Four Areas To Study

From my perspective right now, there are four core elements to a chess game that one can study:

Openings

Middlegame Strategy

Tactics

Endgame

I'm not going to spout off how I think everyone should balance these out but I want to outline what I consider good baseline knowledge/skill and the goals I have for each.

Openings

I want to be able to identify an opening from the first 3-5 moves, so long as it's not some obscure opening. If I see a rossolimo sicilian, a catalan, or a hedgehog I want to be able to say that with confidence. I don't think it's quite valuable yet for me to know the deep plans for each and the 12th move of all variations but if somebody plays c5 to my e4, I want to know two or three good options and what they're called. I think it's good to have that baseline knowledge to springboard my study. 

I'm using a reddit post that outlined a bunch of common openings with anywhere from 2 to 5 moves per side. There were a lot of errors but I corrected them and made my own spreadsheet with all moves and the common name of the opening. I've also been adding to that a quick note for memorization. For Evans Gambit for example, I'd write "giuoco piano then b4 from white." I hope to slowly memorize them and be able to belt out the moves on a board. I also want to add in a column for "General Plans" as I go, such as "trade off the light squared bishop and fight for d5" or something similar.

Middlegame Strategy

It's the "What do I do now?" problem. I will have to continue reading The Amateur's Mind for the time being and keep taking notes on it. Equally important, I'll have to analyze my games and master games with these ideas in mind and take note of when I made a good analysis of the position and when I didn't. If I can get out of the opening 49 times out of 50, this and tactics are the things I need to work on most. To work on this though, is a matter of reading material and applying it to my games which is a more typical version of studying I did in school where you're memorizing key concepts until you can apply them in your games (similar to memorizing concepts to apply to an essay or test in school). Therefore this can seem to be a little dry and feel more like work which might be the reason for my avoiding it. Whereas tactics are easier tests that I can do in a few minutes on a phone app....

Tactics

As I've just got back into chess in the last few weeks I've started playing a LOT of tactics apps and using webpages. It all started a month or so ago when I got the Play Magnus app again. I just began playing him at his youngest age to make myself feel better. Then I decided on playing him until I got to 500 points then I'd jump to the next age level. The first few were easy but I'm currently stuck on age 9. If I work hard, I can draw him but I haven't won yet. Anyway, the point is that I made up a little game within the game where I have a goal of a number of points to get to. And that's how we get to tactics. Find a way to turn it into a game to watch your progress over the course of many days, weeks, months. Like what I did with the woodpecker method. 

Right now I have an app called "Chess Tactics Pro" and it's just like any old tactics trainer. I dove in and saw that it has 150 "easy" puzzles so I instantly decided I'd solve them all, then go straight back and solve them again, and again and again until I could do it in 20 minutes or so.

Make up games like this and do them. It helps stretch your training over the course of many days or weeks until next thing you know, you're doing tactics every day....which is the idea!

Endgame

Again, like middlegame strategy this is a fair amount of just intaking and memorizing knowledge like how opposition works, how to advance a majority, the lucena position, etc. I am oddly not confident in how opposition works and I don't know why. If the king is in front of the pawns I feel good in telling you if it's winning or not but I need to be able to see this from further out and if the kings are in weird positions (like not in or close to direct opposition). I was given a pdf book called Chess Endgame Training by Bernd Rosen and I recall looking at it briefly a few months ago. It seemed pretty helpful and had loads of examples so I should re-visit that. And continue going through Silman's Endgame Course. 

Conclusion

Lastly, it's a matter of playing games and analyzing. And of course making sure I'm using the lessons learned in my tactics training, middlegame and endgame strategy, and opening knowledge to an extent. I think with all these core elements, one could devise a decent study schedule such as Monday is tactics, Tuesday is opening, Wednesday is middlegame, etc. I don't know if I'm organized enough to do that but perhaps I will continue my tactics training hard (1-2 hours a day I think is pretty good) and begin mixing in endgame stuff, Silman's Amateur's Mind book, and random opening memorization which I can probably do during slow times at work.

I bought a chess set

I don't really have anyone to play with but FUCK IT! I've always wanted a nice set of weighted pieces so I went out and bought some. There is a chess board on its way as well. I figured I'd start with the pieces as that selection would be more subjective to my personal tastes and I could play with them on my crappy vinyl roll-out "board" to find out exactly what square size I'd need for a board. Plus I could be more flexible in my choices instead of buying a "set" with both pieces and board in one price (that was usually higher).

