Nortissimo's Beginner Study Plan

Day 1: Beginning Stats

Blitz - 862

 Rapid - 1153

 Daily - 1013

 Puzzles - 1436

I'm looking forward to seeing where I end up! I've always enjoyed playing chess since I was a kid. I took a break and rarely played at all for a bit, but I've recently started up again on both lichess and chess.com. I'm a premium member on chess.com and I've liked looking at all the things offered like lessons, drills, and videos. There's so much educational chess content online, I thought a plan would be a great way to improve systematically as opposed to just watching tons of videos and picking up tips here and there.

Some quick thoughts about where I am going into this plan:

• I typically play 5-minute blitz games. I like this style of play and I find that playing these quick games doesn't allow me to think of a great strategy. I feel like I just try to play smart moves until my opponent makes a mistake, and when my opponents play well, I end up making dumb mistakes. I like that I'm going to be playing slower games with this plan.
• I want to understand openings better.
• When I analyze games, I find that I'm missing early checkmate opportunities 
• In puzzles, I understand how to trade pieces effectively so that I at end up solving the puzzle; in games, I fixate on not losing my pieces (except I know when to sac pieces to get the mate in obvious situations)
• I'm setting up my daily games for be 1 day time control.
• I have Silman's Endgame Course book

Good to have you here!

Thank you! 

Week 1 - Day 1

Finished my first day of training and I have some realizations and a question:

• I'm going to have to get used to playing slower games. I got really impatient towards the end and started making bad decisions.
• When I go to analyze my games, is it enough to go over key moments? Should I go move by move? For this game, I went move by move and annotated some spots in my analysis.
• I attempted 25 puzzles. Should I scale back or is that okay? 

Using the key moments is enough, but I think as you get more experience doing your own game analysis you will start to develop a method that works best for you. If you're interested, I wrote a post on it https://chessgoals.com/game-analysis/ that goes over different levels of game analysis. For blitz games I like to use key moments, and for rapid and slower I like to think through the critical moments on my own or with an engine in analysis mode.

Doing more puzzles is always OK. I would recommend making sure you're spending at least half of your time playing games though, and if you have all of the games completed in the study plan then extra puzzles are a nice additional activity.

1st Daily Game completed - I was white and I won

Positive takeaways:

• Capitalizing on opponents blunders
• Kept pressure with minor pieces on King side as soon as opponent castled

Improves:

• I felt very uncomfortable in the middle game and I think I moved my Queen prematurely. Once she was in place on h5, the attack tempo kind of died and if it weren’t for a blunder where my opponent lost the queen, I may not have pulled this one out.

Week 1 - Day 3

Rapid Game

• Game is annotated with my takeaways, but I'm getting beat up in these rapid games! I keep playing them like I'm playing a 5 min blitz game where I would basically wait for my opponents' mistakes and capitalize on those opportunities. I need to stop and take a beat with each move and decision.

Week 1 Recap 

• Looking forward to playing 5+5 blitz games!
• In reviewing my games, I'm starting to see threats a little better
• I'm experimenting with Caro Kann opening. 
  • As part of my time to do the chess.com lesson, I viewed part of GM Shankland's Caro Kann lesson. 
  • The lesson got very deep, which means I got lost trying to follow some of the main line stuff happening.
  • I shifted to a different type of lesson, exploiting typical opening errors. 
• Puzzles: I'm doing random puzzles which is great. I'm thinking about doing more thematic puzzles based on suggestions from my post game analysis. 
• Daily Games: Should I spend 5 minutes on one move and then not look at it again until the next day? I find myself basically playing all day (I'm doing a 1 day time control).
• I'm trying to fight the urge to just play 5 minute rapid games. For 2 of the days, I did my Chess goals premium plan on chess.com, and my non-Chessgoals stuff on Lichess to get my fix of fast games. I'm realizing I need to stop that if I actually want to improve; quality over quantity.

Daily Games: Should I spend 5 minutes on one move and then not look at it again until the next day? I find myself basically playing all day (I'm doing a 1 day time control)

I'd recommend setting aside one or maybe two times per day to look at the games so you can spend about 5 minutes on the non-simple moves. Our brains are sort of trained to see a notification and react to it, but if you can rewire that to set a focused time I think it will help make sure you are getting the other tasks done as well as not rushing any moves.

If you're getting all your tasks done, feel free to do whatever!

Week 2 Recap

• Getting better spotting blunders (although I still make quite a few of them)
• Still kind of shaky on using the Caro Kann, but in general I like it and am getting slightly better at it.
• Tilt is real! I definitely my good and bad days. One bad habit I need to shake: If I have a few bad games, I start playing a bunch of games in a frustrated state. 
• I'm enjoying using the opening explore to review how other players would react to certain moves. Queen's Gambit is an opening I use frequently and I want to get better and learning the ins and outs of this opening.
• Won quite a few games with Traxler gambit.

