Advice for chess improvement

Dear friends,

I'm looking for some help to improve my chess playing. Please allow me to explain my situation in some detail and hopefully this will inspire someone who really knows their stuff to provide me with some advice/answers.

I am a 36 year old Philosophy Professor. I learned to play chess when I was 4 years old. I took to it immediately and by the time I was 7 I could beat most of the adults in my life. I started playing in seriously competitive tournaments and at my peak I was in about grade 7 or so, rated in and around 1800 and was in the top 5 players in my age bracket for my province (Ontario) in Canada (for context, the 1st and 2nd rated players in all of Canada were both from Ontario as well). As I moved into high school I moved to a different town and stopped playing competitively because I didn't have any family support and all my peers in my new school were not very good. I played on and off in University but during that time I became a serious musician (read: drummer) by way of accenting academic research with something physical. Chess fell by the wayside. 

I realized that now that I have a proper job that I have time to re-invest in this game that held so much meaning for me as a child. I have given myself about an hour a day to work on it. I know that's not a lot, but it's as good as I can do right now given that I have about a million other commitments. As far as resources are concerned, I have a premium account here, an updated copy of Fritz 17 and a very good library of books (if it matters, I can happily list them).

My issue is that I'm not sure how to spend my time effectively. I play in person with a colleague who is much better than me about once a week. I do puzzles on chess.com for fun and am getting decent (puzzle rating is pushing towards 1600). My current rating for 30 minute games floats between 1300-1400, which is down from an old average of 1500 on here. I make a lot of mistakes in games and my opening play is weak. I find drilling openings to be tedious. 

Right now I am trying to study openings (using Modern Chess Openings and Fundamental Chess Openings), playing through some master level games (using Winning Chess Brilliancies) and trying to get my analysis and board awareness more precise (using How to Reassess Your Chess). It seems to me that I might be a bit divided or maybe just in need of a coach. 

If anyone has any thoughts or advice or is even willing to have an actual conversation about this, I'd be very grateful. 

With best wishes to all,

Sean

Dear friends,

I'm looking for some help to improve my chess playing. Please allow me to explain my situation in some detail and hopefully this will inspire someone who really knows their stuff to provide me with some advice/answers.

I am a 36 year old Philosophy Professor. I learned to play chess when I was 4 years old. I took to it immediately and by the time I was 7 I could beat most of the adults in my life. I started playing in seriously competitive tournaments and at my peak I was in about grade 7 or so, rated in and around 1800 and was in the top 5 players in my age bracket for my province (Ontario) in Canada (for context, the 1st and 2nd rated players in all of Canada were both from Ontario as well). As I moved into high school I moved to a different town and stopped playing competitively because I didn't have any family support and all my peers in my new school were not very good. I played on and off in University but during that time I became a serious musician (read: drummer) by way of accenting academic research with something physical. Chess fell by the wayside. 

I realized that now that I have a proper job that I have time to re-invest in this game that held so much meaning for me as a child. I have given myself about an hour a day to work on it. I know that's not a lot, but it's as good as I can do right now given that I have about a million other commitments. As far as resources are concerned, I have a premium account here, an updated copy of Fritz 17 and a very good library of books (if it matters, I can happily list them).

My issue is that I'm not sure how to spend my time effectively. I play in person with a colleague who is much better than me about once a week. I do puzzles on chess.com for fun and am getting decent (puzzle rating is pushing towards 1600). My current rating for 30 minute games floats between 1300-1400, which is down from an old average of 1500 on here. I make a lot of mistakes in games and my opening play is weak. I find drilling openings to be tedious. 

Right now I am trying to study openings (using Modern Chess Openings and Fundamental Chess Openings), playing through some master level games (using Winning Chess Brilliancies) and trying to get my analysis and board awareness more precise (using How to Reassess Your Chess). It seems to me that I might be a bit divided or maybe just in need of a coach. 

If anyone has any thoughts or advice or is even willing to have an actual conversation about this, I'd be very grateful. 

With best wishes to all,

Sean

Dear Sean,

I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.

You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals.

In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.

I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck for your chess games!