Daily training routine

As just randomly watching youtube videos, reading some books and doing some puzzle whenever i was in the mood clearly wasnt helping me progress I decided to try out a more strict daily schedule. Im currently about 1200 rapid and I would appreciate any suggestion on how to improve my training further. Here is what i currently put together:

20 minutes vision (once this becomes second nature can be shorter)

10 minutes white, 10 minutes black

30 minutes

Puzzle rush - a few 5 min warmups and one longer survival

30 min study

1 topic per day iterating between following topics:

• • • • • • London opening as white
          • Caro Kann opening against e4
          • Slav opening against d4
          • Endgames (pawn, rook, queen)

40 min game (15+10) and analysis

Before giving my full input, could you clarify what you eman by vision? Is it the chess.com trainer where it flashes a square and you need to click it?

Yes, the chess.com one. There is the one with the empty board and the one where you have to move the piece to the mentioned square.
Currently when reading books with notations it takes me too long to follow them so im hoping vision training will help with this.

Okay so here's what I'd recommend. I really don't think you need to be spending ~17% of your dedicated training time to finding squares on the board. It seems like overkill and time that could be spent learning something that will be more frutiful for improvement. I totally understand the thought process, but the squares will come the more you play the game. If anything I would just do a couple rounds of vision training now and again for fun or to keep your square recognition up to snuff but at this point there's more important things to learn.

Aside from that, I would recommend not doing the timed puzzles for now. Just do the regular puzzles or survival. At your rating I would recommend taking as long as you need to fully calculate and understand the puzzle. Don't move pieces or draw arrows. Visualize the line until the end and then make a move. I understand it may not seem practical to take as much time as you need, but you need to build a strong foundation and understanding before you can put yourself on a time limit. Later on you can ocilate between giving yourself a max of 2 minutes 3 minutes and 5 minutes to solve puzzles to make it closer to a practical scenario (the time necessary obviously depends on the strength of the puzzles, which I believe chess.com also lets you change).

I would disagree with spending 30 minutes on openings. Make sure you know as many ideas in the opening as you can and make sure you know how to develop and what your goals are. Beyond that, studying the openings themselves aren't going to help you as much as having principled development in the middle game and not hanging pieces. You should check where you went wrong after every game in the opening, that should be more than enough to help you progress in your openings. The more games you play, the more branches of the opening you'll explore. Sometimes you may lose in annoying ways, but the best way to learn is by throwing your hat in the ring yourself. Just make sure you don't make the same mistake twice and you'll expand your opening depth with time. I would instead maybe recommend studying some master games in the openings you play instead of studying the opening itself. Learn how they played the opening into the middle game and what their plan was, where they placed their pieces and why, as well as what pawn breaks you should be playing for.

Endgames are a good shout. Master opposition and simple/common pawn endgames to the best of your ability. If you need a book rec, I would say without a doubt Silmans Complete Endgame Course is by far the best I've come across.

I would suggest spending your time something like 20/20/60, (or 25/25/50, something like that) 20% tactics, 20% your studies and 60% playing and analysing. You can of course sandwich them in whatever order you feel and alternate between them if you're getting bored of one of the three. Overall, playing and gaining experience is by far the most important thing at your level so it's worth making it the largest chunk.

Hopefully you find this useful, feel free to ask any questions if I wasn't clear on anything. At the end of the day, this is just my opinion on the matter and everyone will see it differently, this is just what I've personally seen work best.

What would I know at 800 but that's well written, concise and seems to me very sound. Why haven't I come across you before? You don't generally hang out in these forums? Just curious.

