This will be my daily routine:
30 minutes Tactics Training (Chess.com Tactics Trainer)
60 minutes Difficult Calculation (Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation by Jacon Aagard)
1-2 hours on Opening Preparation (Chessable courses), alternate with Endgame Study (100 Endgames You Must Know) unless I'm doing intensive opening training for a tournament
This study schedule will hopefully be more reasonable than my study in the past
So far, I finished the Gelfand's Position Decision Making book and it is probably the best book on strategy that I have ever read. I wouldn't have been able to finish it (as with most books in the past) without Chessable, I think Chessable makes it much easier to go through books and its partly what got me back into chess because I couldn't finish through entire books until Chessable came out.
Hopefully, my study plan is not too ambitious or taxing like it was in the past and I won't burn out again.
One of the big changes I've made, is mainly in my opening choices, and I hope it will reflect in the results in the future:
1) I've found a simple way to play the English Four Knights: 1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Nf3 Nc6 4. d4 and it leads to alot of simple position and solved the issue I used to have with alot of the e5 lines. Alternatively, I also have the c4, e4, Nf3 set ups which is going to allow me to get into Maroczy Binds which are my bread and butter positions in the English.
2) I've completely scraped the Semi Slav out of my repertoire, because back then that opening took alot of my time and got me no where, it was alot of preparation work and I was still constantly getting worse position because of how hard it was to cover the entire breadth of lines available to white and I often wondered into lines I'm ill prepared for where it was very very concrete and punishing for black (think Marshall gambit in the Triangle slav, a bunch of the sidelines in the Botvinnik Variation and some of the more tricky Meran lines). I did some Stonewall Dutch lines with some success but decide to just play the Dutch straight up and has found alot of success because of how much it suits my style and how intuitive it is to play those positions.
3) I play the Nf6 Modern Variation instead of the Bf5 Classical Variation in the Caro Kann now and it's doing great. I used to go 0-0 and get relentessly hacked by 0-0-0 and g4 lines and those positions were very easy for white to play. Now in the modern after exf6, I realised alot of players up to like 2100 struggle to play the positions as white because they aren't used to that pawn structure where now I get to play dynamically with my kingside which suited my style more (rather than sitting around trying to find engine defenses). I'm also open to the idea of 1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 c5!? lines in the advanced variation to cut down on the theory work and to catch unprepared players off guard, not that I was having problems in the normal advanced variations which I usually have lot of ideas in anyway, but this gives me more option and ideas to play as black.
Last edited by NL Loki; 01-24-2022 at 06:50 PM.