Jake's Beginner 2 Study Plan

Hey everyone, I'm Jake and I am doing the Beginner 2 Study Plan. I've been playing chess for about a month now, and have already seen improvement, but wanna see much more as I'm starting to plateau. Here are my starting stats:

Chess.com Rapid : 935

Chess.com Blitz : 510

Chess.com Daily : Unrated

Chess.com Puzzles: 1673

As everyone can see, my Blitz is severely lacking, and I am trying to work on my speed as well as precision. I plan on spending around 15 hours a week on chess, as I very much enjoy studying it.

In addition to the default beginner study plan, I am going to throw in an extra 30 minutes of opening theory per day, as I find it comforting to make sound moves at the beginning of the game. I have the tendency to panic sometimes when I see something unfamiliar.

Anyways, I look forward to seeing some future progress and I hope the same for y'all as well!

Also one extra thing, I'm gonna look at one master game per week in depth, and create a study with my notes on Lichess. I know this may be a bit over my head, but I think it is important and I think there is a lot to learn from these games no matter what level you are. For this week I'm going to look at a Capablanca match, not sure which one yet and I'm very open to suggestions. Capablanca is my favorite player because he was so creative.

A question - what is your goal as far as chess improvement? Not a rating target but more of do you want to be a better online blitz player and have a higher rating or get better so you can play people OTB and/or longer games online?

A piece of unsolicited advice worth exactly what you paid for it and based solely on my personal experience - unless your goal is to have a higher blitz rating, I think it is a real struggle at your (our) level to improve with blitz. You don't 'learn' much playing blitz. There isn't enough time to think.

I played exclusively blitz the first several months of my chess life and while I got a bit better and learned the rules, I didn't improve my real chess ability until the bulk of my games were slower. Not classical slow but Rapid slow. Now I'm at a point where I need to slow down a bit more to continue learning how to think about positions. At some point, that will transfer back down to faster games, once the skill is more honed.

All that to say enjoy the blitz games as they are fun, but really focus on thinking in those Rapid games. Have fun!

"In addition to the default beginner study plan, I am going to throw in an extra 30 minutes of opening theory per day"

This is fine, but don't get too hung up on openings; I think tactics will serve you better in the short term. Especially if you are looking to improve your blitz where openings matter less.

I should’ve used more careful wording, because in reality I care much more about my rapid rating than my blitz. The only reason I included the part about wanting to improve my blitz is because I tend to take a very long time to make decisions thay often are not that hard. I simply believe that my low blitz rating is indicative of something, and I would like to work in a machine like manner when it comes to openings and endgames, as many good players do.

I hear you on that one!