Who is currently studying (or re-studying)?

Morpheus_chessplayer wrote:Hello All,
Trust you all had a good Christmas and are eagerly studying the course
This is my second attempt at the course, I signed up a couple of years ago but never managed to get passed month1.  I was distracted by thinking Chessable was the answer to becoming better at chess.

However it appears it didn't work for me, I've given it the best part of 18months studying various courses, and spent a small fortune on books looking for the holy grail yet I still haven't improved much

Rating still around 1550 on chess.com, where it has been for the last couple of years.
However my plan now is to complete this course and hopefully increase my rating, ideally id like to get over 2000 but realise this will take a few years.

Well thats me and just thought Id say Hi

Yah, there is no Holy Grail in chess. only Holey In Your Pocket.

I think this is the best course for the bang for your buck. It's hard, but I think it does work. Of course, I'm not a good example or student, and like you, I bought the course, along with the Opening Prep., a few years ago and I'm giving it another try. I'm going slowly through the material, currently on Month 1, and just finished the Znosko-Borovsky - Alekhine game (#3) analysis. I am being very methodical this time.

I think I have a better understanding. I, Unfortunately,  got distracted by Silman and all the other garbage out there that is enticing and try to make it look 'easy' for a buck. What B.S. As the course points out, Chess is not Hard, it's Complex. Decomposing the complexity is the hard part. This course really does that for me. I do use Chessable for keeping in touch with my openings, so it does have a benefit for that.

Currently flipping around the 1900-2000's on Lichess like a rubber ball. I tend to play up in my games for tougher competition, so I assume I will have some revelations going forward. I've witnessed too many 2000+ players simply drop pieces there, so the ratings are a bit inflated, I suppose.

Holey In Your Pocket........definitely true
Well I'm not as far into the course as you as I'm just starting day1 'again'
Like you I'm also still using chessable, mainly for openings and tactics but depending on time constraints I may drop it completely and just concentrate on this course.
How you finding the opening Prep course how are you managing time between the two.
I think I read somewhere that if you were to study for approx 7hrs a week you should manage to get the core course done within 1 year. How does studying the opening prep course impact on you time.

I find I keep coming back to the course to pick up where I left off. The simplest things that it suggests, examining every move for threats and changes in the position seem to have helped my play considerably. I've been doing daily chess for the past few months and my daily chess rating has gone up from 1430 to 1568 in the last 90 days, so I hope its been working. I seem to be able to calculate a litter further and more clearly. I know rating isn't everything but it is the most objective gauge I have of how I'm doing. I've also been trying to just enjoy chess more and that seems to help. I have learned to stop playing so much speed chess late at night - that doesn't help! I've been using the daily games to work on the openings that ICS recommends though I haven't gone into them in detail.

congrats on your rating improvement, mine has been stagnant for a while now but hoping to improve as the year progresses.
I only play daily chess as I like time to ponder my moves, which you would have thought with no time pressure they should be blunder free, lol. alas there not.
Hopefully after month 1 of the course Ill know how NOT to blunder, or at least blunder less.

Morpheus_chessplayer wrote:Holey In Your Pocket........definitely true
Well I'm not as far into the course as you as I'm just starting day1 'again'
Like you, I'm also still using chessable, mainly for openings and tactics but depending on time constraints I may drop it completely and just concentrate on this course.
How you finding the opening Prep course how are you managing time between the two?

First, I'm 60, been playing since 1970 (10 yrs old), I have some decent organization skills, very comp-savvy (Software Engineer by trade), and a gigantic chess library of over 100 books. I've read maybe 6 of them... . I am banging my head against the glass ceiling of 2000, but it's just a number. If it happens, it happens. This is my big push.

I've given this a lot of thought over the past months. I take the advice from"How to Study and Improve at chess", which is mysteriously hidden on this site for some reason and is 16 pages of glorious advice on how to study. I break it down into 8 hours a week and use the guidelines roughly from that document at the end - 1 hr openings, 1 hr endgames, 1 hr tactics, 4-5 hrs middlegames/Annotated Games, per week. It's trivial to break it up into 30-minute chunks and keep track of it if I have to cheat on something for some reason. These are not hard and fast - I often fudge it but it is a point of reference I try to adhere to. Additionally, I do visualization exercises every other day for several minutes, as recommended.

