Playing Along and The Accumulation Of Chess Understanding, Plus A Thought On 'Study Plans' .
A quick New Year's present - brief by my standards, my regular readers will be relieved to hear ( especially those with a mother of a hangover, staring at the left over turkey and wondering what to do with it - curry in progress here!!)
In another quadrant of the chess playing universe I often get asked about studying for improvement. My advice is always the same. Here's a simple 'study plan'. Study chess!!! All time studying chess will help you get better. It doesn't matter how you do it. Coaches will help you. Online puzzle solving will help you. My first 'retirement' from playing chess came when I was 18, and in the next 4 years I had my head in every chess book I could get my hands on looking at games - many unannotated in tournament bulletins etc. - trying to understand them. I came back out of form, but despite that I was a much better player. Just sitting in front of a chess position trying to work out what is going on is good training. What do you do during a game? Sit there looking at a position on the board trying to work out what is going on!!! Makes sense to me guys. It ain't rocket science. 
Watching the World Rapid Championships this week - yes, I choose to write about stuff from the past, but one of the joys of the internet as a chess lover is that you can follow games live - I love it - I got focussed on a game being played by the surprise of the tournament, Giga Quparadze.
Lucky choice! It was a really beautiful game - the man can play - and I understood what was going on, without spending more time looking at the 'eval bar' than at the position.
At one point my old blitz player instincts just took over and I started playing the game along with him. It was a kind of position I know very well. I was playing the Nd5 line of the Sveshnikov - inspired by a game of Gufeld's - 'the winner of the tournament is the one who plays the most beautiful game', way before it was played in a World Championship match.
Here's a thing. Back in the day I could actually play, rather than write!!
Sadly all my own chess notebooks were kept in my office loft - storm damage blew half the roof off and all the notebooks containing my games, photos and press cuttings were destroyed. I was recently in the embarrassing position of having to ask the wonderful Tim Harding for the moves of one of my own games. Luckily one correspondence game relevant to the theme here is in the databases. It has an exchange sacrifice in the centre to allow the Pawns to roll forward. That will help you understand how I was thinking when I was following the feature game here.
It was particularly memorable, because it was decisive in me winning my first international c.c. tournament.
Sorry!