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Hi All, We are excited to announce our next Rapid tournament on 17th of July,2021. The event will be 10+5 four rounds in Swiss style. Time - 10 AM CDT/ 3PM UTC You will be able to register for the event on chess.com. @smarterchess will do live commentary along with streaming on youtube. Join us in our rapid tournament. See you at the chess boards. For any questions/clarifications please ask on this forum thread.

Time to focus on improving my play in longer time controls! As preparation for working on my USCF rating at some point, hopefully. Week 1 initial ratings (using categories and ratings from Lichess.org): Classical: 1955 Rapid : 1763 Blitz : 1724

Hello everyone, I started trying to improve my chess this year. I have been playing since my school days but never learned it properly. December 2020 I had the free time to watch Queen's Gambit and a new interest in chess developed. Over the last 3 weeks I have been following the novice plan. Not to its fullest yet but i am diligently doing the 5 puzzles and 1 survival puzzle rush daily. Also playing 1-2 blitz games everyday so spending like 30m. Today I found the forum and decided to post regularly.

Hi all, I finally buckled down and purchased one of the Premium plans. I played some casual chess with some friends and family when I was growing up but never studies it nor really attempted to get better. I started playing this again in February 2019 when a co-worker suggested I join so we could play some online games. Since then, I was bitten by the chess bug and have been playing it non-stop ever since. My goal with this plan is to really push my rating in Blitz and Daily games. For Daily games, I've been stuck between my peak rating of 1441 and 1400 (or even a bit less) for about 7 months now and really want to start pushing that again. For Blitz, I've been stuck around the 1200 mark for about 5 months as well. I easily play 7 hours per week, so I'll likely be doing quite a bit of the extra work provided in the plan. My current ratings are below: Chess.com Bullet: 1207; Peak rating: 1250 (3,384 games) Chess.com Blitz: 1197; Peak rating: 1251 (1,996 games) I really beat up my rating with the last 3|2 games I played. I typically do MUCH better on the 5|5 time control. Chess.com Rapid: 1359; Peak rating: 1393 (81 games) Chess.com Daily: 1426; Peak rating: 1441 (523 games) Chess.com Puzzles: 1904; Peak rating: 2051 (1995 rated puzzles) I also really enjoy a few of the variants offered here and these are the two I play most often: Chess.com Daily 960: 1270 Chess.com Fog of War: 1808 Yeah, I don't know how I got up to an 1800 rating on Fog of War either, but here we are. Here are the resources I'll be using: Woodpecker Method: This may be a purchase I make down the line. For now, I'm going to do a mix of Rated Puzzles and Survival Puzzle Rush. My best survival Puzzle Rush was a 31 and I really want to beat that. Strategy Review: I'm going to use three lesson series (two of which I've already started): Name Your Pawns:https://www.chess.com/lessons/name-your-pawns-the-queenside Master Material Imbalances:https://www.chess.com/lessons/master-material-imbalances Pawn Structures That Win: https://www.chess.com/lessons/pawn-structures-that-win Opening Review: I've started working on "A Kaleidoscope of Openings" https://www.chess.com/lessons/a-kaleidoscope-of-openings and want to finish this course. Endgame Review: The Drawing Zone, Part 1 https://www.chess.com/lessons/the-drawing-zone-part-1. I think this is something I really struggle with. At some point, I'm in a losing position and have drawing chances, but I continue to move as if I'm trying to win. When I analyze my games, I think this makes the most sense: Rapid Games: Level 3 Analysis (Key Moments + Full Game Analysis) Blitz Games: Level 2 Analysis (Key Moments) I'm excited to get this 12-week run started and see where my ratings go. Based on the average rating progression, I'm hoping to push my current Daily rating to 1475 and Blitz rating back up to a stable 1250.

