I stated in the "2015 goals" thread that at the end of the year I'd like to be 1800 at year-end, but I've no idea if that is realistic based on the "work" that I'm putting in, namely, playing a reasonable amount of chess (4 or 5 concurrent turn-based games, and about 15 15/10 games a week), doing 20 minutes of tactics every day and some examinations of the openings that I encounter in these games.

Are there other areas where I could apply focus that would give me greater return?

Is my goal reasonable based on the above?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Learn to Love Endgames

That's an interesting thread, thanks. I've always viewed endgames as dull but necessary, and given little thought to them, despite at least half of my games actually ending up in end game situations. I'm a little more excited after going through the thread.

I'll take a look at the book you recommended, cheers.

The great news about the bolded, is that many of the opponents you'll have to beat, on your way to 1800, can say exactly the same, so there's room for endgame knowledge to be a huge edge, and win you tons of half (and even some full) points.

I'm not sure what it is about them. Perhaps for me, the excitement of the possibility of some cool tactic no longer exists, and it's down to who calculates the most, which for some reason doesn't light my fire, but my view of endgame has always been coloured this way.

Reading the posted thread has made me realise that that's not necessarily the case, and quite pleasingly has in fact lit a fire. Whether the fire will withstand the child light of endgame study remains to be seen, but I'm excited as I stand right now.

What are your thoughts as to the goal? It really was set in a vacuum regarding what it takes to achieve it, and was more based on 1800 being a higher number than 1600.

Chill light. On mobile...

I'm only rated 2000 elo, but for what its worth my suggestion would be that just playing games isn't going to move forward without going over the games afterwards.

The classic advice has been that each game you play you spend quite some times reviewing, without a computer. Analyse the positions, delve as deeply into them as you can. Then you can compare your analysis against the computer or more ideally a good player.

The tactics if of course important too, as well as studying endgames, and perhaps playing over some games - given your love of endgames perhaps Rubinstein or Capablanca's classics.

I don't recommend going too deep into endgame study. You do need to know King + Pawn endings. And it's important to know some of the basic principles such King activity, bad bishops, cutting off the King in Rook endings, and so forth. But buying an endgame manual and going through it cover to cover is overkill.

Spending 10 minutes a day on tactical problems will likely give more bang for your buck.

And going over your games to identify mistakes and oversights is absolutely essential. I don't recommend looking at openings in great detail, but just try to learn as you go along. If you have problems against one particular variation, look it up and see how strong players handle it.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been using the online computer at chess.com to go over all the games I play, but to be honest I'm not finding it helpful. I'll definitely start going over the games in more detail without the computer analysis and see where that gets me.

I'm not going into much detail with openings, just looking at lines that crop up and hoping that they get committed to memory.

Sometimes threads like this are encouraging to me because early on here I'm showing a natural tendency to excel in the endgame and I actually enjoy studying the endgame tremendously. I watch a lot of "What Every Russian Schoolboy Knows" on ICC which is primarily about complicated endgames. I like studying them out of book OTB, too.