erodrig411 Advanced Study Plan

This forum topic is where I will post progress on the plan.

I'm not sure how best to post annotated games.  The below is my first attempt.  The ratings are lichess ratings.

Below is first week's progress.  I went low tech, using printed sheet, and posting a picture of the sheet.  Looks like I did not check off the chess.com puzzles, but I did do the 20 minutes...

Also, I did the Yusupov chapter one on passed pawn combinations, but there were 13 diagrams.  I noticed it takes me 2 minutes to setup each position.  But I got through the material.   I believe I will need to do the challenges in week 3?  So it looks like it will take me two iterations to make it through each Yusupov chapter.  Great material, but a lot to review and digest to try and understand the examples Yusupov has chosen.

Apologies on the picture.  It seemingly gets rotated automatically, though I rotated the picture in the opposite direction in Windows 10.  Not sure what is going on with this jpeg. 

This is the second game I mentioned with a similar King & Pawn motif (two connected passers vs a King.)

Your printout with notes is amazing! Looking forward to reading your updates.

I had a vacation that started on Wednesday/Thursday of my second week. I have been keeping up after the vacation, picking up where I left off.  I just haven't had a chance to post the picture of the progress.  I believe when I am rested and ready to go I am a bit stronger than before starting the Advanced Study plan.  I have been viewing content that is geared towards 1600-1800's as well.  Lastly I put an emphasis on puzzles, and ended up getting the chess.com upgrade mainly to allow further progress on tactical puzzles.  I have hit a rating of 2072 on puzzles in about one week.  I do find the chess.com puzzles are very tactical and seem to mimic playing a game, as the concept for each puzzle is fairly random -- which is good.  I am beginning to get a sense of where I need to improve, also.  This is the very first time I have analyzed my games, and it seems fruitful for deciding on what to focus upon next.

This post is for the week that was cut short by vacation.  I picked up on the week that I arrived back.  This is the worksheet for week 2.

Based on the games' analysis, I started solving more tactics puzzles.  I also picked out games where my opening was not up to par with my repertoire recommendations, and reviewed those lines in the repertoire.

Now the worksheet for week 3.  I continued studying more tactics.  I finished the Silman part 3 in this week.  But I am much slower with Yusupov's chapter 1.  It took me a week to get through the remainder of the chapter 1 problems.  I continued seeing the need for tactics solving.   I believe this needs to continue until the different tactics are more ingrained.  I won some games spectacularly based on tactics patterns I recognized.  I lost more games with missed one move tactics.

Week 4 is completed!  This is the very first time in my chess 'life' where I have actually analyzed, annotated, and commented on my own games.  Very helpful!  I am still seeing a common need (i.e. tactics)  to improve upon my play, and I believe this is normal since I am solving puzzles to tackle the noted areas.  I realize that I still need to build upon my known patterns a great deal.  This study plan has also encouraged me to truly look only the opening lines are not doing well for me, based on the game analyses (plural.)  And it has provided a timeslot and allocated time during week 4 to specifically look at those openings.  I am not seeing ratings increase, but I am feeling there is more consistency of my chess strength during my games.

Looks like it's going well. Keep up the good work and the ratings will follow!

Pushing along with week 5 and week 6.  The hardest part of week 5 was the amount of time it took to finish off the Yusupov chapter reading.  (I treated each diagram as a puzzle, where I tried to annotate the pluses, minuses, and possible plans for each side at each diagram.  I was doing 1-2 diagrams at a time whenever there was free time.  This took about 5-6 minutes per diagram, so it took a while.)   For week 6, the more difficult part was finding the time to analyze the blitz games and to identify any new learnings.

Last week was week 7!  The effort hours needed to fulfill responsibilities at work "popped upwards" in a big way.  Still I managed to complete all items, with one exception.  The gap was that I was only able to get to one-third of the exercises in the Yusupov book.  So about 20-30 minutes of effort I was able to accomplish.  I have been slow on each exercise, since they are challenging.  This is the picture of the updated plan, with checkmarks as applicable.  In terms of chess ratings, my blitz is on a plateau in the 1900's, where as my Rapid has spurted upwards and came within 3 points of 2100.  These are Lichess ratings...

Week 8!  I completed week 8 one day early (since my day 1 is a Monday).  Next week will test whether my rapid game strength has continued to bolster based on the small amount of structured studying I could muster, and on playing and then analyzing my blitz games.  Here is the post of the activities performed.

The completion of week 9 activities marks 75% of the plan completed!  I have been very pleased with the study plan.  For the first time ever I was studying my games!  I was introduced to additional time-limits that I had not played before, which also showed that I am somewhat stronger on the rapid side than on the blitz side.  I also was introduced to bullet and I didn't think that I would enjoy bullet, but it actually is not bad.  I was also introduced to the Yusupov series of book, and other helpful actions to improve and maintain my chess strength.  My goal was to solidify the last two years of chess progress.  I believe I have accomplished that already.  It turns out that last week, it has become clear that I am transitioning into a much busier period at my job, with activities that relate to fighting against COVID-19.  So I am foreseeing this week 9 being the final week that I can FULLY accomplish the full set of the activities on the premium chess plan.  I will continue to update progress here for weeks 10-12, however, it is a dynamic situation and I am not sure if I will have the time to complete 75% -- or if instead I will only be able to complete 10-20% of the activities.

I recommend the Chess Goals premium plans.  I can see how they really help to organize an aspiring chess player's efforts to improve (or maintain) your chess strength.

Week 9 results are below:

Week 10 has me at about 54% complete on Wednesday.  So it appears I have at least crossed over the 50% marker!

I guess I forgot to post week 10!  I was able to complete a few more elements on week 10 to finish about 68% of the week 10 plan.  And I am also posting week 11, where I finished about 70% of the plan.  I did not complete 100% of these past two weeks, given the circumstances of the new urgent job activities.  My lichess rating for bullet and blitz are at their highest.  And the lichess rapid rating rose to nearly 2100, and is down about 40 points from its peak.  However this lichess rapid rating is essentially 100 points lower than my ultimate goal of hitting approximately 2170.  I will finish off week 12, and am very happy to have built a great foundation with this study plan.

I finished week 12 at about 50% completion.  I have been pleased to have my highest Lichess rating today after having finished the 12 week plan about a month ago.  This plan was great!

The quick update six weeks after finishing my study plan is that my Lichess Rapid rating continued upwards because of this study plan, up to 2133, which is 37 rating points from what I targeted.  My blitz rating continued to rise and is now 2070.