Category Archives: Progress report

Weekly Progress Report #59

This week was again focused mainly on playing (and a little analysing), with an online training game on Monday, a Club Championship game on Wednesday, and the British Rapidplay at the weekend (coming to around 17 hours in total). The training game was interesting, though ultimately unsuccessful, the club game was a sharp draw, and the British Rapidplay threatened at times to become an excellent tournament, but ended up being merely a fairly good one. I scored 4.5/11 in the Open Section, playing nobody graded less than 20 points higher than me, for a 182 performance. Here’s a selection of the week’s games:

The club championship encounter.

Next, a relatively smooth win in a French Tarrasch.

Finally, a loss in which I was ground down in a King’s Indian turned Benoni type structure.

Catch-up Progress Report (WPRs #42-57)

My apologies for the long gap since my last post, and especially since my last weekly progress report.  This post summarises how I’ve spent my time since then, and I will now resume weekly updates.

In the first half of August I spent a lot of time on chess, doing from 34 hours to a peak of nearly 53 hours per week during my two tournaments (Major Open and Sunningdale).  After that I took a break from chess for a couple of weeks, and then spent a lot of time thinking about my year’s training (which totalled around 630 hours over 52 weeks) and how it might be improved for the coming year.  Since then my training has been somewhat in limbo for a variety of reasons – I’ve been busy starting the new year at uni, I’ve been continuing to have doubts about the best way to proceed, and I’ve been looking for a face-to-face chess coach.

I’ve not played a great deal of over-the-board competitive chess since August, but have played some.  I scored 2.5/6 in the strong Keynsham rapidplay in September, with a performance of about 161 – almost exactly my current ECF grade.  I’ve played two games in this season’s Durham League, losing to a 167 as a result of a bad blunder, and then beating a 165 in a time-scramble (having been under pressure for much of the game).  This coming weekend I will be playing in the first two rounds of the Northern 4NCL, and the following weekend I’m intending to take part in the British Rapidplay.

One Year along the Road

It’s now been about a year since I started my ‘Road to Grandmaster’ project, so in this post I’ll give a brief summary of the year, before looking forward to the coming year.

The year started with a disastrous performance at Paignton last September – but this was before I’d started studying properly, and at the end of the summer club closed season. Things improved thereafter, and I thought the London Classic in December might be the start of a breakthrough. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite able to sustain the level achieved there over the remainder of the season. The British Major Open in August seemed like another breakthrough, but it was immediately followed by a miserable performance at Sunningdale (which may or may not be attributable partly to tiredness from playing back-to-back tournaments).

Does this year’s up-and-down performance represent improvement? I believe it does, though not as much as I’d have liked. My new ECF grade is 162 (equivalent to 1946 FIDE), up from 152 (1866 FIDE) last year. My latest rating, and first official FIDE rating, is 1966 on the September list, which marks an improvement of exactly 100 ELO points (admittedly involving a conversion between different rating systems) on my rating last year. It also marks a starting point; a point from which my progress towards the title can be measured directly, without the need for conversions.

Given that, despite many hours of hard work, my progress is not all that could be desired, is it clear that I do not have the innate talent required to become an excellent chess player? I’m not yet prepared to accept that as the only explanation. Let’s look at a hypothetical good day’s study from earlier in this summer holiday:

9 – 10 am: Solve tactics problems from CT-Art 4.0
10 – 11 am: Work through Dvoretsky’s ‘Endgame Manual
11 am – 12 noon: Work through Silman’s ‘How to Reassess Your Chess
12 noon – 1 pm: Lunch break
1 pm – 2 pm: Solve tactics problems from CT-Art 4.0
2 pm – 4 pm: Watch an opening DVD
8 pm – 9 pm: Play a couple of 15-minute games on ICC

Next day: repeat.

Looks great, doesn’t it? I used to think so too, but I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that this doesn’t necessarily represent an optimal way to study.

I put it to you that there are two main problems with the above example. Firstly, there are too many different types of material crammed into one day. To quote Nimzowitsch: ‘The simultaneous analysis of different types of positions merely generates confusion in your thoughts…’. Any lessons learned from Dvoretsky are likely to be forgotten when we start working through Silman immediately afterwards.

Secondly, because of the length of the day (seven hours’ study) it’s very difficult to maintain a high level of intensity. Indeed, just the first hour of focused problem-solving is tiring enough to make it difficult to engage fully with the challenging material which follows (Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual). The result is that at some point you end up clock-watching, waiting for the allotted time to end, or studying half-heartedly (e.g. watching a DVD passively, without taking notes, or reading a book without subjecting the author’s opinions to your own analysis).

Having said that, I don’t think the above day’s study is a bad one by any means. The real problem is that it’s not possible to maintain all the time. During term-time, for example, a day’s study might be 15 minutes tactics, half an hour watching a DVD, 15 minutes playing a game online and half an hour reading a middlegame book. With such reduced times it’s clear that nothing profound can be learned from any element of the day’s study. One way in which the pattern can be (and has been) disrupted during the holidays is in the lead-up to a tournament, when I’ve felt the need to flit from opening to opening trying to ‘plug the holes’ in my repertoire. Again, the net result is that very little is learned about any of the openings I play.

