Thanks!

Also, I just beat my PR score with a 32. Perhaps just doing it enough makes a big difference (I only play once most days).

Right now I'm concentrating on Secrets of Chess Training by Yusupov & Dvoretsky - specifically the chapters dealing with analysis of one's own game. I feel like even though I "do all the right things" when analyzing my games, I'm not really learning from them properly. I'm kind of doing a superficial analysis even though it seems like I'm spending a decent amount of time on looking at them. I'm not actually using it to improve my calculation, analysis ability, or truly identify my mistakes.

I also am working on a list of strengths and weaknesses. The problem - and why I haven't done this before - is that I feel I am completely guessing. It's really easy to come up with examples of weaknesses where I did them ok and strengths where I botched them.

Any tips from players who have identified their weaknesses and strengths productively?

No first hand experience, but, despite the corny title and fugly cover, I've heard good things about:

Chess Exam And Training Guide: Rate Yourself And Learn How To Improve
by Igor Khmelnitsky

Reportedly it's doing a good job identifying ones strengths and weaknesses. Amazon user reviews are overwhelmingly positive, as well.

Hmm, that book definitely looks interesting (and his other two that are similar follow-ups). However, not sure I feel great about doing it with a pirated copy and also not sure I want to pay for a copy. lol

Just not sure in general at the moment. Also, I think a lot of the things I need to fix won't show up in that, they are in-game things. For instance, losing concentration at some point in the game for 1-3 moves or not transitioning to low time well (or not moving fast enough to avoid low time). Or not transitioning mentally when there are various shifts in the game.

That's not to say finding weaknesses like the ones that test identifies wouldn't be valuable, it's just that I probably should train all areas anyway. I guess if I score lowest on, let's say Calculation, then I'd have extra motivation to move that to a top priority. But then how do I retest? Dude only has one test! I have to be able to test/retest somehow.

In general news - I hit 1000 days on chessable. Wooo!



Also, I stopped tracking my studying stuff in such detail. My plan from now on is to just note what I studied and how much time I spent each day. I suspect I will miss a bunch but, ok, whatever. I can't think of a better goal than an effort-based one and tracking time is the main way I can think of doing that.

I just finished going through the chapters of Secrets of Chess Training (Dvorestky/Yusupov) relevant to analyzing and improving from your own games. I've updated my game analysis plan algorithm and am interested to see if it can make me delve into games more thoroughly and in a way that helps me actually improve from my mistakes.

I'm also learning the new d4 repertoire (Go for the Throat: Play 1.d4) I helped edit. It seems immense to me and may be a bit slow going.

I think I'm going to just log what I do each day here:

5/28
15m - review Botvinik variation
10m - review misc chessable stuff
5m - puzzle rush
50m - Secrets of Chess Training (SoCT): 3.1 & 3.2

80m total

5/29

20m - review Botvinik variation
30m - review zukertort repertoire
5m - misc chessable
45m - SoCT 5.1
10m - Woodpecker (WP) review
35m - Learn anti-moscow variation
5m - puzzle rush (PR)
20m - SoCT 9.1

170m total

5/30
5m - PR
24m - review anti-moscow
10m - review botvinik
48m - review tromp

87m total

6/1
8m - review Tromp tactics
5m - PR
20m - review anti-moscow
5m - review botvinnik

38m total

6/2
37m - review Dutch (632/655)
14m - learned cambridge springs
60m - Positional Decision Making
5m - PR
11m - review cambridge springs

127m total

6/3
5m - PR
13m - review cambridge springs
20m - review botvinnik
60m - 12 blitz games
30m - finished Positional Decision Making (finally - woo!)

128m total

6/4
5m - PR
15m - review blitz games
60m - review WP
18m - 253/258 botvinnik
11m - 86/96 cambridge springs
30m - Newhall v Hunt analysis
10m - misc chessable review

149m total

6/5
15m - misc chessable review
5m - PR
30m - learn slav QGD hybrid
60m - Newhall v Hunt analysis

110m total

I ***** respect you man.

Does my rating respect me, though?

