Has everyone quit?

Congratulations on your retirement. I had the very same misconceptions when I retired a couple of years ago

I think you are right in the target range to get the most from the ICS courses so I really don't understand why you think you would get more from the Smirnov courses. I only know from the advertisements, but aren't the Smirnov courses only video? The ICS courses are multimedia: pdf's, videos, and chessbase files; I can't imagine Smirnov's courses are as comprehensive than ICS.

Agreed again. The ICS course is definitely a good course and well worth your time... if you have bought it, study it!!

Thanks for the quick reply.

I certainly will study the ICs material. I have looked through it and it is clearly highest quality. But I realise that my current playing level is "built on sand". The Smirnov courses look like a good way to fill in the gaps and get a stable base before taking the ICS course.

Smirnov does do his communication by video, but the main part of his method is the active learning based on the practical material and exercises he sets. He himself says that only looking at his videos will get you nowhere, you have to do the exercises. From what I can see, the practical work takes 98% of the time you need to spend, the videos are really a minor point.

Interestingly, both Smirnov and ICS are obviously based on the same training approach...presumably the Russian Chess school method. So I think they are complementary.

My plan is to work on Smirnov until about this time next year, then start the ICS course and follow it religiously. I think I will be able to devote about 20 hours per week so will be interesting to see if this level of commitment can overcome the obvious age issue...I am 57 and not the teenager you are supposed to be if you want to improve at chess. I will try to post some updates of progress as I go along, and would love it if you guys are interested enough to follow this.

VG

I will track your progress with interest :-)

I am 46 and I still struggle with learning new chess material.

Looked at Smirnov's material, want it, but found the "complete package" just too expensive :-(

Thanks Victorian Gent for coming back. Like BQ, I would like to see your progress so keep us posted. I'm weaker than you are (around 1400 chess.com) and not that young anymore. I would like to try all methods inc that of Smirnov's where it not for financial issue. So I'll tackle ICS first before I jump around. Retirement is far from me though.

Yeah, Smirnov does seem pricey, but doing his courses properly takes time, so cost spread out a bit (as long as you have the initial outlay). The GM Secrets course seems to contain the key essence of his "thinking system" and if you do all of his exercises properly will take a couple of months to complete if you can spend 3-4 hours per day, His method for learning openings is a revelation too...this is explained in his Openings Lab course, which probably takes another month to 6 weeks to do (but at the end you have cracked your opening repertoire). These two courses, done sequentially with dedication are supposed to be able to give a 300+rating point boost for a player in the 1400-1700 range. But the proof is in the pudding, so I will not know the potential effect it has on me until I play tourney chess again in Sept and get a read on my grading.

I will probably start a thread on this site where I will update my progress, high and low points, etc. I'll call it something like "An improvers story".

VG

Well if you manage to go from 1400 to 1700 or 1700 to 2000 in a few months, you'll have made a good investment!

Well after many years of putting chess on the backburner, I have returned to the game. BorgQueen, not sure if you remember me or not but I'm sure BDK will remember me :] I'll do my best to be active here as well as my blog (chess.daftandcurious.com). Anybody wanna have a race to ELO 2000? haha

I remember you... well your username anyway :-)

Glad you remember

Uhmmm.... Seem everyone has 'gotten a life' for a long time now. Hear you soon!

Uhmmm.... Seem everyone has 'gotten a life' for a long time now. Hear you soon!

Same story for me... somehow this site logs me out after a while and then I don't get any e-mail notifications either. Out of sight, out of mind. The site defeats itself.

Hi, Right now I'm distracted from chess because i'm still studying. Can't wait the moment to finish and return to study chess.
However I haven't quit reading the forum posts, but it's very true that you never notice when someone replies or starts a new topic, and that is disappointing, I agree, this forum is excellent but it is urgently asking for mainteinance.
Hello again everyone

supermoy wrote:...it's very true that you never notice when someone replies or starts a new topic, and that is disappointing, I agree, this forum is excellent but it is urgently asking for mainteinance...

Indeed :-)

Hi BQ! How's your 'study' going on? BTW, happy new year to all, may we have better chess this year!

It's going slowly... much slower that I would like... because I keep having to re-study the same stuff over and over before I fully remember it... which I need to do before moving on to the next topics!

It's ok though, it comes with age and a taste for scotch ^_^

Hi All,
Joined last month... Nice treatment of todo list, is good. Opening repertoire lines seem solid for Month01 though surprised not to see the Tarrasch in the French as white.
I am lagging behind already as i need to complete learning the opening repertoire more thouroughly.

