Seems like sound advise. I was kind of thinking along those lines myself. In your opinion what would be a reasonable expectation for improvement in about a year wit casual to moderate study? I am ranked a little over 1300 in online chess, although I think this may be somewhat inflated.
Removing the Noise #1 - The Key Areas
Sort:
- The Opening: Lightly studying them
- Tactical work: Do them everyday
- Endgame Study: Not studying quite yet but paying very close attention in tactical puzzle, mentor challanges, and my own games while playing them.
- Instructional Anthologies of Master games: I find these to be VERY interesting and watch a few every couple weeks.
- Analysis of your own games: Uh...yeah. I should get started on this and take it more seriously. Been more into studying other people's games lately lol
What you said above is sound advice. I am improving primarily because of having figured these out over the last six to eight years of playing the game. But in the end it does come down to the person. They must make that commitment, that choice to improve; games by themselves very rarely make a good player, study and play however make Billy a happy boy.
Removing the Noise: The Key areas
I want to start this article by walking you through a typical journey of someone discovering chess. Initially a friend or family member will teach you the rules and how to move the pieces. You play a few games and lose horribly, somehow they can just see more than you, but you are interested in this game and want to improve so you look online for information.
You look at some articles and you get a few ideas down.
“Just study tactics and you will rapidly improve”
“Don’t bother memorising openings”
“Look over your old games”
These are all perfectly good pieces of advice and they are a good guide for rapid chess improvement. However once you hit a certain point you seem to plateau and then you go looking for more.
At this point it becomes an overwhelming amount of noise. You have a lot of people on forums telling you lots of different things, articles telling you even more and lots of books that you have to read . You try and follow all this advice but there is just so much to study. At this stage you burn out and stop playing or just restrict yourself to 5/2 games on the internet and just stay at the same level. You tell yourself things like “If I had the time to dedicate myself to study then I would improve.” Sound familiar? I must confess that I used to think this way.
The reason for this isn’t that people don’t want to put the work in. It is because they just don’t know where to begin. However I believe that improvement can be gained by a study of 5 simple areas.
These are, in my opinion, the most important areas to study for taking your chess to the next level.
In my series of articles “Removing the Noise” I will be discussing each area in more detail along with a method for training each point and an overall training schedule.
I just want to make a final point. You won’t improve at chess if you aren’t working on it.
This means two things. Firstly if you go at it too hard you can burn yourself out, chess is fun and it should be something you enjoy doing, if you aren’t enjoying it then take a little break and come back fresh.
Secondly just playing the game won’t help you improve. Massing games in the 5/2 pool is a total waste of your time. I personally believe that the 5/2 pool is totally useless, when you do play make sure you are playing slow games.
Thanks for reading
Kelsier