As for openings, I try and do the recommendations on how to study an opening from the Opening Preparation, Month06, "Semi Slav - Moscow Variation - Introduction & Theory" document. This gets slotted into my general approach above for opening study. So far, that is working pretty well, but the real test will be trial by fire in the coming few months. when I start playing a bit more frequently. I'm only playing a few games a week - the time is a limited resource right now, basically Sundays only - and no blitz whatsoever. I have such bad habits from the past I need to break them like a bad horse; I am playing a half-dozen daily games and building the good habits I need to for positional evaluation and TODO lists. It's not easy, but if you want easy, play checkers.

Morpheus_chessplayer wrote:I think I read somewhere that if you were to study for approx 7hrs a week you should manage to get the core course done within 1 year. How does studying the opening prep course impact on your time.

I slot it into the 1 hr Openings timeslot each week. All the work I do for ICS is done on a real board. I print out the pdf and highlight the variations as I review them. I can drop it any time and pick it right back up. I'm not gonna lie - I do access Chessable for some opening repertoire (Semi-Slav, Kalashnikov, a few others) every morning and it keeps me fresh, along with some endgame work (100 Endgames...and Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual). My middlegame book at present is "The Middlegame by Euwe & Kramer, Vol 1 and 2", in Algebraic, working it over a real board. I have other classic and not-so-classic middlegame books (Modern Chess Strategy by Pachman; Chess Strategy in Action by Watson), and it's all I need right now. I have transitioned from computer onscreen tactical puzzles to a real board, set-up-the-position methodology. I also read Yusupov's Mastery Series (#3) and do the puzzles - they can be difficult.

All I can say is that I'm trying as hard as I can to study correctly all facets of the game and see it reflect in my play.

I'm studying too. Well into month 3 now.

Edit: well, I should add a little more I guess. I find month 3 hard in some ways. I know it's trying to teach me how to think, but I rather be spoonfed a bit more on how to exploit this piece play in the mentioned situations. Because I fear month 4: it requires you to exploit learned weaknesses, but I feel it's too hard for 1400's.

So I pay extra attention now in month 3, but it seems to me that the answer is "activity" each and every time, without learning techniques for specific situations.

Studying alone, is it worth it?

Apparently the answer is yes according to this investigation: http://clinica.ispa.pt/ficheiros/areas_utilizador/user11/11_-_the_role_of_dp_in_chess_expertise.pdf

You can skip the statistics an go directly to the conclusions which tells some interesting observations about how titled players reached that level, along with some conclusions on aging and the value of OTB playing.

PawnCustodian wrote:Studying alone, is it worth it?

Apparently the answer is yes according to this investigation: http://clinica.ispa.pt/ficheiros/areas_utilizador/user11/11_-_the_role_of_dp_in_chess_expertise.pdf

You can skip the statistics an go directly to the conclusions which tells some interesting observations about how titled players reached that level, along with some conclusions on aging and the value of OTB playing.

"Based on the regression equations presented in this paper, we could argue that players ought to devote more time to the former (study) than the latter (play) if they want to see large increases in their tournament ratings. For instance, for the combined sample in Table 3, each log unit of serious study alone yields about 200 rating points compared to 33 rating points for log tournament play. Hence, players ought to devote the majority of their time to that activity. However, for a younger player, tournament play does make an independent contribution to current skill level."

Even though this study is from 2005, I'm sure it holds true now. A casual assumption that correlates to this observation can be made by the plethora of "complaints" on Reddit about how many "Queen's Gambit" players (i.e., those players that were drawn into the game because of the Netflix series, and/or COVID-19 lockdowns) don't see any improvement in their play and hit the proverbial "glass ceiling" and bump their heads due to hours and hours of bullet/blitz play online in the absence of any serious study. Even Rapid play has this problem. The complaint goes like this:

"I am 1200 Blitz on Lichess and been playing for about a year, but I can't seem to break out of this level. I play and I play, to no avail. I play the London System because I don't want to study "booked up" openings, and I am an attacking player so I rarely get to an endgame. I need some help with my game. My bullet rating is 1400 so, I know I am better."...But, do you?