Biggest problem for me is to discipline myself to limit online games and spend more time learning, hopefully the discipline will come...

I had a few qns on how folks are going over game analysis:
(1) While analyzing games, how much time per GM game?
(2) Does one need to guess the move method?

Regards,

Hi Manas,discipline doesn´t come out from nothing, you should have priorities. Ypu decided to study a serious-really serious- program for improving in chess. It really works, but it also really requires a good amount of time and your attention. People tries several methods to leave cigarrete, and THEY jus don't work, however none of them won't work until you decide to quit forever because that is not your priority anymore, you should extrapole this to the online games as well. Just quit playing on internet. When the time comes and you return you will even be glad because you will see a big difference and an improvement but you cannot expect to change your thinking proccess if you are constantly playing hi-speed chess instead of practicing the analysis by playing slower (tournament duration 2-4 hour games)

We don't just use the "guees the move method", we MUST if we expect to learn the proccess to find those correct moves.

Regards
supermoy

Manas wrote:Hi All,
Joined last month... Nice treatment of todo list, is good. Opening repertoire lines seem solid for Month01 though surprised not to see the Tarrasch in the French as white.
I am lagging behind already as i need to complete learning the opening repertoire more thouroughly.

Biggest problem for me is to discipline myself to limit online games and spend more time learning, hopefully the discipline will come...

I had a few qns on how folks are going over game analysis:
(1) While analyzing games, how much time per GM game?
(2) Does one need to guess the move method?

Regards,

You need to spend some time to analyze games, so expect to spend at least an hour or more per game.

Definitely, try to guess moves as you work through the games this is recommended on the ICS website (of course your not guessing, but applying the ICS principles to move selection); this is hard to do with the PDFs, so I use the ChessBase training tab on my laptop to hide upcoming moves. The comments don' t always synchronize well, but at least moves are hidden.

BTW, I recently moved the ICS openings repertoire to Chess Position Trainer. The latest release now has a "topic" function which looks like a decent way to use the "guess the move" method for games as well as openings.

Im glad to hear that you hace moved your repertorie to ctp,cause i did it just yesterday,the program completely worthy, its excellent and now I no longer need a training mate in order to learn the ics openings. Without it,it would be much harder because of the long variations
However i am taking too long to replay all the moves,it will take me at least a week to move my whole repertorie to cpt, do you know a faster way?

supermoy wrote:Im glad to hear that you hace moved your repertorie to ctp,cause i did it just yesterday,the program completely worthy, its excellent and now I no longer need a training mate in order to learn the ics openings. Without it,it would be much harder because of the long variations
However i am taking too long to replay all the moves,it will take me at least a week to move my whole repertorie to cpt, do you know a faster way?

Replaying is brutal!

First, you need to convert to pgn so CPT will handle. This is relatively easy if you have ChessBase; I don't know of other programs that will convert, but I'm sure there are some available. The nice thing is you will be able to move all of the comments with the moves.

The way I did it was to create an opening for each variation; so for White d4 repertoire it goes, Czech Benoni, Modern Benoni, Volga Gambit, etc. Then use the import function to move each opening into CPT. It's as easy as that! Took me a couple of hours for all of the d4 and black repertoire.

Basically, I created a master CPT file for all of the ICS openings. Now, I select what openings I plan to use for upcoming tournaments, then create a separate repertoire for that event training prep.

Thank you so much Pawncustodian,it will save me a lot of time , I do.have CB .
Thank as well for sharing your advice for tournament .
I'll let you know how it worked

supermoy wrote:Thank you so much Pawncustodian,it will save me a lot of time , I do.have CB .
Thank as well for sharing your advice for tournament .
I'll let you know how it worked

Good Luck.

If you come up with any ideas on how to make best use of "Topics" let me know. Right now I'm moving couple of model games into it to try and use CPT to memorize them.

Hi Guys!

I'm new to the forum. I got my month 2 study material a few days ago. I've found that for me, the best way to digest the material is to do it in the order it is structured. I get tired but I know that I am learning so I devote at least 2 hours to going over the games. The videos are not priority with me. I view them in my spare time. The way I see it. Chess is a game of knowledge and the more you know the more you can apply OTB.
The professionals have studied THOUSANDS of games so they recognize patterns in positions. So I go over the games and then go over them again.
I love this course. I am rated 1712 USCF and this information allows me to play chess in an organized manner. I look at positions differently now.