“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”
Muhammad Ali

Term is over, and with the Christmas holidays comes the chance to do some serious training.  I’ll be aiming for 30 hours a week, with the exception of this week as Christmas will get in the way.  I intend to do 5 hours a day, which leaves 1 day a week spare for a break or for making up the hours if I haven’t managed them earlier in the week.  The daily plan is as follows:

1 hour of tactics problems
Sources: Chess Tempo, ICC TrainingBot, PlayChess tactics trainer, and CT-Art 4.0 if I can get it to work
Method: I will alternate between sources, using them approximately evenly. With TrainingBot I will continue to use JimGrange’s method, as described here.

1 hour of opening study
Sources: Various DVDs, books, databases, chess engines and online sources
Method: I will be creating ChessBase databases covering my repertoire, using all of the above-named sources to determine the most desirable moves.

1 hour of middlegame study
Sources: Jeremy Silman’s How to Reassess Your Chess, Garry Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors: Part 1, Maurice Ashley’s ‘The Secret To Chess’
Method: I will be changing the source each day, and so should use each twice a week. After looking over my games, Ken Neat, the leader of Durham City Chess Club, has suggested that a more thorough grounding in classic games would be of benefit, which is why I will be studying ‘My Great Predecessors’.

1 hour of endgame study
Sources: Mark Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual
Method: A thorough, cover-to-cover study, with a board and a computer engine running to answer any questions about variations which the book doesn’t explain.

1 hour of miscellaneous study
Sources: Various
Method: This can include playing and analysing games, or extra time on any of the previously mentioned areas. Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, it will consist of working through Livshitz’s ‘Test Your Chess IQ: book 2’ (probably this, though my copy has a different cover).

I will also be playing at least one more Team 45 45 league game, and will be going to the London Junior Chess Championships from the 28th to the 30th, which will disrupt the schedule but will certainly be useful.  I haven’t put very much playing into the plan, as I will try to do a lot of that in tournaments and league games next term.  As always, I’d be interested to know your thoughts, and any suggested improvements.

I’ve been doing lots of tactics training this week, and hope my tactical vision is improving.  The same cannot be said for my ocular vision.  I’ve got a double organometallic chemistry lecture over lunch this year, and the lecturer is rather unreasonable with his lunch breaks.  Today we were released ten minutes late and told to be back in seven, so I rushed to the café to grab something.  Unfortunately all the good things were gone, and in severe time trouble I made the dubious choice of a chicken, jalapeño and cheese panini.  Upon my return to the lecture I decided that the jalapeños needed to be picked out, before rubbing some sleepy dust from my eye.  Chilli in the eye is not a pleasant experience, and my immediate attempt to wash it out with water from my bottle proved unsuccessful as I’d already used all the water to quench the fire in my mouth.  Fortunately my friend Nicola was on hand with another bottle, and I spent the remainder of the lecture trying to wash my eye, and pouring most of the water into my lap.

Anyway, on to the chess.  I’ve been doing tactics training in two different ways so far: with ICC’s TrainingBot, and with Playchess’s Tactics training.  The former consists solely of mate problems, and gives you 20 minutes to solve them (so essentially unlimited time).  I’ve been trying an interesting method promoted by Jim Grange, where as soon as you make a single mistake you erase the record of which problems you’ve done and return to the start.  The idea as I understand it is to ‘hard-wire’ common tactical motifs into your brain, so that seeing them becomes automatic.  His video can be seen here (may not be working at the moment), and an interesting article about a similar technique for the game Go can be read here.

Playchess’s Tactics training is a little different.  You are presented with tactical problems – sometimes mates and sometimes just the winning of material – and given a minute to solve them.  After solving each you are immediately presented with the next problem.  In addition to the minute for each problem another clock is counting down from five minutes, and when this reaches zero the session is over.  The aim is to solve thirty problems within the five minutes, but I haven’t come close yet.  This approach puts you under pressure and forces you to try to think quickly, but on the other hand I am sometimes obliged to ‘guess’ the right move rather than calculate everything out (generally calculating everything until you are sure is what I hear recommended).

I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of each tool, your opinion of ‘hardwiring’, and tips for removing spicy things from eyes in a hurry.

After some consideration I have decided to dedicate 10 hours a week to chess study during term-time. “10 hours a week?”, I hear you cry! “10 hours a day would not be sufficient!” Well, perhaps it’s not enough, but I think it’s important to start with a manageable plan. If I find I’m coping easily, I can increase it. Conversely, during exam period or when I have big assignments due in, I can decrease the number of hours. The one thing I don’t want to do is start trying to cram chess into every waking moment, only to burn out quickly and stop abruptly. I know from experience that my ‘8-hours-a-day revision plans’ mean nothing will get done, but with a more modest aim then constructive work can be achieved. As for the other objection, that 10 hours a week is too much as I have a degree to pass; well, that still leaves 30 hours of the working week, which is more than enough for any degree if used efficiently.

