Blogs
Reaching for 2200: Starting the Chess.com Study Plan
https://www.chess.com/article/view/study-plan-for-advanced-players-the-opening-1#structures

Reaching for 2200: Starting the Chess.com Study Plan

Avatar of colorfulcake
colorfulcake
| 13

I reach 2000. That's not too difficult. Problem is, I can't stay above it. Bobbing back and forth above and below. I just can't seem to be consistent. And here we see one of the sources of my problems.

Non-improvement. Is that a word?

With all of the resources and abundance of information here on chess.com, you could imagine that improving shouldn't be too difficult. Right? Except that with so much to learn, you also need an organized study plan. If you don't have a set course with all of the ideas needed to improve covered in a comprehensive and well-sorted way, you won't be able to improve as much as you want.

Fortunately for us, chess.com has got the perfect solution for players like me.

Study plan! Exactly what we need. All of the material here on this wonderful site is sorted out into categories, sub categories, sub-sub-categories, skill levels, themes, etc. If you want to see it for yourself, here is the study plan directory:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/study-plan-directory

There's a ton of links and I was a bit disarrayed at first, but got the hang of it. 

I will actually be doing two study plans. First, the "Advanced" study plan, which is described by ratings 1800-1999, and then the "Master-path" study plan, characterized by ratings between 2000 and 2199. I'm guessing that they don't have study plans for ratings 2200 and above because if you're that strong already you have other ways of improving...

My current rating is 1985, since a week or two ago I lost a few games in a row and it brought my rating crashing back down below 2000. However my peak rating was 2037. I'm doing two study plans because I feel like I need to stamp my understanding of the topics covered in the Advanced study plan, but also feel that I am strong enough to learn the Master-path ideas and that they will help me greatly. Maybe I'll be on the path to mastership nervous.png. Doing two plans will take a long time, likely less than half a year. If you checked out the study plan directory you can see how many links there were leading to articles, lessons, videos, and the like. Also, I will have limited time to study during the school year ( I mentioned this in my last post (https://www.chess.com/blog/colorfulcake/time-for-10-0-playing-again). Most of my study time will probably be during the weekends, when I'll try to cram in as much as I can. That might not be the best idea, trying to stuff in as much as possible in two days, so I'll spread a little bit when I have time on the weekdays too. For now, at least, I'll be able to study every day for the rest of the summer, hopefully! I don't think that I have any more major activities during the next two weeks, so I'll be home long enough to get in a few hours of studying and writing my blog almost every day.

My goal is to reach 2200 rapid rating by February 2022. Or I could magically transform into an optimist and set my goal to be 2200 before the new year. That would be great, but speaking objectively I don't think it's going to happen. Unfortunately for me and those around me I'm usually not very optimistic. meh.png

OTB chess is coming back soon, too, and I'm also going to try to be as active as possible. Right now I'm actually still unrated OTB because tournaments shut down during the pandemic and I didn't have the chance to play in any rated tournaments. Before the pandemic I had only played in unrated sections. I'll first try for 1600, then raise the bar higher to 1800 and 2000. All of this is in terms of USCF ratings. I'm not close to playing internationally yet.

I did win a few plaques (nobody remembers the time when they gave out trophies to scholastic tournament winners meh.png) in online tournaments but I just don't seem to play that well in a tournament situation, and my best guess is that I need experience.

Anyway, let's get on to the first day of my study plan! chess.com doesn't give you a specific schedule for when to watch the videos or read the articles, so I get to decide how much I want to do. Let's start at the beginning, a very good place to start! 

Day 1, Week 1: Openings. Expanding my knowledge of common structures and plans, part 1.

The first section out of the five sections of the Advanced study plan is the Opening. (https://www.chess.com/article/view/study-plan-for-advanced-players-the-opening-1#structures)

There are eight sub-sections in the Advanced Opening course. First up: Expand your Knowledge of Common Structures and Plans.

I'll be doing about half of this section, reading eight articles. The instructions given are to "Read the following articles and notice the authors' focus on the common plans and thematic ideas in each opening."

Here are the articles I will read today:

You can click on the links and study along with me if you want to! I don't know why the links aren't blue and underlined, but it doesn't really matter.

  1. Do You Need To Study Junk Openings? by GM Gregory Serper - I found this article interesting, even though it may not be very useful in practical chess. GM Serper gave examples of situations where Halloween Gambit style sacrifices could be used and talked about offbeat openings, but for me personally I don't go into those lines, but it is good to know the ideas.
  2. Monster Opening Preparation by IM Jeremy Silman - Gives a very good description of opening preparation at a high level, some tips, and Silman's own history with the Bronstein-Larsen Caro-Kann.
  3. Monster Opening Preparation Part 2 by IM Jeremy Silman - Yet again a very well written article by Silman, focusing on the rich history of the Marshall Gambit this time.
  4. Kostya's Blueprint: Learning Structures Part 1 by FM Kostya Kavutskiy - An helpful article, although I already knew many of the topics written about here. Great tips, though.
  5. Kostya's Blueprint: Learning Structures Part 2 by FM Kostya Kavutskiy - Great article too. I'm also a French devotee (although now I'm more of a Sicilian player as I play stronger players) and this helped. Again it had good tips on how to learn openings.
  6. Can You Still Specialize In An Opening? by GM Bryan Smith - Answers the title question very effectively. The examples are great and playing through the game was fun. The analysis is good, and this even made me want to play one of the most dangerous lines there is... you really should read this one.
  7. An Opening Line for Club Players by GM Gregory Serper - Explains a lot of different things very well. You should click some of the links given in the article that lead to other articles by GM Serper about openings, I looked and they're all very good. I've read many of Serper's articles and posts before and they are consistently of very high quality and are fun to read.
  8. An Opening Line for Masters by GM Gregory Serper - As expected, another great article from Gregory Serper. I personally don't like playing the Advance variation of the French as white, since I was taught how to play against it as black, but this opened my eyes to some different ideas for white.

And my first day of studying is over! I have to say, all of the articles were of good quality and well written. I enjoyed reading them and look forward to studying more. Tomorrow I'll be watching these videos by IM Danny Rensch:

Like I said before, I won't be posting every day since I want to post on other things too, so every weekend I'll post an update on how I'm doing and what I studied. 

You can request a topic for me to write about, send me games for me to analyze (and compare with your analysis), or ask to play a match against me if I'm online at the same time, and I'll happily say yes!

This was a bit long, and if I post about this every week with everything I did over the whole week, I can imagine how enormously long this will be, so I'll have to find a way to shorten it.

Until then, I'll post on other things.

Thanks for reading! I'll see you next time!