A student recently told me about all the chess books he was working through. Seven of them. At the same time.

He wasn’t slacking. He was genuinely putting in hours, rotating between strategy books, endgame manuals, game collections, and a tactics course on the side. He had a full spread going and he was proud of it. I had to be the one to tell him that the effort wasn’t the problem. The structure was.

Seven books at once isn’t a training plan. It’s a reading list. And there’s a big difference between the two.

What a Training Plan Should Actually Look Like

This is going to sound underwhelming, and that’s the point.

A good training plan for most improving players involves a small number of resources. One book or course for strategy. One resource for calculation training. An online puzzle trainer for tactics and defensive calculation1. Your own games, played at a slow time control and analyzed afterwards (with your brain first, engine second; I recommend using Chessalyz.ai for this!). And whatever opening resource you’re currently working through. You don’t use all of those every day. You pick two or three things to focus on each day or each week, and you try to get better at one thing at a time before moving on to the next.

That’s the whole plan. If it requires a spreadsheet to track, you’ve already gone sideways.

Why This Is So Hard to Actually Do

Because it feels like you’re not doing enough. You sit down, solve 20 puzzles, review one of your own games, and then a voice in your head tells you that you should also be reading that chapter on pawn structures and watching that breakdown of the Candidates and studying that Carlsen endgame you bookmarked last week. There’s so much material out there and you’re just sitting here solving puzzles?

Yeah. You are. And that’s working.

The urge to add more variety usually isn’t about improvement. It’s about avoiding the discomfort of doing the same thing over and over when you can’t see the results yet. Buying a new book feels like progress. Starting a new course feels like progress. Rotating between five resources in a single week feels productive. But what’s actually happening is you’re spreading your attention so thin that nothing gets deep enough to stick.

I’ve been guilty of this myself. I own more courses than I want to admit and I’ve caught myself thinking I should be working through all of them at the same time because they’re just sitting there and it feels wasteful not to. But every time I’ve actually gotten better at something, it was because I picked one thing, worked through it until I finished it, checked it off, and moved on. Not because I tried to do everything in parallel.

If You’re Picking One Thing, Pick Calculation

If you’re rated somewhere between 1200 and 2000 and you’re trying to figure out what your “one boring thing” should be right now, it’s probably calculation.

I read an interview recently with Javokhir Sindarov (the recent Candidates winner) where he said that concrete calculation is the basic element of modern chess. Not strategy. Not positional understanding. Calculation.

His coach has built a database of 40,000 puzzles organized across 17 different skill categories and he’s feeding Sindarov targeted exercises from that system constantly.

You don’t need a 40,000-puzzle database yourself, but the principle works the same at every level. The players who are improving fastest are the ones grinding calculation every single day. Not because it’s fun (it usually isn’t) but because it’s the skill that touches every other part of your game. Your strategy doesn’t matter if you can’t calculate whether your plan actually works. Your opening prep doesn’t matter if you miss a tactic on move 14.

Most adult improvers spend the majority of their study time on strategic concepts and grandmaster games. That stuff is interesting and it feels sophisticated and it’s way more enjoyable than staring at a position for three minutes trying to figure out whether Nxf7 actually wins material or just loses a piece. But if your training always feels fun and interesting, you’re probably not doing the work that actually moves your rating.

Simplify and Commit

The advice I give almost every student is the same. Pick one calculation resource and work through it consistently. Use a tactics trainer daily, even if it’s only 15 or 20 minutes. Play slow games and analyze them with your own brain before turning on the engine. Have one opening resource and work through it at a pace where you’re actually absorbing the ideas. If you want to study strategy or endgames, pick one book and finish it before starting another.

Work on one thing at a time. Finish it. Move on. Repeat. It’s not exciting and it won’t make for a great Instagram post about your study setup, but it works. The ten-resources-at-once approach is more fun, and it definitely looks more impressive on a shelf, but improvement doesn’t care about how many books you own. It cares about how deeply you’ve worked through the ones that matter.

If you’re not sure what your “one thing” should be right now or you want help building a plan like this and sticking to it, that’s basically what I do as a coach. But whether you work with me or not, the advice is the same: pick fewer things, go deeper, and get comfortable with boring.

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