Day 0: Getting Started Hi everyone! After the (relative) success of the novice plan, I wanted to keep it going and venture further in my chess journey. Now that I’m classified as a “beginner” of sorts (900 rapid), I will call this my “beginner classical study plan”, to differentiate from the earlier plan. After acquainting myself with the enormous world of chess, I want to study more effectively, play more games and practice more, without worrying about my ratings. With the help of Matt (shoutout to @SmarterChess) I have created a custom beginner plan, largely based on the intermediate rapid & classical plan, while trying to increase the amount of tactics training at the expense of the daily games, which I don’t really find enjoyable. This plan will be 12 weeks or longer, depending on the time it takes to reach “intermediate” status (stable 1100 rating). My long term goal: get official FIDE Arena International Master title in 2 years - requires 50 games above 1700 in rapid games My study plan goal: reach stable 1100 rapid rating and improve my blitz rating to 800+. My psychological goal: take games easy and not stress over ratings (Taken from the FIDE Online Arena website) Plan Structure This plan will alternate two weekly structures, with 20 puzzles per day (at least), one game review from “A Book of Morphy” and either one 30+0 game, two 15+10’s, three 10+0’s or four 5+5’s. The weekends will feature endgame and opening studies, with an optional 60+0 game. Recently there have been many ChessGoals games in various formats, but mostly 30+30 games, and mostly on Sundays. I will do my best to complete my daily tasks alongside those games. Let’s go! 🏆♟🤩

Hi There I am a bit behind with introducing myself but here goes I live in the UK and learnt chess at primary school, played at high school then stopped -picked up again briefly somed years later and played UK league chess then stopped for the last 20 years. The love of the game has never left me and I always look for chess puzzles in the papers. I am hoping I can pick up some study habits and practical playing skills & importantly review habits over the 12 weeks so I can learn and improve. I played an online tournament here in the UK 4NCL congress which I thought was excellent I finished near the bottom as expected and mainly collapsed in a heap in time trouble after surviving ok for a longish number of moves. I am also giving a week 1 update here as well : Activity Review Dailies Failing to start on this Puzzles This is going well I already did a lot of puzzles Rapid Games Not played enough. Analyze Not reviewed any Blitz Played half the number needed. Played badly- struggled with clock. Lessons Covered lessons ok Yuspov Chapter book work going well Yuspov Test Test went well Next week action Plan and play more rapid games & plan review time My work schedule is difficult at the moment so am going to aim to hang in there and try to improve on activity level in each area that is falling behind whilst keeping other areas ok.

Hello everyone! Glad to be here with you all as we explore our chess journey together.I would like to share with you all my two 15+10 games today, and intend to do say for everyday that I play in my study plan. I will also be sharing my OTB games here in Salt Lake City that I play every Saturday. Both games ended with resignations fairly early on by my opponent after fairly significant blunders by them. However I do feel as if there are still some decent lessons to learn. Game 1: Modern Defense with 1.e4: 2.d4 Bg7 White in a vain attempt to develop their position, plays 12. Bd3?? ∓ and ignores the threat of 12... f4, winning the knight! Takeaway's: White cramps their position with two knight moves on e2 and d2, blocking in their light square bishop, and typical patters of Be3, Qd2, Bh6 to get early counter play against the black king.9... Ng4 is objectively inaccurate - I wanted to trade my Knight for Dark Squared bishop to remove dark square parity, and create an imbalance that would over time strengthen my dark squares.Game 2: Italian Game: Anti-Friend Liver DefenseLong term, my plan here is the idea of Nf3 Nc2 Bb2 to prepare d4 for center control in the 4.c3 Italian after taking space on the queenside. Black falls behind in development early, and I decide to put my opponent in an uncomfortable position after 9.Qb3 putting more pressure on the b file, and threating to pick up the pawn on f7 with check. 6.a4 felt natural to take space on the queenside, but is another inaccuracy I would definitely like more insight on this.Black resigns, and two victories are achieved to start off without blundering in the opening myself!