Thanks for the kind words. I never used to be a forums person but nowadays I try and help people out whenever I can on here. I mainly respond to people who have questions on improvement or anything chess related really, however I usually respond to those in the unanswered forum which means I'm usually the only one interacting on their forum for the most part. That probably explains why you may not have seen me around much.

yo just a quick question if you dont mind. What do you think the max elo the average person could get by just spamming games everyday and then reviewing them? I also have reassess your chess and silmans endgame manual so i could possibly start utilizing those

I got to around the mid 2300s by mainly just playing a boat load and analysing a ton. I did a lot of tactics for the initial 8 or so months at the beginning of my chess journey and then it really tapered off the better I got since I found them repetitive (duh, that’s the point) and not of much interest. Unfortunately my results also tapered off when I stopped being diligent with tactics training. Since I was just so entrenched in playing, my version of tactics training became playing the game, missing/losing to a tactic and then having the pain of missing the tactic seared into my brain. Not exactly the most efficient use of my time but boy did I ever not fall for the same mistake twice. Definitely make it a habit to be consistent with tactics training so you'll be more likely to see them in game, especially when you're starting out in chess, you really need to take time to build your foundation of tactical awareness. I personally never found training/studying much fun so probably around 80% of my chess time was dedicated to playing and analysing and the other % was consuming a lot of chess content on youtube and I tried reading books but never found them too useful (only really seriously read Nimzo's my system at the time and it was probably too over my head to really gain much).

For reference, on my old account I have a total of 130 hours of tactics training (most of which I'm sure was me away from the screen, likely closer to 90 hours at most imo). This may seem like a decent number, until you compare it to my games played which was around 30,000. I wasn't lying when I said I played and analyzed a lot. To specify time controls, it was 15,000 bullet, 15,000 blitz, and 1,000 rapid. For context, for my first 8 months of chess I played rapid almost exclusively (a bit of blitz here and there and almost 0 bullet (thankfully)) until I got to 2000. Unfortunately it became unbearable to play since there were a lot of "fairplay" violations at the time which thankfully chess.com has gotten much better at handling. So I had to switch over to blitz (which was still dreadful at the time due to fairplay violations, but much better than rapid). I think blitz both accelerated and stunted my chess growth. Looking back, blitz essentially acted as a substitute to tactics just because of the sheer volume of games I would be able to play. I had so much exposure to different openings and tactics constantly that it helped build patterns stronger than I would have in a chessable openings course and tactics puzzles. However I do think it strongly hindered my calculation skills to the point where I’d often way too much rely on my intuition and play a move without calculating it fully which is a terrible habit.

So based on my journey, I would seriously steer clear from bullet completely and mainly stick to rapid until you reach 1800-2000 which you could then start exploring blitz. No use playing blitz if you have no foundation to build off of. Be diligent with your tactics but beyond that just play a lot and most importantly enjoy the game. Your best improvements will come when you enjoy the game. If you treat the game like a chore, you'll likely play worse and overwork yourself with no results. Everyone improves at their own pace so don’t be discouraged if you see the amount of games I’ve played and think it’s way too much time. There’s no doubt I could have improved quicker which is why I’m here trying to explain what I did right and wrong to others.

As for the books part, I would suggest looking at tactics training as imperative and books as supplementary. That said, the two books you have are amoung some of the best, along with yusupov's build up your chess series. I read silman's when I was 2200 chess.com and man do I wish I read it sooner. It was explained very simply and concise and didn’t flood you with extra info. The rating guidelines in his book are good but honestly I'd say read and practice it until you feel a concept is out of your league, then return back to it at a later date. You may find yourself ahead or behind his rating gauges.

Sorry for the long winded answer, just thought I’d give all the background info I could. Feel free to ask any other questions you may have.

thank you so much man. really appreciate the detail, exactly what i was looking for. I actually do have one last question. What about the openings? will just playing and analyzing help me develop them or do i need to research and read books about them? So far ive just been doing opening principles no actual openings so i was wondering how i would go about developing that.

At your level and until about 1600-1800 I think you could get away with just the basic opening principles. Books and research is good, but nothing beats playing and learning through experience. As I mentioned to the OP, I would highly recommend creating a repetoire file for white and black on whatever chess interface you prefer (especially the higher rated you get) and whenever you find yourself caught out in the opening, input it into your file and find responses your opponent's move and any other logical moves you could think of. Here's an example of what that might looks like.

Sorry for the really word dense diagram, it's tough to make chess.com's comments look nice and not messy. Anywyas, this is how I've come to learn openings and I find it to be most effective for me. Every game you're being exposed to more and more about an opening and slowly exploring new lines. You'd idealy do tthat method for a handful of different lines after every game analysis to feel comfortable in the position you got caught out on and you'll eventually deepen your opening prep more and move. If you save your analysis and opening prep in a file, it can serve as a nice reference sheet for if you ever forget. This may seem like it is a lot of work, and it can be. But the repetoire you create will last a lifetime (if sound enough) and you only need one response to your opponent's move, so it's not like you need to be memorizing tons of different theory. There's no better feeling than still being in your preparation and comfortable in the position you find yourself in.

