At your present level a '7-hours-per-week' training program can be the following:

- 2 hours: tactics training (you have to develop the ability to recognize patterns)

- 1 hour: opening preparation (learn the basic principles of two openings for white and two openings for black; use them in your games; don't memorize complicate variations)

- 2,5 hours: playing games (play slow games with a bit little stronger opponents, 30 0 or 20 10 can be OK; when you play, use your time and try to develop a basic analytical skill, i.e. before moving look at your opponent pieces, at what they are threating and imagine the consequences of the moving you're thinking to play, if it stops the threat, if it improves the activity of your pieces, if it can allow you to gain an advantage, etc.; if the move doesn't fit, look at possible better moves)

- 1,5 hours: analyzing your games (it's the hard part because generally it's not fun , but the benefits can be important; if possible do it with a stronger player, otherwise use a chess engine; look first at your openings, verify if you played dubious moves, try to understand why another move can be better, find in a database master or grandmaster games that use the same opening and see how they afford the position; then look at the moments of your game where the engine gives a '?' or a '??' to your moves: ask yourself 'why my move is wrong?', 'why didn't I consider that opponent reply', etc. and try to understand why the suggested moves are better; finally annote in a workbook two or three things that you've learned from analyzing your game and read them periodically).

This program can help you for a +100 ELO increment, then the things will change: you will have to develop other skills, such as positional evaluation, imbalances, endgame knowledge, firm discipline in analyzing candidate moves, etc. with the lecture of good books.

good luck!

Hey, get lost! I'll decide for myself what stuff I find amusing. :)

4 hours playing slow games

2 hours tactics

1 hour additional analysis of key decisions in your slow games

(including a quick look into an opening manual to figure out where you left Opening Theory)

Run a marathon, save kittens from trees, and a diet of french toast.  Don't tell anyone the secret though...

From my experience, the most rewarding type of study is

studying GM games with a certain repertoire (pick a side & play guess-the-move),

trying to solve problems (either tactics problems, or strategical problems like the ones at Chess Mentor, or How to Reassess your Chess Workbook),

playing slow games with detailed post-mortem analysis (including psychological analysis, like, where you drifted off, where you lost your focus after a slight inaccuracy etc.).

sekhar1,

To become a master at chess is itself a lifelong commitment, with no guarantees of financial success. One would need to become addicted, self-centred, and anti-social. These negative social attributes are necessary, because most of your time will be consumed by chess theory, practice, analysis, tournament play etc...it takes a great many hours to become average at chess, and maybe twice time that to become good at chess. To become a Master will be even much longer. The question is "how good in chess do you really want to become?" It may be a better decision to focuss on your professional training, and study chess as an interest/hobby. We hear about Magnus Carlsen (GM at 13), and wish to follow in his footsteps, but for every one prodigy, there are countless of "failures" who have invested so much time into chess, and cannot show anything for it in return. Only a handful of GMs make a living from chess, the rest have to find "a real job" in order to make end meet...so it is a great risk to invest so much of one's life into something where the end result is very uncertain.

Study chess all waking hours, pee in bottles.

  Reaching Expert  (an expert is a class less than a master) is a reasonable 10 year goal.  it won't happen overnight.  It doesn't require an encyclopedic knowledge of openings.  It does require a basic knowledge of endgames.  Mostly it requires a good tactical eye, which can be developed.   As to how much you should study endgames I would recommend Silman's Book Complete Endgame Course which will show you how much endgame knowledge you should have at each stage of your development.

I do agree that you should get a life and not let chess become an addiction.

This is not the way to study games.  Follow this and you won't see the forrest for the trees.  You should take about 15 minutes to play through a game.  Most instructive games are Master vs. Amature type, Euwe wrote a book with that name which I highly recommend.  Also the games of Paul Morphy are great to study because his opponents weren't that strong.

I think it's always helpful to consider the titles and ratings on the percentile chart rather than

http://www.sizes.com/sports/chess_ratings.htm

These are USCF, but I'm assuming FIDE and others are pretty similar.

To reach expert class, you need to get to be better than 89% of all players who take chess seriously enough to enter rated tournaments. That's a very tall order.

Take the remaining 11%. In order to reach the lowest level of master, you have to be better than about 75% of *those* players. You have to be able to beat an expert about 75% of the time. Have fun chasing that, anyone who wants to :)

sekhar1,

When playing chess, you should definately be playing at slow time controls.

Have you played in a tournament before? If you haven't, I would recommend trying one. The tournaments I have been to have slow time controls (3 hrs/game). Making moves at this speed really helps you to develop your chess ability, because you are forced to analyze your game more thouroughly, and excersize your brain more extensively.

It is hard to find anyone on the internet who is willing to even play G/60. You really don't want to play less than that when you are trying to learn, because learning how to play in time trouble is not something you need to spend time your time with at this point in development and impulsive move making reinforces bad habits. This is why I play Turn-Based chess right now. If you take 15 minutes or so to analyze each position, you will be learning alot more than when you play G/30. I like to analyze a position after my opponent makes their move and then revisit the position later that day or the next day. This really helps develop your analysis skills, and helps me make better moves. :) I don't really think of Online Chess as correspondence (although I do use opening databases) but as a way of playing slow time control chess that is more convenient for my opponent and I, as well as less mentally taxing than playing chess for three hours. Also, it is alot of fun.

Good luck!

Depends on a lot on who you are.  I've had friends who play a bit, and study a lot.  Personally I don't study at all, but played a lot and looked through my games with people.  Playing competativly helps, and reviewing how you did!

I teach chess and its a matter of a balance between playing games and studying. It helps to study an opening or a specific tactic and trying it in a game. You have to have a balance between study and live play.

play and enjoy.forget about becoming an expert/world champion for you have neither time nor the steely heart .

I think for a starter that all you need is the basic endings.  Lucena positions, Philador positions, how to mate with Queen or Rook or two Bishops.  Learn Bishop + Knight mate later.  Start with basic openings, like the Scotch game or Modern Italian game or London System. Hyper-Accelerated Dragon and Nimzo-Indian are good for Black.  You definitely need to spend a good deal of time with the TACTICS TRAINER as good tactical awareness will take you a long way.  You will need to review your games to see what errors that you are consistently making.  GOOD LUCK!

Yes, I'm sure you know plenty of top chess students, you mix in those circles (the cream rises). Mere mortals will find an hour a day wholly insufficient.

Psssst! that's the bit you have to pay for.

Spend it wisely.