I am 17 and have played chess on and off my whole childhood and at 14, I played in a few tournaments and acquired a rating of 1437 USCF (started out at 1567 and then dropped). I was playing/studying chess obsessively at the time and then after a few months quit. Now, after 2.5 years, I have come back, and since several weeks ago, I have again being playing studying chess obsessively, and am planning to get back into the club/tournament scene.
Of course, right now in the summer I have a lot of time. I do 30-60 minutes of Chess Tempo tactics training everyday and have a standard rating of ~1700 on there. This is something I think I could do almost every day regardless of the time of the year. In addition because I have an abundant amount of time, I am also playing long games (Game/45+5 MINIMUM, and usually Game/60+5) online and play along with my real chess set so I can be accustomed to three-dimensional chess (because that’s what OTB will be like).
I have also figured out what openings I want to play, more or less even though I don’t know a ton of theory. I have studied the French Defense (watching all of SuperChessGURU’s videos), the Benko Gambit and 1.e4. For 1.e4, I have generally studied a system against the Sicilian in which derives from the Alapin Variation in which white wins a pawn but black gains a considerable developmental advantage, the Korchnoi Gambit which derives from the Tarrasch Variation against the French, and Soctch Game versus 1…e5. And these are the openings I play.
In addition, I am going through Silman’s Copmlete Endgame Course. Right now, I am in the Class C section and is what I plan to study up to and through for now until I break 1600 (that’s what he recommends and is how the book is organized), assuming I am still at 1437 even though that rating is outdated by 2.5 years. Once, I finish this, I’ll be spending time studying endgames by doing the endgame problems on ChessTempo.
I have also started going through Silman’s Reassess Your Chess which I find very helpful, because before I was often finding not knowing what the hell to do and this book really addresses this problem. So I do a good amount of tactical training (maybe I should incorporate some Blitz tactics training too) to improve my calculation, visualization, and pattern-recognition skills on a consistent basis (so that’s like the core of my training), and then I spend whatever free time I have left balancing studying endgames, strategy, openings, playing long games, and analyzing my own games. Once the long OTB tournament at my club begins, which works by playing one long game a week over a few-week span, I’ll just be analyzing that sometime that week and if I don’t have any OTB tournaments going on at the moment, I just study one of my long games online. Right now, during the summer, I am probably spending about 4-8 hours on chess a day. I guess one aspect i am missing is studying Master’s games.
I am expecting to play about 30-50 OTB USCF standard time-control games (many of which will be Game/100+5 or 40/85+5, SD 30+5, over the course of the next year. This is just about as much as my club’s going to offer and I really won’t have the time to do much more in terms of standard time-control OTB USCF games.
Of course, once school starts (I’m going to be a senior next year), my time to do all this stuff will be greatly diminished, and I’ll probably be strictly down to around 1-3 long games, including OTB, a week, of which I’ll analyze 1-2 (myself and then with the computer), and sporadically cycle between practicing endgames, learning strategic principles, and studying openings (perhaps spend 30-60 minutes a day on one of these things), but still continue to do 30-60 minutes of tactical training almost every day.
How does my training and participation regimen look?
, so here are my responses.
