What should I do to improve my game?

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708090448/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review750.pdf

Here is the last piece of information in the book of Soltis and may it be my last comment

Soltis suggests chess magazine which has tons of master games full with notations. However, he does not recommend novices to fully go over these games. What he recommends are, in the order of the most important annotation:

1. Explanations on position, like weakening a square, bad bishop...

2. Look or keyword: "critical moment" or "from winning to losing" or "automatic move" or "natural move". More than often, the annotator will give a full explanation on these situation.

3. Focus on move marked with ?? or ? or ?! or ! or !! 

4. Other than that, you can skip. Remember, there are thousands of games are played each year so you must be selective! What you want are the "patterns".

5. Save the diagrams of these moves to make flashcards. Be creative with the flashcard by writing question below the diagram. Something like, a critical moment, what should White do?

Another idea I just successfully carried out. With Chessbase, Lucas Chess and chessgames.com, I figured out an awesome way to boost my chess. To save time, I signed up for chessgames membership, well their premium access is wonderful with sacrifice database! I download the entire pgn of a middle name book such as Chess Training for Post-Beginner or Positional Techniques. Then, I open with chessbase to insert a diagram at the start position (this serve as a FEN to create position database in Lucas chess), deleting and all previous move. Then, I follow through until the strategy of the master succeeded and also delete all remaining. The entire process of each game is about 1 min. and the entire book of 54 games is about an hour. Finally, I load the pgn in Lucas and create a collection of tactics training. OMG! Each tactics is a plan! Each tactics is minimum 5 moves! Each tactics is a positional technique! Thanks God for allowing me to discover this method! I can save tons of time looking for good tactics website that emphasizes strategy and positional play.

This is how I train for calculation/candidate move and decision making. 

The software needed is ChessHero (free)

The website needed is found on pgnmentor.com

First download a pgn of your choice. Personally, I love Lasker/Capablanca/Tal. You don't have to customize your pgn, but if you want, you can filter "win only" games of the master you love. If you don't have a chess hero, you can pick the opening of your repertoire. Same thing, customize your variation if you want.

Second, load the pgn in ChessHero. The interface is simple and easy to figure out. 

Basically, this software will generate a random position from your pgn. The difference between this method and tactical puzzle is that, there is not a hint of what to do. When you do tactics, you can foretell that there is something to do with capture, fork, pin bla...bla. However, with this method, sometime, it is just a pawn move the slightly improve you pawn structure or position. Another awesome feature is that, this does not tell you the answer immediately but it gives some the evaluation with the variation. So, you can test all of your candidate moves. And keep in mind, master's moves are not necessary best move. You can set the max attempt is 3 moves, which means you should have 3 candidate moves in your pocket at all time. If you want to train for blitz, set the max time you like. You can also set the successful threshold. Default is 25. I would change to 30, indicating a tempo.

Overall, this method give you a boost in

1. Your confidence in making a move when there is no hint.

2. Your candidate moves.

3. Accurate calculation.