more volume. He only had time to train a few hours a week.

I finished my first week and decided to make a couple changes. My somewhat revised study plan with week one results.

TACTICS TRAINING:

For week #1 I did themed tactics rated 800-1500 in ascending order under the themes "Fork, Pin & Counting". I did 3390 problems in 16 hrs of CT time (solving time only, not counting load time or analysis of position after). An average of 484 problems a day. An average of 17 sec per problem. Going to have to pick it up a little for next time only got half way thru the "Forks".

Board vision:

I have slacked on this and have done a total of only 15 min solving time for the week on chess gym board vision, "attack exercise". Going to try to get it up to 45 min this week.

Strategy:

Decided **** that for now. If I do not find a way to get much better in tactics, board vision and calculation then there is no reason to work on the other skills. Not quite true, I am watching videos on ICC and chess.com. Joel Benjamin "game of the week" is my favorite.

CALCULATION:

This is the part I am most surprised. This is the first time i have tried correspondence chess and i am loving it. I am playing 15 games with 3 days per move. I am setting up my board and writing what a notice about the position, tactical threats, imbalances & potential plans in a composition notebook. For the positions i think i can keep track of in my head i am doing the calculations and assessments in my head. For the positions i know are too complex for my current skill level I try to visualize it then move the pieces to see what i missed. Besides the CC game's gonna play a couple G/30 games a week (taking some advice from this thread). Corispondence chess is much more fun than it sounded to me, for the first time i kind of have an idea of what is going on in complex positions and time to make a plan.

Week #2/10

Started week 2 today (mon) trying to get in 4500 mate in 2 by Friday.

So reading some more about "board vision" and trying out some some training sites i think i would be well served to invest some time in this kind of training first, before tackling more complex tactics like chess tempo. I am still missing one move tactics.
I hope i am not posting too much but this is my first attempt at organized study, so i am still trying to find a strong plan.

Board Vision:

-I am using "chess eye" software to memorize the squares, diagonals, optimal knight paths ect... They have a series of progressive drills.

-I signed up to "Chessity" website, they have a bunch of board vision drills as well as simple tactics like hanging piece and defensive moves.

-I do the "attack", "defense" and "check" drills at chess gym.

-I use "chess visualization trainer" to play against the computer 2-ply behind the true position. I hope to progress to 6-ply by the end of the 10 weeks.

-I am still going to do chess tempo but only do the set "Forks, non mates" 3,500 puzzles and repeat them 5 times 2 weeks apart.

-My only play is CC and will analyze them with master online when they are finished.

Anything i can add? Take away? I am trying to improve my board vision, calculation ability and tactics.

Sounds like a serious plan. Depending on how high you want to go everything is pertinent. What is your rating goal? If you want to reach master level you need to add endgame study in there.

I just started my own improvement log in this forum, and compared to the others your approach seems the most similar to mine (focusing on drilling tactics, etc, and playing mainly CC).

I checked out the training sites in your latest post, and will be adding the chess gym-exercises to my own training.