My training

As I said in my previous post, my chess training has been relaxed so far. I need to devise an intensive training program to maximize the time I have. I don't have to think about full time school until the summer (I'm a 21 year old city planning student by the way) so I can take maybe 6 or 7 months just for chess, with little else to think about. I don't know how much a person my age can improve in 7 months but I'm going to try to maximize the time I have.

So, I've devised a daily study plan which includes:

TACTICS 

-200 puzzles on CTS (for tactical vision)

-20 puzzles from "combination challenge" (these are harder, and training calculation)

This is the most important part, I need to get my pattern recognition and calculation up to snuff.

 MASTER GAMES

-Go over 5-10 master games from "My 50 years of chess" by Frank Marshall

 CHESS.COM

-Cut down my gameload to about 10 games and really work on the plans for each move, I'll be reading "the amateur's mind" again and trying to apply the silman thinking method to each move I make.

 BLITZ

-I'll be playing lots of blitz on FICS, I have a copy of Fritz 11 on the way so I'll probably be switching to playchess fairly soon.

This will be my plan until I hit about 1700 here, afterwhich I'll keep following the plan but also start reading some more books, including:

"The art of attack" by Vladimir Vukovic

"Pawn Structure Chess" by Andrew Soltis

"The art of defence in chess" by Andrew Soltis

And once I'm done with Frank Marshall's games I'll go through:

"Bobby Fisher's best games of chess" by Eric Schiller (ewww...I know, but I got it as a gift and I might as well use it)

"Botvinnik's 100 Games" by Mikhail Botvinnik

"How to play the English Opening" by Anatoly Karpov

"Petrosian vs. the Elite" By Poole and Simpole

My plan is to build up my pattern recognition my massive repetition. Lots of tactics puzzles and master games will do this very nicely.