Sort of a birthday today.

3 weeks of chess. After countless nagging by friends and foes I finally started to play.

Of course being my usual obsessive-compulsive I play a ton and already read way too many books for my own good.

All of that is a bit confusing, for now on I decided to work mainly on tactics and openings.

My daily ( except WE ) training :

tactical play

- 15 min convekta chess tactics for beginners
- 20 min chess mentor
- 15 min random endgame and puzzle books

Openings:

- 15 min study on bookup
- 20 min short games ( stop around 12 moves and evaluate the position ) using the opening studied earlier.

Play:

- no time constraint, I usually play 3 or 4 20 min games playing alternatively black and white. Official settings, no takeback, no friendly draw offer/acceptation ( no guts no glory )


Today I studied the london opening, I'm looking for a queen opening with white that I like to play.

Played 3 games:

- win against a 950 player with black playing Pirc
- draw against a 1050 player with white playing the london
- Win against the same guy, playing the same opening, played solid even if I missed a mate in 4... twice!

I like to play the london and the pirc because both of those openings are complex enough without requiring to follow long strict lines.

I still need to find a way to handle the sicilian when i play e4 with white, I can't win with the smith morra, I definitely need to work on my tactical play.

Objectives :

- play in my first live tournament this year.
- Play two opening with both color reasonably well.
- be familiar with most standard openings my opponents could play.
- have fun
- make a ton pf money clicking buttons for a living

Greetings
yet another training journal

Looks like a pretty good schedule, although I am sceptical about the amount you are going to devote to openings. It's way more important to master the general principles of opening play. If one is familiar with strategies then most of the opening moves can be found following general logic. Thus my sugesstion would be to reduce the time considerably or to even replace it with study of master games as you would get the whole package: openings explained, middlegame explained and endgame as well

Glad to see another journal.

I agree with Armis about openings. They're not nearly as important as most people want them to be until you're at least 1800 USCF strength. (Many people say even higher)

Also, something you might want to think about is mixing it up a little. Instead of doing the same 10 things every day maybe you could do the same 6 things every day and then have a rotating schedule in there for something else? I'd suggest something like doing tactics every day (definitely the most important thing to study at your level) then alternate days doing openings, master game study, endgames, positional exercises etc. I think that doing that would help for a couple reasons. Firstly it helps to avoid burnout as you're not doing the same thing over and over and over... Secondly it will give the information that you picked up a day or two to sink in. Some of it will need much longer (You'll know what you're supposed to do, but not when to do it, etc) but I think a small break in learning a certain kind of thing is important as you can overload yourself with it and it will sink in much faster that way.

Either way, just a suggestion. But I definitely think you should add some positional study in there as well. A good place to start is with Armis's exercises he made for the forum (they have their own section) and if you want to get really involved with positional stuff you can get The Amateur's Mind and then later How to Reassess Your Chess. Both by Jeremy Silman.

Oh and welcome to the forums!

Thanks for your suggestions.

Here's the revised schedule ( work in progress )
Everyday :
- tactics 40 min
- 1 Master's game analysis : I need help on this one, analysis ok but how? I have logical chess by chernev I guess i should read and play along thinking about why they do what they do.

In rotation monday to friday :
- endgame study
- opening study
- positional study ( silman book on its way )

And as many 20 min games as I wish everyday of course

Here's a good place to start for master games. (At your and my level we can probably learn more from reading master games that have already been analyzed)

http://jeremysilman.com/chess_mstr_gms/ ... mes_1.html

After you're done with that you can move on to:

http://jeremysilman.com/chess_dossier_j ... ic_01.html

This one is more of a "journey through Silman's styles" but it's got good games in it and a varying array of styles of chess for each game.

