A fine line between...

Sort:
Daybreak57

During the coming months I am going to spend a lot of time playing chess.  I just wanted to know what ratios other people on chess.com think I should use to focus on.  like 30% analysis 30% games 20% opening study and 20% book study...?  I want to spend time going over chess videos, articles, and books.  I'll call that book study, and I want to spend an hour or so a day on tactics training.  I am currently playing a lot of correspondance games, I was wondering if 80 games is a bit much... I've made like 10 stupid mistakes over 10 different games but I think I'm getting the hang of playing that many games now, it's just a matter of not messing up with the visualization as I am not using the analysis board to choose my next candidate move on these games because my goal is to improve on my OTB visualization skills.

So how much piece of the pie is "book study" (Studying of my rephretore books, books on chess thinking, end game books, middle game books, books like The Amateurs Mind, etc... also go over a bunch of chess videos, ariticles and the like)

Opening memorization (Up to move 8.. I am going to use the opening encyclopedia on certain openings I am playing now and later branch out from there)  A big part of this is reading a book I have on chess openings.  My plan is to not stress on the actual moves past move 8 but focus more on the ideas behind the openings.  I actually have a book called, "The idea's behind the Openings," but Reuben fine that goes over a lot of the common openings.  I have another, pawn Structure chess, by Andrew Soltis, but I put that book down because I think I'm better off reading a book like Reuben Fines book right now because my rating is still around 1200 and I think Soltis' book is geared toward a much more advanced crowd.  Pawn Structure chess was recommended to me by a master, but I think he was giving me more credit than I am due because I really do not think I should be learning this higher level stuff when I havn't mastered the basics yet...  

Actual playing of games.  Right now I am only playing correspondance.  Is that a mistake, should I play 30 minute standard games as well to get more long game live experience?  I play over the board a lot but it's only blitz, I do not play much live long games, though I appear to be quite good at it.  I think if I play 800 live 30 minute standard games over the course of a long time I would think my chess skills will improve greatly.  What do you guys think?

Analyis of the games I play...  Just that, analysing my games.  How much time should I spend on it.  Right now I am thinking analysing all of the games myself and putting up some of the harder ones on chess.com forums asking for input then later giving them to a GM to look at.  I pay a GM to look over the games I feel I did no serious blunders in but ended up losing nonetheless due to bad choices in the opening, not seeing tactics, etc...  A lot of my games are easy to analyse, but I think I'm getting better at knowing when to ask for help.

I plan to study chess 12+ hours a day for about 2 and a half years with breaks on weekends.  Let's call that number 12.  How much of that time should be alloted to each category?