Train Like a Master: A No-Nonsense Guide to Explosive Chess
Hey Impressive Chessers!
And to my fellow Americans, Happy 4th of July!
So let’s start out by not sugar (or red*) coating anything: chess is a really hard game! Just to learn how all the pieces move and then get to the point where you hardly ever hang pieces anymore takes years and years of chess playing and study. So if you are in this thing to be able to, one day, play impressive chess; I commend you!
*Only my fellow Americans have a chance at this one😜*
Today’s blog is going to be a no nonsense guide to getting better at chess. We will be going over my round 1 game at the San Diego Chess Club on 6/28/2025, like a master does. You’ll get to see if you are doing the same things with your games. As the famous UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, said:
So with those wise words from the “Wizard of Westwood” let’s get cracking!
How to Train Like a Master
The best players don’t just magically come up with brilliant ideas over the board. They train to see them. If you want to play sharp, tactical, or dominating positional games, you first need to adopt a disciplined training routine.
In this blog, I’ll walk you through how I review my own tournament game. Specifically, my round 1 game from a recent event I played at the San Diego Chess Club on Saturday, June 28th, 2025. This tournament has a time control of 45 minutes with 5 seconds delay. Using the Rule of 10% 3-5 times per game I should be using ~10% of my starting time which is 5 minutes. Obviously you want to try to use these 10% chunks of times in critical positions, where the time is well spent. It's important to note that I wrote down my move times for each game. This is a very important task to determine if you are using your time in the right places. In this tournament one of my main goals was to never get below 5 minutes in any of my games. I have a terrible time pressure issue that I'm trying to address and so I was trying to limit the amount of moves that I used 10% on to 3 moves/game. Let's see how it went!
The Game
I've marked down the times when I used close to 5 minutes or 10% of my time. In this round that was:
Critical Position (CP) #1
CP #2
CP #3
Answers and Conclusion
I'm off to celebrate the 4th and I wanted to give you all enough time to comment your answers before I gave them away to y'all. Please comment which 3 moves you would have spent ~10% of your time and what move would you have played. And as always...
…Stay impressive!
OLM/NM Craig C.
linktr.ee/ChessToImpress
