Instruction / GM Advice
ChessBase data base. You also can find any book you wanted for sale online rather than being confined to whatever was in the latest catalog that you had. I was quickly learn ing that I was in danger of being over whelm ed by information. I realized just how real that danger was
a few months later as I had purchased over 100 chess books and still had no real plan as to how to improve. It was time to decide where I wanted to be and to map out what it would take to get there. So I formulated a study plan. I picked
a list of openings to learn, chose some endgame themes to work on, and then … bought more chess books and didn’t follow my new plan at all. Having come to the conclusion that
saying I was going to do something and actually doing it were two different things I finally understood that it wasn’t going to be an easy journey, but that if I persevered I would make it. So I sat down and de signed a real plan. The first thing I needed was a long term
goal that could be benchmarked with short and intermediate term goals. Choosing the long term goal was easy. I want to live out my childhood dream and become a master. Next I needed to determine how best to benchmark that goal. Since my rating was in the low 1500s it seemed to make sense that I should set a goal of when I felt I should be 1600, 1800, 2000, and then finally 2200. This was probably around March or
April of 2011, so I decided that by the end of the year I wanted to be 1600. Then by the end of 2012 I wanted to be 1800. After that I knew that progress would slow so I decided I would give myself three more years to become an expert by the end of 2015, and then within five more years I would be a master by 2020. I’d put more emphasis on a different set
of questions. What do I need to know to become an 1800 player? (More distant but thus vague: an expert). How can I learn it? Which books, which methods should I use? The first step would be to get to 1600
over the next several months. My rating had been bouncing between 1470-1520 for the majority of my return so I knew that the first thing I would need to do was to develop some consistency. One thing which I was careful never to do was to believe my own hype. For example, I have often overheard players saying things like “My rating is 1200, but I’m really playing about 1500 strength.” I took almost the opposite approach.
Since I was relearning everything from scratch I felt more like I was 1500 playing at 1200 strength. I was reading anything I could about how to improve and the two things that kept popping up were to play as many games as I could and to work on tactics.
So I set out to do those two things. Amongst the books I had purchased were a number of books on tactics. I worked through several, but the ones that I kept going back to were Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player by Lev Alburt and Sam Palatnik, and Chess Tactics for Champions by Susan Polgar. Any time I had a few free minutes I’d grab one of these books and work through a handful of problems. Within just a couple of months the combination of solving tactical puzzles and playing as much as I could manage yielded some astonishing results. After having been rated 1497 in mid-May I made it to 1623 at the end of July at the Green Bay Open. We’ve all heard the motto “Success breeds success.” Truer words were never spoken and so I continued my work on tactics and playing a large number of games. I also decided at this time to refine my opening repertoire a bit. I don’t much care for opening study although I do play main line openings. I was playing the Sicilian Najdorf at the time and was starting to have to play a lot of games against players rated 1900-2100 and getting crushed right out of the opening as my opponents had a far greater under standing of those positions than I did and those openings lend them - selves to tactical maelstroms which I was not nearly as ready for as the higher rated competition was. The Rule of Thumb for non-experts: spend
about one quarter of your study time on openings. So I went back to the French Defense
which I had been playing as a teenager. I figured that the more solid choice would work in my favor. I also started to play the Orthodox Queens Gambit Declined rather than the Kings Indian for the same reason. By October 2011 I made it to 1721 after
a nice showing at the Hales Corners Challenge. I also finally made the decision to get a coach. I had been on the fence for a while about this, but finally knew that it was time. So I started working with Nolan Hendrickson, a young master from the Milwaukee area where I live. Between the decision to start working
with a coach, and my strong performances over a few months I was once again on top of the world and felt like the sky was the limit! It was then that I committed the cardinal sin I had so far avoided. I got cocky. Then reality set in. By April of 2012 I
had shed almost 100 rating points, crashing to 1625. I was continuing to work with Nolan, but it seemed that our lessons had taken on the same flavor. He would tell me to work on solving endgame studies to improve calculation and I would ignore him and do whatever I wanted. Endgame studies can be beautiful and
some are indeed useful for practical players, like this famous Reti study:
WHITE TO PLAY AND DRAW Solution on page 71.
Still, there are more efficient ways to im - prove calculations (one hint—use mostly positions from, or based on, real games). By August of 2012 I was in total free
fall. My rating was down to 1560 and I was beginning to wonder if I would reach my 1500 floor. I couldn’t seem to win any games against players rated 200-300 points lower than me. Even my coach moved out of town. It was at that point that the real work
began. It was time to dig in my heels and get my game back on track. The first thing that I did was to take a long hard look at my study habits. I had gone from diligently working on tactics to hardly working on them at all. I had come to the erroneous conclusion that since I had done so much work on them I didn’t need to keep it up. I also realized that working with a coach
is a huge benefit that shouldn’t be ignored, so I started working with Allen Becker, a local 2100 player. I was finally able to stop the bleeding
and begin my trip back towards my peak rating. A couple of strong showings com - bined with the hard work I was putting in had me back over 1660 in just a couple of months. From there I set the goal to get to 1700 by the end of 2012. I didn’t quite make it as I finished 2012 at 1689. A month later in January of this year I made it back over 1700. It was then, after making such a steep
round trip that I decided it was time to truly focus in on my goals and how best to achieve them. One of the first decisions that I came to
was that it was going to be important to track my progress in a detailed manner so I could chart what was and what was not working. So I started a blog (http://onthe
roadtochessmaster.blogspot.com/). I did so not only to track what was and
what wasn’t working, but also because I needed something that would force me to be honest with myself when I wasn’t working on the things that I said I needed to work on. I also made the decision to go back to
my original loves, the Sicilian Najdorf and the King’s Indian Defense. My two favorite
www.uschess.org 29
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76