A new way of studying

These thoughts about how best to study were triggered by my friend FM Peter Poobalasingam, who introduced me to the idea of ‘deliberate practice’. As I understand it, the basic concept is to practice one element of your chosen discipline, over and over again, until you’ve really mastered it (or at least significantly improved at it). It could be the serve, or a stretched forehand volley in tennis; a particular shot is chosen and repeated many times. In music, it could be a short phrase which is practiced with a metronome until it’s been perfected at that speed (when the metronome can be sped up or you can move on to the next phrase).

I’d now like to complete the Nimzowitsch quote which I started earlier:

“The simultaneous analysis of different types of positions merely generates confusion in your thoughts, whereas a thorough study of one type cannot fail to raise the level of your positional understanding. If you, dear reader, with maximum available intensity sit down to study positions say, with a central file against a flank storm, it would not surprise me at all if as a result you observe a clearer judgement in the field of the endgame. The process of studying one typical position has the aim not only of analyzing this typical position, but also improving your positional understanding as a whole.”

I’ll also quote a reader, Chris Falter, who said the following in response to my ‘Summer of Chess’ post:

“You asked a question about what you should be studying, but I think the more important question is *how* you should be studying. I myself am just now figuring out (at the age of 50!) how important it is to actively engage with difficult material in order to improve. When I look at how I gained piano mastery decades ago, that was definitely the key. I would take on a piece that’s a little beyond my ability, work through it phrase by phrase, repeatedly, until I got it under my belt.”

This post is getting lengthy, so rather than analysing those quotations I’ll jump straight to my proposed new method of study.

• Do away with the weekly study time targets, and stop clock-watching and recording all my study to the nearest 5 minutes.
• Instead, have daily achievement aims, such as ‘Analyse game x.’
• Work until I feel I’ve learned something, or until I can no longer work at a high intensity, not until a set time.

The way I see this working in the next few weeks is in analysing my latest FIDE-rated games deeply. I intend to analyse them in batches by opening, in order to facilitate the drawing of conclusions about general problems I might have in certain types of position. For example, I might choose to start with my French Defence games, in which case I will analyse the first of these until I think I’ve done a good job of it and really learned something (which might take a day, or might take longer, but I plan not to be too concerned about that). Then I’ll move onto the next, and perhaps draw breath at the end of the French games to note connections and shared conclusions, before starting to look at my games in a different opening.

Finally, a word about how long I intend to keep trying to become a Grandmaster, and when I might call it a day. I intend to keep going for the following year (my final year of university), and then probably have a gap year in which I make a special effort. If at the end of that time I’ve not made significant progress then I will be forced to accept that it’s not a realistic aim, but I hope to have enjoyed the journey in any case.

This post has only really covered the ‘how to study’ bit of my proposed new method; a post with some new ideas about what to study will follow.

As always, I value your comments.

Weekly Progress Report #41

As predicted in WPR 40, my girlfriend was a highly disruptive influence last week, so I only managed about 13 hours.  This week will be largely about getting a few repertoire tweaks in some sort of working order in time for the Major Open which starts next week.  Hic naufragii (yes, I know that’s wrong):

Monday: 30 minutes CT-Art 4.0, 30 minutes opening work

Tuesday: 2 hours 25 minutes (car journey) opening work

Wednesday: 1 hour lesson with GM Damian Lemos

Thursday: Nowt

Friday: 3 hours playing, analysing and discussing ways to train with an old friend from junior tournaments

Saturday/Sunday: A considerable amount of time reading about and thinking about the optimal way to train.  I’ll guess at 6 hours.

As can be seen above, I’m currently having a minor crisis about how to train, but I intend to set this aside, at least to an extent, until after my two upcoming tournaments (which can be seen on the calendar page).

Weekly Progress Report #40

I’ve had a good week, managing 40 hours and 20 minutes of study.  This has been split between tactics problems (CT-Art 4.0), opening study (various top-secret sources), middlegame study (How To Reassess Your Chess, 4th edition), endgame study (Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual) and a few online 15-minute games.  I’ve also restarted lessons after a break with GM Damian Lemos.  Hier ist die Aufteilung:

Monday: 60 minutes solving CT-Art 4.0 tactics problems, 3 hours 5 minutes reading Silman’s ‘How To Reassess Your Chess’, 30 minutes opening work, 30 minutes playing an ICC 15-minute game and 40 minutes analysing it

Tuesday: 35 minutes CT-Art, 1 hour 20 minutes studying Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual, 1 hour 40 minutes Reassessing My Chess, 70 minutes lesson with GM Damian Lemos, 40 minutes reviewing lesson material, 50 minutes opening work, 50 minutes playing & analysing an ICC 15-minute game

Wednesday: 60 minutes CT-Art, 1 hour 25 minutes Silman, 1 hour 40 minutes opening work, 10 minutes PlayChess tactics training

Thursday: 65 minutes CT-Art, 1 hour 30 minutes Dvoretsky, 2 hours 10 minutes opening work, 20 minutes playing an ICC 15-minute game, 15 minutes playing a couple of training games with chessdi