I intend to split the time up roughly into one hour every weekday, and two and a half hours each day of the weekend. Half an hour each morning, before I go to lectures, will be spent on solving tactics problems. I still make lots of blunders, and my calculating ability really needs to be improved, so I think this may be the most important thing to do for a while. Every evening I’ll spend at least half an hour playing online games, or doing bookwork. Bookwork at the moment will consist mainly of working through Silman’s ‘How To Reassess Your Chess’, Maurice Ashley’s ‘The Secret To Chess’, or chess.com video lectures which I’m currently trying out. The extra time at the weekend will be spent on longer games, more bookwork or preparing for my weekly lesson with GM Damian Lemos.

Each week I will post a summary of what I have achieved, either on the main page or on a separate page made for this purpose, in order to hold myself to account. Comments or suggestions on my schedule are very welcome.

I have two important bits of news regarding help I am getting towards improving. Firstly, ChessBase have taken an interest in my project by offering me membership of their excellent Playchess server, and by giving me Maurice Ashley’s new DVD ‘The Secret to Chess’. I’m incredibly grateful to Frederic Friedel and the ChessBase team for their generosity, and look forward to hopefully meeting them at the London Classic in December.

Secondly, I’ve decided to pay for some lessons from a Grandmaster. GM Damian Lemos Sarro, known as Blitz-King on the Internet Chess Club, offers lessons at an excellent rate, and I’m looking forward to my first lesson tomorrow.

Finally, I’m pleased to say that I didn’t actually leave the Paignton tournament completely empty-handed. I won £5, for a quarter-share of the Slow Starter Prize!

Hello and welcome to Road to Grandmaster.  This blog will document my journey as I attempt to improve from a ‘Class A’ chess player to a Grandmaster, the highest title awarded by FIDE (the World Chess Federation).  I propose to do this without failing my degree (an MSci Joint Honours in Physics and Chemistry), without dropping my other hobbies (guitar, Go, Mandarin Chinese and more), without losing my girlfriend (who has not the slightest interest in chess), and even whilst maintaining a normal student’s social life.  To further motivate myself I have wagered £200 with William Hill at odds of 25:1 on me becoming a Grandmaster, and so stand to win £5000 should I succeed.

My current English Chess Federation grade stands at 152.  That’s about 1866 FIDE according to the ECF’s conversion formula (ECF*8 + 650 = FIDE).  My grade last year was 162, or 1946 FIDE, so I think my level can safely be approximated to 1900 FIDE, though I have no official FIDE rating at present.  As many of you will know, one of the requirements for becoming a Grandmaster is achieving a rating of 2500, which means I must improve by about 600 ELO points.

That’s a lot, but such gains are routinely made quickly nowadays by talented youngsters.  Unfortunately, at 20 years old (21 in two weeks), I’m no longer really a youngster and might even be considered over the hill (for those who don’t know, the current world no. 1 is only 19)!  Below is a graph of my ECF grade since I first started playing competitively.

As you can see, I have generally made steady progress, though 2006-2008 was something of a plateau.  My grade jumped in 2009, but at least part of that was due to the ECF adjusting grades because it felt deflation had been occurring, and my grade has dropped a bit this year.  The Grandmaster level in terms of ECF grades is around 230.

Next is a graph of my grade, along with the grades of the top three British players of my year group (James Hanley, Peter Poobalasingam and Tom Pym), and the grade of David Howell, a prodigy in the year below me who is now a strong Grandmaster.

Let’s look first at David Howell’s line.  This is the typical child prodigy graph – he rockets up to begin with, and keeps on improving pretty rapidly up to 230, the Grandmaster point.  Of course improvement slows a bit the stronger he gets, but it still takes only 8 years from his first ever grade until he’s about Grandmaster strength.  The lines of Poobalasingam, Hanley and Pym follow a similar trajectory, though somewhat lower, but they all seem to reach a bit of a plateau around the 180-200 mark.  Whilst very strong, this is still a significant way from Grandmaster, and the last 30 points are the hardest to climb.  Many players reach this sort of level and remain there or thereabouts for most of their chess career.  Well done to Pete who appears to be making a push off this plateau with his latest grade.

My grade line is significantly lower again.  Clearly the child prodigy Grandmaster route is no longer open to me – nor have I reached the level of the other three, where GM is in sight and probably achievable with a few years’ hard work.  Given my other time commitments, a third route – slow and steady – would appear to be the only option.  Perhaps, by using my study time efficiently, I can make my line look more like the start of the others up to near the 200 mark, but from there I suspect it will be a slow grind.  For this reason, I don’t expect to reach my goal for ten years at the very least.

Finally, readers needn’t worry that this website will only be about ratings, improvement, or lack thereof.  I expect to write about everything that interests me in, and to an extent out of, the chess world.  It’s going to be a long road, and I hope that some of you will join me, at least some of the way.