Shortly after checking amazon.com, I discovered that I really like the aesthetics of a set that I began to see referred to as the "Leningrad." Who knows if that is an accepted name, but it was the knight in particular that caught my eye. Its bowed head looked honorable and respectful as opposed to the more traditional knight I've seen with its head pointed forward.

I ordered them from a store called Staunton Castle and it shipped from India. The packaging was great and the pieces feel amazing. Nice and weighty. Substantial. Good felt on the bottoms.

The one set I had when I was younger was a cheap magnetic travel set that had approximately 1 inch squares. I bought a vinyl and plastic tournament set two years ago and I was surprised at how much larger the pieces were. It took me many games to get used to the size. The board alone was about 21 inches wide! Quite different compared to the travel set. I started to see that the chess pieces the professionals play with are quite large as well and most of the quality sets for sale online are similar size. The king in my set is around 4 inches tall and the base is about 1.625 inches. I got the ebonized set so the black pieces are quite dark. Thanks to amazon points, I only had to spend $81.78 on these pieces.

For the board, I decided to go for a 2.25 inch square to match the vinyl board I'd been using to practice. I found that boards looked too crowded if you didn't get a large enough square size. Between watching the 2019 Sinquefield cup on youtube and reading comments about the board (the table is amazing) and also getting inspiration from /r/chessporn, I was settled on a 2.25 square. Then of course is type of wood, color, border, etc. I didn't want a huge border and I wanted completely solid wood but those are hard to find and expensive. Most options were veneer but reviews sounded good so I settled with chessusa.com.

I went with a mahogany board. Click here to go to the store's page. As for price, I took advantage of Chess USA's new customer discount and only had to pay $103.96.

I will post a picture of the board and pieces when I put everything together!

It is a bit overkill since I rarely play anyone OTB at my house but I'll be super excited to see this on display and to use it for practicing opening memorization and playing through master games.

Slow Rapids

So my new idea is to play more rapid. I want to get to 200 classical games still, but also I'd like to focus on my rapid game which will presumably give me a lot more games to play and let me focus on just GETTING GAMES IN! So I want to find out the slowest possible time control on lichess that still is classified as "rapid." I found this information on lichess' message board:

Assuming a time control of M minutes with S increment in seconds:

1 M = 60 seconds
1 S = 40 seconds

Basically, for every base minute add 60 seconds and for every increment-second, add 40 seconds. You'll use that sum in conjunction with this table to get lichess' time control classification:

0:01-0:29 = Ultrabullet
0:30-2:59 = Bullet
3:00-7:59 = Blitz
8:00-24:59 = Rapid
25:00+ = Classical

Let's say you have a 5|5 game That's 5 minutes of game time plus 5 seconds increment per move, or 5M + 5S. From the above assignments, that would be 5*60 + 5*40 = 500 seconds, or 8:20 which fits under the rapid category.

So my quest is to know all comfortably slow time controls that are still considered rapid in lichess. This way I can still take as much time as possible even though they're technically rapid. I'm reeeeally trying to find every edge, probably for little actual value ;) So I have to get as close to the 24:59 sum as possible. Let's just shoot for 25:00 to simplify the math then I can drop a second of increment to get within the range. 

Let's start with a base of 10 minutes. That would give me 15:00 more to work with to calculate the increment time. That's 900 seconds and if I divide that by 40 to get the necessary increment, it's 22.5 so we have to say 22 seconds. So with a base start time of 10 minutes, I can do a maximum of 22s increment to stay within rapid. I'd imagine after playing a few quick opening moves, a 10|22 game wouldn't feel wildly different from a 15|15 game that I'm more used to.

I did a few more so here's an overview for rapid time controls that would be on the extreme slow end. This should be read as base time plus the maximum increment that will still classify the game as rapid:

5|29 (minimum of 5 seconds of increment)
6|28 (minimum of 4 seconds of increment)
7|26 (minimum of 2 seconds of increment)        
8|25 
9|23
10|22
11|20
12|19
13|17
14|16
15|14
20|7

Again, 5|29 is rapid, but if you play a 5|30 game, that is technically classified as a classical game! I'll grant that this chart is a bit specific because, most probably, you won't find a lot of 6|28 games. But it is helpful for those more common 5, 8, 10, 12, or 15-minute base games that pop up in the lobby. So if you see a 5|25 game available, you'll know that's technically a rapid game! Or a 10|20, 12|15, 15|10, or 20|5 game! 

So in conclusion, since I'm going to start working on my rapid rating, why not try to milk as much time as possible for these games?! I mean technically a 5 minute game with 5 seconds increment is rapid, but if there is a 5|25 game available too, isn't it good to know that they're both classified as the same type of game?! Oh well, this at least wasted some time for me at work....