Friday: 30 minutes CT-Art, 50 minutes Dvoretsky, 1 hour 45 minutes listening to Chess Talk with Levon Aronian (not wholly instructional, but did include a nice annotated game), 55 minutes playing & analysing an ICC 15-minute game, ~40 minutes opening work

Saturday: 50 minutes CT-Art, 1 hour 40 minutes Silman, 1 hour 30 minutes opening work, 1 hour 5 minutes playing an ICC 15-minute game and reviewing the opening

Sunday: 1 hour 30 minutes CT-Art, 2 hours 30 minutes Dvoretsky, 2 hours Silman, 2 hours 20 minutes opening work, 40 minutes playing and analysing a few ICC and PlayChess games

I won’t be able to manage 40 hours this week, as my girlfriend’s visiting.  See you next week.

Weekly Progress Report #39

Hello and welcome to another weekly round-up.  I do intend to do these on Monday, but a casual observer would be forgiven for assuming that I used a random number generator to decide on which day of the week to write them.  The bad news is that, as predicted in WPR #38, last week wasn’t particularly productive; I only managed 4 hours 55 minutes.  The good news is that I’m now in an excellent routine, and am on course to manage 40 hours this week.  Voici la répartition:

Monday: Nowt

Tuesday: 1 hour 5 minutes working through Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual

Wednesday: 1 hour reading Gallagher’s Starting Out: The King’s Indian, 15 minutes ICC TrainingBot

Thursday: 30 minutes finishing off Gallagher’s book (which I found to be a useful refresher even though I’ve played the King’s Indian for years), 10 minutes playing an ICC 15-minute game, 50 minutes Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual

Friday: 1 hour 10 minutes starting to read Silman’s (recently rewritten) classic ‘How To Reassess Your Chess’

Saturday: 5 minutes PlayChess tactics training

Sunday: 40 minutes Reassess Your Chess

The second piece of bad news is that I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t afford to play tournaments in Europe this summer.  The corresponding piece of good news is that I will be active on the British tournament circuit, and so far have entered the British Major Open and the e2e4 Sunningdale International.  Both are FIDE-rated, and both should offer a relatively strong and uniform field (in particular the latter, which is a round robin).

 

Weekly Progress Report #38

I managed 12 hours 50 minutes of chess over the past week, which is ok for the last week of term.  Here’s the breakdown:

Monday: ~1 hour 40 minutes working through Joe Gallagher’s ‘Starting Out: The King’s Indian’, 15 minutes watching Bazna end-of-round videos

Wednesday: ~3 hours at the City club analysing Bazna and other games and playing a 15-minute game

Friday: ~1 and a half hours playing and analysing with a uni friend

Saturday: ~2 hours 10 minutes working through the Gallagher book, 35 minutes playing 2x 15-minute games on ICC

Sunday: ~2 hours 50 minutes on the Gallagher book, 50 minutes studying Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual

I’m at home now and am finding myself a little distracted by Wimbledon, a Roger Waters gig and meeting old school friends, so I’m unlikely to manage the 40 hour target this week.  I’m still undecided about which tournaments to play this summer; my first will probably be either the British Major Open or the Czech Open.

Weekly Progress Reports #36 & 37

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been on holiday to Turkey and have been otherwise fairly busy with end-of-term stuff, so I’ve only managed about 6 hours over the last fortnight.  I’ve also been following the tournament in Bazna, but haven’t included time going over those games in my report.  Here’s the breakdown:

1st week

Monday: 15 minutes CT-Art

Tuesday: 30 minutes analysing games with derfel

Wednesday: 15 minutes CT-Art, ~2 hours at Durham City Club watching FM David Eggleston go over one of his games and playing 15-minute games with a strong player

Thursday: ~1 hour reading ‘My Great Predecessors’

2nd week

Thursday: ~an hour and a half reading ‘My Great Predecessors’ (on the flight home)

Friday: 10 minutes PlayChess tactics training

Saturday: 10 minutes PlayChess tactics training and 10 minutes reviewing mistakes

I don’t expect to get a great deal done this week, but after that I will be home and starting my 40 hour weekly target.

Weekly Progress Report #35

I did about 15 hours 40 minutes this week:

Tuesday (31st): 10 minutes ICC TrainingBot, ~45 minutes playing 3-minute games with derfel(GM), ~1 hour 40 minutes analysing past games with derfel, 30 minutes playing and analysing a 15-minute game

Friday: ~40 minutes preparation for a game with a friend, ~4 hours playing and analysing with said friend, ~4 hours playing ICC Open qualifiers, ~30 minutes analysing ICC Open games

Saturday: ~3 and a half hours playing ICC Open qualifiers (best result was 6.5/11, which may or may not be enough for a rating prize, and I beat a GM but also lost some games to lower-rated players)

From tomorrow until the following Thursday I’m going to Turkey for a week with friends, so this will probably be the last report until I get back.  Following comments on my last post I’m now seriously considering spending the summer playing European rather than British tournaments.