Hello! I've been playing chess for about a year now, and have been doing something chess-related every day since I started. I think I prefer to study chess over playing it, but I've also been rather haphazard about this and usually just work on whatever I feel like on a given day. Hopefully having more structure will help. I'm not a big fan of tracking my rating, but here are my current numbers: Blitz: 1499 (peak 1509) ⏰ Rapid: 1772 ☀️ Daily: 1639 Puzzles: 2231 (peak 2287)

Hello! Before I get into the introduction and my plans of following the plan, I would like to just say some things beforehand.First of all, RaymondL2007 is my main account. For this study plan I wanted to try it on a new account as a "Fresh Start" it just helps with my mindset, so sorry for any confusion! Secondly, RaymondLRapid on lichess is also my account, I will do less serious games on there and more serious, one per day games on here. I'll also do tactics on there because it's free . With that all out of the way, here is my plan. Because I can't play OTB tournaments just yet, I will use the chessgoals rating comparison as a guide of my rating. (It was the reason I discovered chessgoals in the first place, just a side note) My goal after 12 weeks of following the plan and doing some extra work (3 hours a day of chess, Im 13 almost 14 years old so I have a-lot of time) is to get the equivalent of 2000 USCF rating in rapid, my best time control, and to get 1900 USCF in blitz and bullet.I am posting daily updates, starting from next Sunday. This week I am preparing a binder and books, ect. Tomorrow I am posting what I want to accomplish outside of the study plan, like finishing some books I have and stuff. And last thing, I just wanted to thank Birdsell and SmarterChess for the opportunity to do this and have a structured plan of what to study and what books to read!

Hello! I'm an Adult-onset Chess Learner (A.C.L). My parents taught me how to play when I was young, but really nothing more than the basics of how the pieces move. Two years ago I started playing online regularly. My beginning ratings (chess.com) in both Rapid and Blitz were about 900. I've seen 200 points of improvement through mostly unstructured learning. Tons of quantity, not much quality. I'm hoping that using the ChessGoals Intermediate Study Plan, I'll be forced into more focused learning. My (perhaps unrealistic) goal Blitz rating after the first 12 weeks of the program is a sustainable 1200. chess.com Other Chess Site Blitz 1128 1504 Rapid 1168 1510 Daily (Only have 19 games) 1080 Puzzles 1474 1636 Puzzle Rush (3 min) 19 USCF Haven't played any OTB... yet. - Birdsell

I have to admit that I only did 1 week of the custom OTB study plan Matt created for me before abandoning it due to life circumstances. However, I did manage to finish the last Yusupov book since my last log. However, it seems I skipped the 4 opening chapters from the 2nd to last book. Lol. Almost, almost. Now I'm ready to start a new plan and I'll be playing OTB once a week on Thursday nights. Here is the basis for the plan I created after reading some of "How to study chess on your own": Goals: Minimize blunders, improve candidate moves, calculation resistance, improve prophylaxisDuration: 2 months (3 months may be necessary?)Available time: 1.5 hours per day Study areas: Openings: review condensed repertoire on ChessableTactics: Overcoming resistance in calculation, candidate moves, opponent’s resourcesEndgames: Endgame studiesMiddlegames: StructuresGeneral Improvement: Improve thought process, focus/stamina Key study areas: Blunders, Calculation Study resources & methods: Openings: Review - condensed repertoire lines Tactics:Watch - Chess24 calculation videoSolve - exercises from Recognizing Your Opponent’s ResourcesSolve - chess.com tacticsSolve blind - Visualization courses Endgames: Solve blind - studies from Blindfold Endgame Visualization Middlegames: Read - Chess Structures General Improvement:Simulation - games from Dynamic Decision Making in ChessLight Analysis - simulated games comparing to book annotationsDeep Analysis - Analyze OTB games

I, Birdsell, being of sound-ish mind and relatively healthy body, do hereby declare that if I do not complete all tasks in the ChessGoals Intermediate Rapid & Classical plan, including the Maximize tasks, for four consecutive weeks starting June 1st, I will award a study plan to any ChessGoals forum member who posts four weekly updates in the month of June 2021. Progress will be tracked weekly in the Chess.com forums.

Hi All, We are excited to announce our first Rapid tournament on 26th of June,2021. The event will be 10+5 four rounds in Swiss style. Time - 10 AM CDT/ 3PM UTC You will be able to register for the event on chess.com. @smarterchess will do live commentary along with streaming on youtube. Join us in our first rapid tournament. See you at the chess boards. For any questions/clarifications please ask on this forum thread.