I've also seen some writings that relate to the above study with regards to "each log unit of serious study" and what that means. Seems to me that the consensus is this is focused study on one aspect of chess and is not a hodgepodge of thrashing across several subjects over the span of a study session. I used to do that and I really did not get anything from it that stuck. Now, I focus on this course and let each month run as long as it takes, in addition to having the additional focus on specific aspects of chess each month like Middlegames, Endgames, Openings, Tactics, Strategy, etc. For February, it is Middlegames for me, and I endeavor to read as much of one of my middlegame books as I can get through for the month.

To another previous post, I think that the course here and completing each month in the month allotted is ambitious. I myself have spent probably 2 months on MONTH 01, and I am just beginning MONTH 02. The test alone has taken me a week to complete to my satisfaction. I'm not sure if that is the norm or I am just anal about the work.

Distributing time between OTB and Off-the-board is also a relative new issue that needs to be dealt with. I hate online playing, but it seems one is practically forced in that direction. I'm one of those "faithful" students who actually uses a real board because masters said so, but clearly that notion is being undermined.

With regard to the study comment on OTB and aging, the comment is subjective but for the last couple of years I have been conducting my own study and I agree with the observation that the ability to deal with distractions is a major contributor to difficulties experience by older players OTB.

My experiment was to construct a problem set on Chess Tempo that consisted of only easy problems rated between 1100-1700 and I have exclusively worked those problems daily for the past three years. I'm in my 70s. I had done quite a few problems before the "experiment" and I am able to view duplicate problems for success and time to solve on the website. My first conclusion was that my time to solve was taking longer, presumably due to aging; however, lately it is appearing that my ability to handle distractions was the cause of the discrepancy and if I were to draw a conclusion consistency in practice can minimize that particular issue. I need to create a new problem set that more accurately reflect my playing strength, but I'm not only old, but also lazy and don't want to create a set that forces me to take more time to solve each problem .

It's been ten years since I worked my way through the ICS courses and when I look back today it's as if I am seeing much of the material for the first time, but from a new perspective. Even though I can still rattle of the various centre formations and the associated playing strategies I really never used what I know properly. You have sparked a renewed interest in me and I am now looking across openings for similar structures for modifying my openings. Chess Base has this capability, but I would prefer to use Chess Tempo (it's cheaper). I have a query into Richard on the CT forum about implementing a database search for pawn structures, but I am not optimistic.

RadDogFriday wrote:

A casual assumption that correlates to this observation can be made by the plethora of "complaints" on Reddit about how many "Queen's Gambit" players (i.e., those players that were drawn into the game because of the Netflix series, and/or COVID-19 lockdowns) don't see any improvement in their play and hit the proverbial "glass ceiling" and bump their heads due to hours and hours of bullet/blitz play online in the absence of any serious study. Even Rapid play has this problem. The complaint goes like this:

"I am 1200 Blitz on Lichess and been playing for about a year, but I can't seem to break out of this level. I play and I play, to no avail. I play the London System because I don't want to study "booked up" openings, and I am an attacking player so I rarely get to an endgame. I need some help with my game. My bullet rating is 1400 so, I know I am better."...But, do you?

I have a six year old granddaughter. She knows the moves and her parents have watched the movie (of course she is not allowed to watch that movie for obvious reasons). I taught her the Scholar's Mate in all of its variations and she took out both parents quickly. They're impressed, she's overjoyed, but when I set up a K&Q vs K endgame and told her to checkmate me she couldn't do it, and wasn't interested in what  I had to teach her. Motivations differ I guess, I won't press her until she is ready. Maybe that is what you are seeing on Lichess?

Maybe movies are motivators, but not proper motivators - just thinking.

When it comes to chess. the reason some won't go beyond 1200/1300 is due to "personality". When I observe long time chess players at the club who never promote, I notice always some kind of an obstruction caused by personality. I've also seen players even after a brain injury performing well: they persist, are willing to take mental pain and dare to look in the mirror. And thus they are capable of stepping out of what hinders their performance.

Valmont wrote:Maybe movies are motivators, but not proper motivators - just thinking.

When it comes to chess. the reason some won't go beyond 1200/1300 is due to "personality". When I observe long time chess players at the club who never promote, I notice always some kind of an obstruction caused by personality. I've also seen players even after a brain injury performing well: they persist, are willing to take mental pain and dare to look in the mirror. And thus they are capable of stepping out of what hinders their performance.

