How do you study chess?

This is a question aimed primarily at the higher rated players 1850+!? We know that if they have gotten that far they must be doing something right. However, if you are a lower rated player and have any useful tips that can help the members here, feel free to drop a comment below.

One of the things that i have been wondering for a while is, how can i Efficiently study chess? What should i focus on? Many put an emphasis on studying tactics, others on just playing lots of games and reviewing them with an engines, others say to get a coach, etc., but i know there has to be specific things that we can target as chess players in order to get better.

So my question to you higher rated players is how do you study chess? What have you done to get where you are, and what do you continue to practice to see growth in your playstyle?

I'll briefly go over what i do: Currently i am watching a couple instructive chess videos on YouTube from several channels such as:

https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/OnlineChessLessons

They are very instructive and i've gathered a lot of useful tips from them.

Then i'll do 5 tactics daily on chess.com. I take my time to try to understand the position and find the best move, even if i get a low score. I play on average 10-20 games a week on 10|0 blitz and will review every game on Stockfish 8 engine, to try to find my mistakes and weaknesses. I have seen steady growth these past weeks and notice my play is better, but i am still playing around 1100 (chess.com rating) and am looking to grow.

So how do you study chess? What do you do to improve your game?

(1) Develop a consistent thinking algorithm that you can apply to every position (AKA a thinking process). It should utilize your intuition, but also make sure that you can find tactical shots during a real game. Dan Heisman talks about this in great detail. This is the first step to becoming an "1850+" player. 

(2) Focus on applying knowledge, not on getting knowledge - you need to try to apply everything you know in your games, yet you need to be efficient in your thinking process. Hence, you need to only focus on the most important elements of a chess game during the game (AKA the basic knowledge), and those will help you connect to more specific ideas. This relates to the thinking algorithm.

(3) Get basic chess information, and learn to use it. You should be instantly 1700+ on this site on any of the live ratings if you have basic chess knowledge and can use it. If you skip this part, you may improve, but you will quickly quickly hit a wall in you improvement, and chess will make no sense to you.

(4) Pattern recognition - at a low level, you should practice lots and lots of easy tactics until they're engraved in your memory. These should be common tactics, and it'll help you see them during a real game. 

(5) Play slower games - 10+0 is too fast, and will not allow you to train your thinking algorithm or use your knowledge. Each training game should be an opportunity for you to test out your thinking algorithm or new knowledge.

(6) Focus on training quality over quantity. Reading 1 chess book thoroughly is better than rapidly reading 100 chess books (the latter is a waste of time and money!)

Lastly, what stronger and weaker players do to study chess are vastly different. If I asked a grand master what he does, he would say he mostly focuses on analyzing opening variations to the 20th move. This is, of course useless to me and even many master level players.

Thank you for your response and insight @Chrub_Enjel, some useful information.  Would you mind elaborating a bit on  what you think are the important elements of chess, and the fundamental understanding needed to apply in-game? Also, about the time based games would you consider 20min to be a good time in order to improve thinking and pattern recognition?

Lastly, any good chess books you can recommend for us? 

Thanks in advance. 

Possibly of interest:
Simple Attacking Plans by Fred Wilson (2012)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140708090402/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review874.pdf
https://www.newinchess.com/Shop/Images/Pdfs/7192.pdf
Logical Chess: Move by Move by Irving Chernev (1957)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140708104437/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/logichess.pdf
The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played by Irving Chernev (1965)
https://chessbookreviews.wordpress.com/tag/most-instructive-games-of-chess-ever-played/
Winning Chess by Irving Chernev and Fred Reinfeld (1949)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140708093415/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review919.pdf
Discovering Chess Openings by GM John Emms (2006)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140627114655/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/hansen91.pdf
Openings for Amateurs by Pete Tamburro (2014)
http://kenilworthian.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-of-pete-tamburros-openings-for.html
Chess Endgames for Kids by Karsten Müller (2015)
https://chessbookreviews.wordpress.com/tag/chess-endgames-for-kids/
http://www.gambitbooks.com/pdfs/Chess_Endgames_for_Kids.pdf
A Guide to Chess Improvement by Dan Heisman (2010)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140708105628/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review781.pdf

(1) 20 minutes is too fast - chess is an incredibly complex game, and when you realize this, you'll wonder why classical tournament games are so fast - only 2 hrs to play 40 moves! When you realize this, it's a sign your chess is getting better. I'd recommend at least 45 minutes per game though. Quality over quantity. 