I've also allowd myself to play games while flustered, I lost 200 rapid and I've yet to recover.

I look foward to see you recover your rapid points and keep growing your stats!

Same to you and thanks for commenting!

Week 3 Recap

• My stats have gone up and down this week, general settling in with lower numbers as of today.
• Won a few rapid games early in the week where I got a great position and my opponent resigned. My plan said to only play one rapid game each day, but in these games where my opponent would resign (quite early at times), I felt like maybe it wasn't a true game where I was really working my tactics out. I sometimes feel the same way when I win off of a major blunder from my opponent, like if they hang a queen. Some days, I played an extra game or two.
• After completing my tasks, I'll often play a few blitz games and I do realize I should stop this mainly because I look at these games as "just for fun" and I think I could be reinforcing bad habits. For instance, I played a few fast 5 minute blitz games, and then I played two 15|10 rapid game. I wasn't taking my time to think out the consequences/implications of my moves and I blundered quite a bit and also felt frustrated. I know this is a common theme in my posts, so I hope to control my urge to just play over and over again.
• I'm realizing the value of analyzing my games, as well as annotating my thoughts during a game.
• I'm in the Chess Goals tournament (my first daily one). I know I'll learn a lot by being destroyed and maybe winning a few games here and there. Looking forward to week 4 as well the beginning work in Silman's Complete Endgame Course book.

Week 4 Recap

(Few days late!)

• I'm a little late this week! Life hit hard this week but I never stopped completing my tasks.
• Completed the first part of Silman's Complete Endgame Course. I need to get used to reading the algebraic notation for chess. I'm getting better at it but it tends to be a little dense. I have a few chess boards and I'm wondering if it's a good idea to set it up and move the actual pieces in addition to visualizing the moves?
• I'm in currently in my first two daily tournaments: 53rd Quick Knockouts by Chess.com and our Chess Goals one. Getting used to playing 13 games at a time is not easy but I'm trying.
• I've had some good chess days lately. I'm starting to utilize the openings explorer to see how I should react to specific moves.
• Currently wondering if I should keep going with my opening (d4) or experiment with some e4 openings. I play mostly London system and I'm just experimenting with Caro-Kann.
  • I might watch some videos and do some lessons on Caro-Kann and revert to that for the remainder of the program.

Try mixing e4 and d4, see what you like. I was exclusively a 1.e4 player for much of my career, and I still enjoy going back to it sometimes even as a 1.d4/1.Nf3 player now.

Did you watch our Caro-Kann repertoire videos on YouTube?

I've seen a few previews and the course looks awesome and in depth! 

Week 5 Recap

• I'm experiencing a lot of success with the London system. I'm working on my timing for controlling the e4 and e5 squares and how to react to pawn or knight moves from the opponent in those squares.
• I've noticed an improvement in king-pawn endgames.
• I've lost some games this week because of my reluctance to trade queens. Analyzing those games, I learned that had I traded Queens, I would've had a positional advantage to cause a mate or be up in pawns. 
• I'm forgetting to take a breath before pulling the trigger on a move I think is a no-brainer. I've hung my Queen a couple times this way.
• Serious question I've been thinking about: I've heard multiple times through some chess streams and YouTube videos, never resign. Force the opponent to execute an endgame. Resign or never resign? (I've tried to get stalemates in hopeless situations but I feel like that's actually harder than trying not to get checkmated!).

With regards to resigning it depends on what your goals are. Win/draw at all costs? I think as a player's rating improves they should resign earlier for the most part. If there's a ton of time on the clock and you are down 10 points, probably best to resign and spend the time on a new game.

If it's 1 minute on the clock you can make them prove it!

Week 6 Recap

• I felt this week was my best week on this plan thus far.
• I've been playing mostly 1 day daily games but I'm thinking maybe 3 days might be a better idea? I start getting a little anxious when the time left is in the red and chess.com constantly sends me notifications that I'm running out of my time (with 4 hours left!)
• My puzzle rating goes up and down drastically. I was above 1800 this past week at some point and a string of bad moves on puzzles brought me lower than 1700. 
• I'm working on analyzing my games better. I tend to breeze over this part by using the key moments feature but I'm going to think longer about the positive and improvement takeaways.
• I feel I'm getting better and I'm glad I broke 1000 in blitz this week! With that said, I got beat in some wayward queen attacks because I was focusing way too much on my own plan instead of how my opponent was setting up. Might watch a couple YouTube vids to expand my defense rep on these attacks.
• Looking forward to week 7!

I think the switch from 1-day daily games to 3-day is good. 1-day sounds stressful haha.

That 1000 blitz is a solid improvement in only 6 weeks!