I was going to ask this question in your log...maybe I will. But I often feel adrift and like I'm wasting time when I analyze my games. It's like I go through the motions:

1) look without engine, write down thoughts and improvements I see
2) look with engine, write down more stuff
3) go over with coach

But it doesn't seem like it's helped too much. So now I'm trying to be much more thorough and do these things too:

- identify turning points in the game
- identify mistakes I made
- create "position sketches" from the mistakes (either psychological or chess skill)
- turn sketches into exercises for chessable and drill them

A big problem I have is that most moves seem like they could be mistakes or perhaps I should have had a better plan. Also, a ~2400 browsed the game I just went through and pointed out in two spots a move I should likely have played "even if it loses" simply b/c as played my opponent had nothing to worry about. However, one of those instances it loses immediately to a 2 move combination (not hard to see but he must have missed glancing at my game) and the other one loses, but I have no idea if during a game it was still a better approach or not. What I did was objectively better, but given I was low on time and the game situation, how do I know how likely it was for my opponent to find the winning moves?

cliffs: I find it more overwhelming the deeper I get into analyzing a game. feelsbadman

Is it still worth doing? How do I or will I know?

Should I continue doing deeper analysis or just skip to categorizing the biggest mistakes and after compiling mistakes for 50 games or whatever, then find patterns and then come up with training methods to fix them?

From your analysis of your games are most of your losses still related to either missed tactics or calculational error?

Do you choose objectively strong openings or put alot of work into preparation? You think we can play on lichess abit (maybe something between rapid time control and classical) and analyse our games together?

I don't know, I need to categorize all the mistakes I've been making. I think I'll stop analyzing past games I've already done some analysis on and simply note down the clear mistakes I found.

Kind of? I am switching to what I think will be a much better White repertoire but it is many mainlines and I will need a lot of time to learn it.

Previously my opening repertoires were chosen very much seemingly at random.

Yes, of course. I believe I've mentioned doing this multiple times in the past. I am working from home for the foreseeable future so should have pretty decent flexibility during the weekdays. What time(s) and/or day(s) did you have in mind and what time control?

6/6
5m - PR
45m - blitz
7m - review cambridge springs 96/96
35m - Analyze Hunt game

6/7
7m - misc chessable
2m - PR
15m - anti-moscow variation
14m - QGD hybrid 65/95
45m - analyze Hunt game

6/8
15m - QGD hybrid 81/95
5m - PR
5m - misc chessable
25m - blitz

6/9
5m - PR
10m - misc chessable
158m - blitz

Really went off the deep end playing bitz yesterday (mainly on my phone while holding newborn, who was crying a lot of the time). I went on massive tilt and just kept playing and playing.

Doing a deeper dive into all of my games will take a ridiculous amount of time so my plan is to go through all of them and create a list of mistakes with Axel Smith's method in Pump Up Your Rating. The problem I've found is that my annotated games are not very clean and it takes some time to go through and confirm or find the mistakes. I should probably speed up and worry less about finding all of them since I'm finding plenty mistakes already through only 10 games. Plan to do two separate lists, the first half of 2018 and since then.

In the first 10 games there are a ton of mistakes I've categorized under "Blunder" and "Time Trouble"...I may need to go back and look at all the blunders (I should probably be flagging what category specific mistakes are falling into so I can look at them later) and then perhaps put them here with my conclusions and see what everyone else thinks (if anyone is willing to put a bit of thought into them) to try to get to the bottom of why they are happening (poor concentration, which is a separate mistakes category I have, or not doing a blunder check, or some other reason).

6/10
5m - puzzle rush
90m - list of mistakes

6/11
5m - puzzle rush
80m - list of mistakes
16m - review botvinnik variation 253/258

6/12
5m - puzzle rush
7m - review cambridge springs 93/96
15m - review anti-moscow 174/179
8m - review QGD hybrid 91/95
70m - list of mistakes

105m total

6/13
5m - puzzle rush
15m - misc chessable
20m total

6/14
5m - misc chessable
5m - puzzle rush
110m - list of mistakes (finished!)
40m - slav no 6...nbd7
160m total

6/15
28m review slav no 6...nbd7 190/224
25m - slav no nbd7: 202/224
30m - misc chessable
83m total

6/16
20m - review slav no nbd7 - 212/224
20m - misc chessable
40m total

LIST OF MISTAKES

Ok, so I categorized 117 mistakes from my last 29 OTB games. I'm sure there are likely many more but, at least going backwards, I don't want to spend any more time on them - there are plenty already!