(2) The fundamentals of chess are very simple:

-What's the goal in chess? Checkmate.

-But in a game, your opponent will protect the king with his/her pieces. So then what's the goal? To destroy/overwhelm the opponent's pieces with your own. So then, the goal becomes to gain the most MATERIAL, which will give you numerical superiority.

-But in a game, the armies are equal, and a good opponent won't just let you destroy his/her army most of the time. So now what? You need to get PIECE ACTIVITY - to place your pieces on better squares, where they attack and restrict the opponent's movements. 

So chess is about ACTIVITY - in particular, 2 types of activity - PIECE ACTIVITY and MATERIAL. Activity can be kind of defined as your ability to control squares. It's a general concept. 

However, everything in your chess game should be focused on increasing your activity (material and piece activity) and decreasing your opponent's activity, or playing for a direct checkmate (when the situation allows for it). 

Also, this provides a perfect link between tactics and strategy/positional play, which beginners definitely don't understand (and most weak players who insist that these are different things). Your STRATEGY always remains the same - it's what I said above. TACTICS are the best concrete way for you to achieve your strategy.

For instance, I want to make my pieces super active, and attack the opponent. 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 and now, should black play 3...Bb4+? It's positionally a great move - attacks the king, develops the bishop on a very active square. But 4.c3 and white kicked the bishop back and strengthened the center, and now will win material with dxe5 unless the bishop goes to the bad square d6, blocking the d7 pawn and the rest of black's army. The tactics show that black's move doesn't quite work positionally, even though it looks like it could. 

In "combinations", the tactic simply follows the positional idea to gain as much material as possible (or checkmate!). 

So in chess, your goals are the same - activity. However, each position, each fork in the road, will provide you with many paths. It's your goal to seek the best path using tactics (calculation and evaluation). This is the hard part in chess. 

However, this is essentially the basic information that I think every chess player needs to understand. If you understand this, you have a fundamental understanding of chess, and very very little in chess should come as a surprise to you. With this, you should be able to:

*understand why every single opening that's mainstream works

*understand why certain specific positional concepts (how to play vs isolated pawns, etc.) are true  - and so you won't have to think about these specific concepts so much during a game, but instead you focus on activity and when the specific instance occurs, you'll remember the specific plan.

*understand why pawn promotion is the foundation of this chess theory I've just outlined. 

I have used this as my own fundamental understanding for chess, and in 3 years of on-off chess practice, I have reached a level I am very happy with, with no plateaus or struggles to break a rating barrier. This is due to basic chess knowledge. I believe that every reasonably intelligent person who hits a rating barrier before being a master or almost being master suffers from this lack of basic knowledge. Yes, there are a lot of advanced general ideas in chess, but not a single one of them ever deviates from this principle of activity. 

Anyways, if you fully understand this basic structure of chess, you know as much as I do about chess! (Minus possibly some specific principles and openings, but those aren't too important). 

If you follow these ideas, not only will it instantly make you a better, stronger player, but you'll know exactly what you need to work on to get better after analyzing your own games. For example, if you can't calculate well, then you won't be able to choose between ideas. 

An important note to why pawn promotion is the central link for this chess understanding to be valid - pawn promotion is the way in which material can be transformed into large quantities of piece activity (a queen!), and this allows you to destroy your opponent's army and checkmate, as was the goal.