hello Everyone

Hi everyone, I decided to take up chess and was looking for a good online program and found ICS. Before I paid I wanted to do a little research and came across this forum. So here I am, let me tell you a little about my chess knowledge up till now. When i was around 12 years old i started playing a little bit at school, Learned the basics and played in a couple of tournaments. I believe my rating was around 1400-1500. I am now 25 and i have not played any serious chess since those days but I recently decided that i want to become a really good player and I'm confident that i can pull it off. I'm probably going to average 3-4 hours a day playing and learning chess and hopefully by the end of this course I will be well on my way to becoming good! I have an ICC account username:ChessCh4mp, add me to friends if you want to play (or give me lessons if you can kick my ass ) Well that's about it, I don't want to bore everyone See you on the other topics

Welcome to the forum.

It's great that you decided to start studying chess seriously. After doing ICS for more than half a year I've realized that people need some good basics before starting ICS program. I mean you should obviously study tactics on a regular basis and you should have some familiarity with strategy/positional chess. If you finished any basic strategy book like "Inside Amateur's mind" or "How to reassess your chess" you should be good.

ICS material is very good but I believe that it's not all that basic and having a good foundation helps a lot.

This is obviously my personal opinion and others might disagree but I think people should be away of these things before starting this program. I wish I've took extra couple of months of serious studying before starting ICS.

Thanks for the welcome Fanat and thanks for the advice. I will look into getting those books you mentioned and other books as well. Like i said i will have between 3-4 hours every day for study so that leaves plenty of time for other material.

Chesschamp best of luck don't worry this program will suck up all the time you can give it (assuming you are playing/postmortems as well), if you can do the course and read more books that would be superhuman. Just be careful of burnout, and have fun with it!!!

Welcome Chesschamp. The ICS course takes up lots of time if you want to do it the right way. Nevertheless the course is very worthwhile.

But like BDK says, watch out for a burnout. Dont forget to have fun!