Most costly/frequent mistakes

Blunder - 8 (6 were big) - these are 1-3 ply blunders that lose material
Missing prophylactic moves - 23 (9 big) - Missing my opponent's resources/ideas
Bad concentration/impulsive - 9 (8) - I'm sure I could categorize many other mistakes as lack of concentration but these are the clearest ones where I played a move or made a decision quite impulsively
Time trouble - 9 (7) - in games where I got into time trouble there tended to be multiple mistakes.

Next tier of mistakes which were common but less costly
Candidate moves/ideas 13 (3)
Wrong or weird plan 7 (2)
Forcing action/not being patient 10 (2)

Other significant mistakes
Playing the wrong opening repertoire move 5 (1)
Piece placement 4 (2) - these were all from one game lol but I'm sure there were many other instances of bad piece placement I just didn't catch
Piece exchange 5 (1)
Not comparing candidate ideas concretely 4 (1) - this is where I had two ideas but lazily didn't compare them properly and just did vaguely instead
Not getting logical move to work 4 (2)

So, it seems like the stuff that is costing me the most is also relatively simple stuff that needs to be fixed in-game. I guess I could argue that improving my tactics should help me see blunders without doing a blunder check, but, I've done a lot of work on tactics and I do not think this has helped. If anything, it may be I used to do blunder checks and now I don't b/c I'm relying on tactics training and purely intuition to avoid blunders.

I do think calculation is likely the next high-level thing I can work on but it's not the main culprit in costing me points OTB right now. High-level prophylaxis may be better to work on (and likely also trains calculation), although it's a much lower-level form of it that is costing me points, not missing some deep move, simply either not paying attention to my opponents' main plan or seeing it and somehow not playing a simple move to prevent it.

It seems to me improving these things has to come through playing games with the exception of prophylaxis. I do have Dvoretsky's book on opponent resources on Chessable which should directly train that issue.

So, my plan is:

1) To play a steady diet of 15+10 games and remember to do a blunder check for each move and keep my concentration up for the entirety of each game. Playing many short training games may also help with time trouble since I'll hopefully get more used to spending shorter amount of time on each move.

2) Either start Dvorestky's book or consciously make myself consider opponent resources each move of the training games. Or both? I wasn't planning to do his book next, there are so many other books I had in line!

I'd be very grateful to any other ideas or questions anyone has on this stuff. I can also go through and post examples of mistakes from some of these categories if people are interested and think it would be helpful.

Rest of month:



July goals:
1) Recognizing Your Opponent's Resources
2) All 2nd moves of 1.d4 repertoire (so I can start training it properly in blitz)
3) 10m/day studies
4) 10m/day chesstempo anonymous blitz
5) 15+10 games
6) For fun: Read Devoted to Chess: The Creative Heritage of Yuri Razuvaev - library just got it in, no clue how they pick the chess books they end up with. So far even just reading people's memories of him is very worthwhile/inspirational.

7/1
10m - anon chess tempo
5m - puzzle rush
10m - 1 study
20m - misc chessable

7/2
20m - 2 studies
20m - misc chessable
5m - puzzle rush
5m - Resources

Picked up Resources at library so now I have it as a print book and on chessable. I may actually try to go through it via the book and then train the exercises starting a month later or something on chessable. Or maybe not, who knows!

July tracking:



Have the book from library and on chessable. Haven't done any of it :/.

Stopped doing other things in order to concentrate on this but got bogged down in the Marshall the last week and haven't finished. Feel kind of burned out to be honest on this kind of studying.

However, I'll definitely finish 1.d4 c4 repertoire this month.

Abandoned these after a week or so it seems.

Didn't do any

Read it except the articles on specific openings (which I skimmed) and his games.

I also spent quite a bit of time reading Logic in Chess by Erik Kislik as he was going on the Perpetual Chess Podcast. The book is amazing and also horrible at the same time. More on the amazing side but hopefully his second book has a better editor.

One of the main things it's done is definitively reinforced that playing and analyze my games is the highest priority for improving. I wish I read it a couple months earlier (well, or much earlier) because it also was very helpful in direction for how to study one's own games. I now really do feel like I can do it relatively efficiently and learn much better from them (rather than spending time but not necessarily getting much out of it).

I'm also reading The Rookie right now which is a book some ~130-140 ECF player wrote about his attempt to make it to 170 grade (and lots of chess personalities and history along the way). It's very good and fun to read. Even though his journey is maybe somewhat of a "downer" overall given his attitude and outlook on chess players I find it refreshing to help remind myself that I don't think like that and am doing really well even when I feel frustrated.