Beyond the previously mentioned method, I highly recommend studying the games of master who play your opening and learn how they develop their pieces, how they attack, how they defend, any common motifs, what the pawn structure should look like and how it transforms throughout the game, etc. Having a wealth of knowledge to draw from when you feel lost during the game can be a huge help. As others have mentioned, openings is largely about understanding ideas rather than concrete moves.

Hope I was somewhat clear and that my diagram wasn't too confusing. Any further questions are as always welcome

I finally listened to this advice:

"At your level don't bother with a lot of memorizing: your opponents aren't good enough to be predictable." 
Then I heard Igor Smirnov, another new discovery for me, say this, which I like: "what's important is to have an idea what you're trying to do, not to just memorize lines".

I took chess up again in June after taking a year off, completely off, after first learning in December 2022 so most things about chess are new to me.
 
My playing style is mainly: neglect to really figure out a position before I move, then blunder.

Then I play despite being over-tired as the other day and go 3 for 22, more than losing the 140 pts it took me a month to gain, in about 30 hours

haha, yup, we've all been there. Also totally agree with Igor, he has great improvement advice.

Congrats to the OP and contributors of this thread.

Thanks for all of the input, i modified my training plan according to your suggestions. I do have a question regarding this specific part tho. When playing regular games I currently don't think about sqare names at all and thats also part of the reason I felt I needed to learn them in vision training. Would it be beneficial to start thinking about every move and sequence in notation instead of just "this, that, this, that"?

Great question. I would suggest the following:

During a game, it's likely already difficult enough for you to calculate lines with clarity, especially while trying to avoid getting low on time. Naming the squares as you do so only makes it the already difficult task that much more difficult. I would instead suggest just thinking about the moves in your head as you suggested (something like this, this, this, or here, here, here or takes, takes, bishop here, etc) during the games, and once you head to analysis, then try to calculate lines with notation, either out loud to yourself (if possible) or in your head (ie bishop takes f6, Knight to d5, etc etc). You can apply the same thing to anything outside of a live game such as the books and puzzles you do. The best way to learn the squares by heart is by seeing pieces on them and building patterns and stories of what colour each square is. Sometimes a piece naturally comes to mind when you think of a square, for example your brain may with time automatically know where the f6 square is because you've likely developed a knight there many times. You might pick up that g7 is a dark square one square diagonal from the top right corner because a bishop is fianchettod there often, etc etc. Learning through doing and creating something memorable for your brain to latch onto will make memorizing squares that much easier.

To sum, I wouldn't stress about learning notation right now. During the game it's unnecessary since you're just calculating moves to yourself. So long as you know where the piece is moving and which squares it covers when it moves there, naming the square while doing so offers no advantage. Learning squares will come the more experience you gain in chess. Practicing it secondarily in an untimed environment such as game analysis or while doing puzzles or books, will serve as a double purpose for bettering your chess and learning notation. It's a much better use of your time, and also in my opinion, much more effective than vision training. If you haven't already, give the square association trick I mentioned a try, it's worked very well for myself and others.

Makes sense, thank you again!
On a different note, as this topic is quite active, then I'll just mention that as part of my improvement plan I'm looking for a better player to practice with in this topic:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/scholastic-chess/looking-for-a-stronger-player-to-improve-withIf anyone is interested feel free to contact me

So, I'm now 12 - 2 my last fourteen games., getting about half my pts back after my 3 - 19 marathon three days ago.

Regarding openings, still unsettled as Black and unsure if the Rousseau Gambit and the Budapest Gambit, as much as I like them, are good choices.

I don't like KID... it's too unlike what I normally play. And I tried Caro Kann and didn't like it.

I like aggressive play and unusual positions,

What could I try, especially against d4... but nothing that starts with e5, thank you.

@MaetsNori recommended the French a few days ago... I had forgotten

so that's on my menu today