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Tactics Training Day 4 | Puzzle Battle and My New Plan
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Tactics Training Day 4 | Puzzle Battle and My New Plan

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This is going to be my last change of plans. Hopefully I can stick to it. It just seems like I can't create a plan and then actually follow it. I've known that I'm not a great planner, but I didn't know that I would have to change my plan every single day that I'm doing it. Not the best start to my plan to improve, but it doesn't worry me too much. Right now it's conveniently Monday, the perfect time to start anew. So here's my tactics training plan for the next two weeks. After that, I might continue with it for another week or two or switch to chess.com's study plan. See, this is why I'm a bad planner.

Sunday: No tactics training! Play a few 10|0 games. 

This is because since starting this plan and writing my blog, I haven't had any time at all to actually play chess, just study it. That's not a good idea, since I won't actually have a chance to see how I'm doing and whether or not my plan is helping. Also, if I don't play, I'll more or less forget what to do in a game. That may sound weird, but if you don't play actual games there'll be certain things that you won't be able to practice, especially in my case because I'm focusing on tactics training right now. 

Monday: Puzzle Battle for half an hour, then 20 rated puzzles.

That's today's agenda. Puzzle Battle is a good way to enhance your calculation speed and competitiveness. Hopefully I can get 9 or ten battles in. I'll be doing 20 rated puzzles for as many days that I have the time to fit them into my non-chess schedule. 

Tuesday: 2 Survival Rush, trying to get the highest score I can get, taking as much time that I need. Also 20 rated puzzles.

For the whole duration of my tactics training I'll be focusing on quality over quantity.

Wednesday: Focus individual puzzles. 30 rated puzzles, trying to get as many as possible right, as slow as needed, and 20 learning puzzles, as fast as possible.

Quality over quantity for the rated puzzles, and speed solving for the learning puzzles, which I'll set to be easier so that I can firmly remember all of the more basic patterns.

Thursday: 5 minute Puzzle Rush for half an hour, and then 20 rated puzzles.

I'll be comparing my scores, pass rates, and average puzzle times between Survival, 5 minute, and 3 minute Puzzle Rush.

Friday: 3 minute Puzzle Rush for half an hour, and then 20 rated puzzles.

Faster Puzzle Rush helps my speed calculation. 

Saturday: No tactics training! Speed chess day!

Saturday will be my exclusively speed chess playing day. I'll play only blitz an bullet, trying to get my rating up, because I usually only played speed chess at the end of a 10|0 session to relax myself. I'll still do that, but now I'll have a whole day to relax and take a break from training. Relaxing and taking a break once in a while (in my case once a week) is very important. If you constantly play and study chess and only chess, it's not good for you and will have negative impacts. Have some fun!

Now a bit of information of my Puzzle Battle history. I basically just did Puzzle Battle whenever I remembered that it was a thing or whenever I felt like it. There was one day in the beginning of August when I did a lot of it, so now my August points are 838 and my rating is 1674. Whenever I do it I win almost all of the Battles, since I played against players who were weaker than me by quite a margin. Now when I focus on it, I'm going to try to get my rating up to where it should be so that I can play players of my level.

The results of my first Puzzle Battle tactics training day:

NUMBER OF BATTLES: 10

WON: 9/10

STARTING AUGUST POINTS: 838

ENDING AUGUST POINTS: 2914

AUGUST POINTS +/-: +2076

STARTING PUZZLE BATTLE RATING: 1674

ENDING PUZZLE BATTLE RATING: 1747

PUZZLE BATTLE RATING +/-: +73

Battle links:

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/24bZdZCqk

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/zBgSh1Ci

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/z9ce13NW

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/2mL7vdXvn

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/33HaGGz9U

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/2fBuzGNcE

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/28VA72QzA

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/2p3AtnMd8

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/2rutLLAgv

https://www.chess.com/puzzles/battle/jyeCkhWW

9/10 is good but I would want that to be 10/10. Maybe next time. But at least my rating went up a lot and so did my monthly points! Not a bad start for my Puzzle Battle training.

Now on to my rated puzzle training.

PUZZLES ATTEMPTED: 20

PUZZLES SOLVED: 14

PASS RATE: 70%

STARTING PUZZLES RATING: 2621

ENDING PUZZLES RATING: 2714

RATING +/- TODAY: 93

It's a good sign! My pass rate is going up from 50% to 60% to 70% now! Happy coincidence. Maybe tomorrow I'll get 80%! And my rating is going up, creeping closer to 3000. 

Here are some of the puzzles I did today!

There's a glitch with chess.com right now so I'm not sure if this will work. Tell me if it did in the comments and if not I'll try to fix it.

I got that one.
That one was pretty easy too. Now for a harder one.
The puzzles weren't working when I previewed this, and it took me a looong time to get them to work. I tried inserting by FENs, PGNs, just the sections of the PGNs that describe the problem, and then finally got myself to set up each puzzle individually with all of the right checkboxes. That was tiring. 
That's it for today.
Excheqquer also writes about his journey to improve, and he's putting the chess.com study plan to the test! He writes about his experiences and annotates his games. You can find is blog here: https://www.chess.com/blog/Excheqquer
By the way, all of my other series (like comparing game analysis, immortal games, etc.) are unfortunately going to have to be delayed for a while during the period when I'm studying, since I can't post multiple blog posts a day. Sorry to those people who were waiting for me to analyze their games! After this I will get back to that. I hope you understand. Thanks!
See you next time!