Perhaps the coolest development is that a 2050-2100 player (who is a TD) reached out to set up 2 game mini-matches with me. He doesn't work during most days and my work schedule is very flexible so I hope to play 2 60+30 games with him each week. That should be great for training although I imagine maybe after a certain # of games it will be too boring to play the same person over and over? Not sure.

My goal for August is:

1) 8 games (hopefully 60+30 match games, but if not then 30m+ games online if I can find them)
2) Analyze all 8 games
3) Finish learning 1.d4 c4
4) Review miscellaneous things and openings on Chessable

It's amazing how much time playing long games and analyzing them takes so this may be all I end up being able to handle. We'll see.

I haven't quit chess but tracking what I do wasn't motivating me and instead I felt like doing some chess things was work.

I do have a new coach and am trying not to worry about studying so much, although a big part of me still feels a lot of pressure to go through materials I own.

Oh, and I may play a 2 game match vs. Kamil Dragun this weekend.

Long time since posting in chess forum. Just wanted to chime in a say. I found the same with poker with regards to tracking
I was logging amount of time spent on each topic area I was working on. I found it quite tiresome and also a little deflating. Made poker like a job (which is is for me but still should be fun).

Moved to a more general plan where I have a list of things I am working on. Normally just 1 maybe 2 at a time, because more than that and your brain gets fried trying to take in lots of stuff. Bruce less style 'I fear not the man who has practiced 1000 kicks but the man that has practiced 1 kick 1000 times'.
Good luck with your improvement seems like quite a slog, have been getting back into chess myself after a break may do a simple blog on here on my ideas to rapidly improve myself (was around 2000 at peak many years ago).

Oh wow, I didn't realize I hadn't updated in so long. I didn't end up playing against Dragun. I did play for a bit more but then didn't do much chess at the beginning of the year and then absolutely zero from March until August. I'm now slowly starting to do chess stuff again since the kids are back at daycare. I have a lot more life stuff going on (don't we all!) so we'll see. I'm really going to try not to worry about accomplishing anything chess-related for quite a while I think.

Yeah, I agree with all of that. It's tough to stay focused on one thing for so long, though. Especially since something like chess feels and seems to be limitless.

It's felt like a slog at times. Not necessarily for a particular reason. I think the main reason is that my expectations of how much chess stuff I can do doesn't match what I really should commit to or will enjoy.

I'd like to say if I had gotten back into chess pre-kids it would have been a lot less of a slog but I'm sure I would have simply focused on other things back then (e.g. rating not going up, not improving despite spending tons of time, etc.).

I recognize your screen name and feel I should remember a lot more about you (from SNG days?). Never knew you were a strong chess player. Do you play poker for a living now/still? When you say 2000 was that an OTB rating, some old online rating? If you do get back into it I assume you are significantly older and while improvement is very, very doable (and the ceiling is higher than I suspect people think), it almost surely won't feel like that's the case or like it's effortless.

If someone else started blogging I think there's a very high chance I would again fwiw .

I used to play sngs a long time ago. Maybe a little after you were also (not sure). I was fairly regular posting in the sttf thread etc.
Yes I still play full time (well kind of) but do a decent amount of coaching (mtts).
Chess wise it was otb, we have a weird system in UK called bcf. I was around 170 which is approximately just below 2000. I think online wise I was always lower actually but basically I just played blitz which I suck at. I was playing some 45/45 on ICC and think I was around 1950 there but barely any games and all league games. I had quite good results though think I had something like 5 wins and a draw in my first season. Then second season having to move up to a higher class was 5 draws and 1 win.

I agree about the ceiling thing, its not easy that's for sure but older people have attained high ish ratings. Was watching a you tube video about some endgame book and the author started a adult and made IM. That is ofc a outlier though and most people will struggle to get to 2000 i think.

Maybe I will start a blog, like you say its tough though to put in the hours you want when you work and have a family (i have 2 kids) and at end of day you are fried and don't feel like chess study etc

oh I should shout out to the IM guy who posts here. Took some coaching like 3 years ago before commitments made me kind of drop chess again a bit.
I feel like I got back to close to that 2000 level after some sessions with him and lots and lots of tactics work. I would guess I am around 1800 now maybe in slow chess. Though I didn't give up complelty just played loads of blitz basically. I think on lichess I am around 1880 blitz which means maybe I am stronger longer time controls than I thought but maybe not since they are likely meaningless those blitz ratings I think.