Hi all. I started playing chess regularly in January 2021 after stumbling upon Gotham Chess on YouTube. I learned some basic strategies and openings and peaked my rating at 929. I then got into a slump, got very frustrated with chess, and crashed my rating down to 694. After taking a few weeks hiatus, I found the Chess Goals study plan. I took some advice from this (limiting myself to ~1 rapid game daily, playing 24 hour daily games, analyzing each game that I play, etc) and I got back to ~850 rapid. This is where I currently find myself plateauing. I want to break past this plateau and get to 1000 rapid. Instead of "casually" following the study plan, I am going to be a bit more strict, and follow the daily routines exactly. Let's see what happens My starting ratings: * Rapid: 854 * Blitz: 589 * Daily: 1152 * Puzzles: 1406

Hey guys, I am a 24 year old player who learned how to play the game at around 10 but never really got serious about it until recently. My dream is to get the title of USCF Master, but I'll worry about that when I get there. These are my current ratings, on Lichess except for puzzles. Rapid: 1574 Blitz: 1154 Classical: 1542 Correspondence: 1851, but still provisional Puzzles (Chess Tempo): 1366 Other Notes: I find my comfort zone is winning small advantage early and trying to trade down to a endgame I know is won. I've completed the 100 Endgames You Must Know course on Chessable, and Aimchess says that I convert significantly more endgames from won positions and draw or even win losing endgames than other players at my rating. However, my middlegames are probably my weakest point. I never seem to be able to attack the enemy king and my opponent seems to mate me in the middlegame far more often than I mate my opponent with most of the pieces still on the board. For openings, I play the London System and Trompowsky as white. For black I play the Caro-Kann against 1.e4 and the English Defense against 1.d4. I probably have more time than most to practice than most because I have a remote job that isn't particularly demanding, so I hope to be maximizing my gains every day.

Day 0: Getting Started Well, this is me starting out the novice study plan in order to break my mental barriers of playing chess and improving gradually, and also provide some accountability to the process. Friends of mine have been imploring me to get into chess for quite some time, so I started out by downloading the chess.com app to my phone and played a few games, did some puzzles and learned quite a few lessons. I have been doing this for a few weeks, and noticed I lack the understanding of good moves in ambiguous situations, so I wanted to dive deeper into studying. And since I like structure and proven systems and methods, I'm starting out with this study plan in an attempt to decrease the amount of errors and mistakes I make in games. My current ratings: Chess.com Blitz: ~775 (actually unrated, never actually played Blitz, this is an estimation by the Dr. Wolf teaching app after playing 20 games vs. beginner AI)Chess.com Rapid: 806 (after 8 games)Chess.com Puzzles: 891 (after 134 attempts) My ambitious goal: get to a stable 1000 rating in both Blitz & Rapid, and cross the 1200 barrier at least once in puzzles! My commitment: update this forum topic every weekend. I've just started 5 Daily games as recommended and also bought the Kindle version of "Logical Chess Move By Move" - I really like books and especially eBooks! I may update this topic during the week sporadically (In addition to the weekend update) if I feel like it . Everyone, feel free to chime in, list your recommendations and advice! I'm a student of the game (and will be for a long time to come), so any participation will be greatly appreciated. I hope these posts will benefit novices like me in their chess journey.Please enjoy and good luck to everyone (and to me! )

Hi, I've been playing serious chess since December (since watching the Queen's Gambit haha), after starting around five years ago and quitting after one year of playing, but wasn't really able to take the last three months too seriously with college. Now that the semester's over, I'm looking forward to getting better over the summer, and hopefully getting to the 1700-1800 rapid range and 1500-1600 blitz range on chess.com. Here are my current ratings: Blitz: 1088 Rapid: 1477 Daily: 1515 Puzzles: 2123

HelloTrying yo improve , we see how it goes.Chess.com: Blitz 1344Rapid 1545

Alright let's go . Day 0 stats: Rapid: 988 (peak 1253 a month ago) Blitz: 709 (current lowest) Daily: 1264 (only 3 games finished) Puzzles: 1686 (current peak)

Week 1: Blitz: 1575 Rapid: 1718 I will mostly be following the plan. I'll be working through the second Yusupov Book in the orange series, and working through the Step 2 Extra, Plus, Mix books in the Dutch Steps Method as well.