My 12-week Advanced Plan

Hey all,

It’s been a long time since I posted here but I used the Intermediate plan about 4 years ago and have made a lot of progress since then. I’m an adult learner but would love to reach Expert level at some point. Just today I finally crossed the 1900 rating in Blitz on Chess.com. It’s been a long time coming.
I really want to begin a more structured plan again to hopefully get myself to beyond 2000+ in my rating. I’ve since played at a couple of in-person tournaments but I really need to practice my slower games since I have played so much Blitz. 
My current ratings are:

• Blitz: 1902
• Rapid: 1821
  • I haven’t played much Rapid for a long while now so that rating is likely to swing quite a bit. I also have an account at the other chess website, and may be utilizing that so I don’t drop 200+ points on Rapid since the rating swings will be much higher now.
• Puzzles: 2700

I’ll be using the following courses on Chessable:

• Crush the King's Gambit!
• The Woodpecker Method
  • Only to go through puzzles, not actually doing the Woodpecker method. I'll do that at the end of the 12 weeks.
• Yusopov's The Fundamentals 2: Boost Your Chess
• 100 Endgames You Must Know

If I can swing it, I'd also like to redo the course, "1st Edition, Mastering Chess Middlegames." I never finished it and erased my progress so I'd like to start fresh.

Here’s to a new 12-week journey!

First day was two 15|10 games. I really don’t like this time control. I feel it’s way too much time for Rapid and I just don’t do as well. But I’m going to play this time control until I learn to pause at the right moments and come up with good moves.
1st game I won fairly easily. It was a quicker game as my opponent just wasn’t familiar with the setup and I was able to capitilize on a couple of small, but significant mistakes.

2nd game I lost and it’s because I didn’t play a crucial move correctly, even when i saw the top engine move, but I thought I’d be putting myself to a disadvantage. Turns out my original idea was the right one. Instead, I went with a mistake of a move and lost a rook for a bishop that my opponent was able to eventually capitalize on.
Did a few more than five puzzles on chess.com and found out that they now have different levels you can input so I’ve only been getting five points per puzzle, but if I manage to get one wrong, I lose 25 points. Not going to lie but I really dislike the rating system on puzzles on Chess.com. You’re awarded almost no points for “easy” puzzles (some of which aren’t actually that straightforward) but then penalized heavy for missing one of those puzzles. Ugh.

You could try unrated puzzles for a bit in your target range. And maybe try 10+0 instead of 15+10. Staying motivated and positive is always good for improvement.

For sure. However, I think I’m more motivated than ever to start doing well at these longer time controls. I’ve always done more poorly with increment times than with straight times and I’d like to get a feel for how to work within those time constraints, especially since the Rapid tournaments I’ve been to are 15|10 time frames

First game tonight was a 15|10 where I played black. They played the Queen’s Gambit and I played the Queen’s Gambit Declined: Albin’s Counter Gambit. I really like this opening as my opponents are not usually very familiar with this opening and I usually come out with a pretty good advantage from the opening. That was no different tonight and I quickly got a resignation after move 16. I had his king trapped in a check and the only two moves available lost him a rook for free.
The second game did not go as well. There were a couple of positions in which I could have gained a clear advantage early in the middle game but didn’t capitalize on the mistakes my opponent made. At that point, I made two crucial mistakes in the end game that let my opponent get rid of our rooks while he had a superior pawn structure and eventually won. However, I will say I had a better go of taking some time when it made sense and didn’t just carelessly move like you can sometimes get away with in blitz. So that’s a plus in my book.

Alright, I did studying and puzzle work yesterday and today played two 15|10 games on the other chess website. I got paired with individuals that were significantly lower rated than me and beat them fairly easily without spending too much time on each move. They both made some poor moves in the opening that I quickly capitalized on, so not much of a learning experience other than to take the initiative quickly and don’t relent.