I always find it easier to run through the games on a board while it's going on. If you can't fit a board by your desk, which is my case, I suggest you use SCID it's a free database program that has a nice little board on it for such things. You can download it here: http://scid.sourceforge.net/download.html

Another excellent way would be to analyse the game first yourself and only then compare it to the annotations in the book. It doesn't have to be extensive analysis but a general feel of what's going on. Move by move books are great for this

That's a good point Armis. I often get discouraged when trying to analyze master games though as I realize just how little I know and so many moves completely confuse me.

Here's a really good place to start analyzing games. This one is set up to have you analyze it and then gives a very in depth analysis of the game afterwards.

http://www.jeremysilman.com/chess_instr ... _tour.html

Apparently it's quite fashionable to say "studying openings is not important before you reach 2890ELO" and other stuff like that.

But what happens when your opponent goes for a gambit you don't know?

I played this today:

Date: 11/2/2008
White: RRR
Black: GoodGayme
Opening: D00 Queen's Pawn, Mason Variation, Steinitz Counter-Gambit

1. d4 d5 2. Bf4 c5 3. e3 Nc6 4. dxc5 e5 ??? oups

Stuff happens.

It's not really a gambit as black regains his pawn. 4.dxc5? was just a bad decision. Apparently it wasn't that hard to find over the board. What happens if I take the pawn? I leave the e5 square unguarded, ah yes! Black can then go e5 and regain the pawn. Simple as that

What people mean by saying don't spend a lot of time on openings is memorization. For example learning lines 15moves depth or playing the moves just because they are given in a book or something.

In Josh Waitzkins' interview he says: WHY is way more important than the WHAT. I didn't quote that exactly, you can find it in his interview if you want but the point is to understand why the moves are good and played so often instead of just playing the book line because it's a book line

The 2890 ELO wasn't a big enough clue apparently ahah I was just making fun of myself here, terrible play ( auto derision in french don't know the english word )

I got the point but somehow this situation makes me think that "opening lines" are double edged, how many times I played a "non-standard" move in the opening opening and the other player just freezed and made an awful play ? quite often. Now I know the feeling

You'll never catch me saying that. I believe that you should always concentrate on your greatest weakness and if that happens to be in the openings then you need to do some work there. If you are always losing in the opening then you will never get a chance to play a good endgame so do what you need to do to be able to survive into the middlegame and ending.



You rely on general opening principles and reason your way through it.



4.c3 or 4.Nf3 seems more advisable.

Crash

This is the main thing that people don't realize when learning openings at lower levels I think. It's more important to understand the why's than the where's of piece placement in the opening. You need to know that in a Ruy Lopez you are playing Bb5 to put all the pressure in the center that you can, or in the Sicilian you're making the bold claim of "You can have the Kingside but the queenside is mine!"

The way that IMs and GMs study openings doesn't seem like they are doing this, it looks like they are memorizing variations so a lower rated player thinks he can memorize the first 18 moves of the Ruy Lopez and come out of the opening much better than his opponent, but then his opponent "leaves book" on move 3 and the guy has no idea why his pieces are where they are and flounders.

By the way IMs and GMs are memorizing variations, but I almost guarantee that they also understand why the moves in the variations are good ones!

I like Dan Heisman's approach to openings. After every game you play, look up the opening and see how you might have played it differently. Learning by piece meal like this is a great way to pick up even the most complicated openings. (This was also suggested to me by Wildman when I first joined the forum mentioning I might have to give up the Ruy Lopez because of all the theory involved at higher levels.)

There will be times when you're caught by a trap, but guess what. You just learned that trap! And you did it without having to sift through countless books and you got some other training along the way, good for you. Don't be afraid of a loss like this, learn from it and don't get fooled again and the 0 pts was well worth it.

*Climbs down off his soap box*

1min + 4s blitz : don't panick!!!

I don't play blitz usually cause I feel I'm not strong enough for it, but the day was slow and my colleague wanted to try a bullet.
Funny game cause he totally collapsed under the time pressure playing horrible blunders... Stop at move 7 for black and find white's move 8 ( in under 5 secs )... I'm kind of proud!

cheers

Pretty much an awesome game