Agree with your observations, but applying the "Principle of Charity" I would prefer to believe that the limitation is not personality, but choice.  https://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

George Leonard in his book Mastery outlines four behaviors: Dabblers, Obsessives, Hackers, and Masters. Dabblers buy the books, sets, etc. and talk about chess, but never go beyond the initial interest; Obsessives buy in big time an push hard until they crash and walk away; Hackers get pretty good and become satisfied with their ability and leave it as good enough; finally, the Master continues through the plateaus and continues a lifetime journey.

I think we all exhibit each of the above behaviors in various aspects of our lives and I and have no objection to any of the behaviors in my own life.  The problem comes when we fail know ourselves and come to regret the outcome.

Surely choice depends on personality?

Valmont wrote:Surely choice depends on personality?

Agree. But isn't personality a variable under our own control? I would hate to think that our destiny is predetermined by personality alone...

I wouldn't dare to think our destiny is predetermined by personality alone. But to some, perhaps many, it sure looks like that way as it greatly influences their abilities in the end. I'm going "realpolitik" here.

Valmont wrote:I'm going "realpolitik" here.

Very good! A direct strike at the weakness in the Principle of Charity.

Remind me to never play chess with you. Your comment recalls the chess of Bobby Fischer.

My personal formula is not to rely on logic and intellectualism from a puritan point of view. It deviates too much from life. That having said, I think you were generous, thank you.

About motivation.

I you really have to enjoy what you are doing, if want to get good results. And vice versa.

When I got retired two years ago, I started an ambitious study program with 10-15 hours a week. Including a couple of online long time control games and analysis. In the beginning this was fun and easy to do. But as time went, it turned to be more and more like an ordinary job you do for your living. And after a year I stopped. It was not fun any more.

This was about a year ago, and I have now again started with study and some online games. But this time I will not force me to do any playing or studying, if I don't feel doing it. Probably this is not a good choice, but pushing youself if you don't like doing it, is not good either.

And chess is only a game. There are more important things in life. Especially when you get older like me (I'm 67).

PawnCustodian wrote:George Leonard in his book Mastery outlines four behaviors: Dabblers, Obsessives, Hackers, and Masters. Dabblers buy the books, sets, etc. and talk about chess, but never go beyond the initial interest; Obsessives buy in big time an push hard until they crash and walk away; Hackers get pretty good and become satisfied with their ability and leave it as good enough; finally, the Master continues through the plateaus and continues a lifetime journey.

I think we all exhibit each of the above behaviors in various aspects of our lives and I and have no objection to any of the behaviors in my own life.  The problem comes when we fail know ourselves and come to regret the outcome.

This. Thanks for the reference.

PawnCustodian wrote:

Valmont wrote:Maybe movies are motivators, but not proper motivators - just thinking.

When it comes to chess. the reason some won't go beyond 1200/1300 is due to "personality". When I observe long time chess players at the club who never promote, I notice always some kind of an obstruction caused by personality. I've also seen players even after a brain injury performing well: they persist, are willing to take mental pain and dare to look in the mirror. And thus they are capable of stepping out of what hinders their performance.

Agree with your observations, but applying the "Principle of Charity" I would prefer to believe that the limitation is not personality, but choice.  https://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

George Leonard in his book Mastery outlines four behaviors: Dabblers, Obsessives, Hackers, and Masters. Dabblers buy the books, sets, etc. and talk about chess, but never go beyond the initial interest; Obsessives buy in big time an push hard until they crash and walk away; Hackers get pretty good and become satisfied with their ability and leave it as good enough; finally, the Master continues through the plateaus and continues a lifetime journey.

I think we all exhibit each of the above behaviors in various aspects of our lives and I and have no objection to any of the behaviors in my own life.  The problem comes when we fail know ourselves and come to regret the outcome.

By that standard, I am a Hacker/Master-in-wait, recently graduated from obsessive. I am stuck there. I am having trouble breaking through the 1900 ceiling. I abhor online play any faster than a 15+10 game, will definitely not play any blitz time-control without increment and bullet chess is just mousing practice.