A ratings slump around the holidays has made me re-examine why I’m winning and losing. Like everyone else below grandmaster level, many of my losses are because I blundered material. I feel like the main reason I’m blundering material is because I’m so focused on what my plans and what I’m doing that I don’t do an adequate job of checking the threat associated with my opponents last move.
What I have been doing for practice is Rapid games and Correspondence games, puzzle tactics, opening study, and occasional endgame study (I feel I’m strong at endgames relative to my peers anyway). The other part of study has been walking through master games, specifically games that use an opening that I use, and I’m focused on the transitions from the opening to the plans of the middlegame.
I returned to chess a few months back and I now feel like the openings are no longer the problem against players around my skill level. I’m pretty happy with my opening repertoire as a fit for how I want to play, and I feel like I have a reasonable handle (to a decent depth) on the openings and variations that I see with any real frequency.
My tactics studying has been either: Targeted Lichess puzzles, such as rook and pawn endgames, mating combinations, or king and pawn endgames. In an attempt to get faster I’ve been doing Puzzle Storm on Lichess.
I don’t think “faster” is the problem though. Unless it’s a super long game I’m always fine on time, and even then I almost always have more time left than my opponent. I need “deeper”, and I need to maintain better overall board vision and not get so fixated on what I’m doing at the exclusion of everything else. If anything Puzzle Storm is training me to disregard everything except finding my tactic to win the puzzle. And that’s when I run into trouble.
The new study plan is going to lean more heavily to reviewing masters games, but now it’s going to mostly be annotated masters games. I’m also going to try to often set up a real board and walk through the games guessing the moves as I go. It’s slower than just clicking through a game on my phone but I think it encourages me to think a lot more deeply about potential plans and combinations – both mine and my opponents.
To start I have selected three books featuring masters games from my mushrooming book collection:
Winning With The Slow (But Venomous) Italian. Especially chapter 11, which is the “strategy” chapter. Well over 50% of the players at my level answer e4 with e5 (king’s pawn with king’s pawn). I wind up in a lot of Slow Italians, and my usual plan is to attack the queenside because my opponent doesn’t prioritize that side of the board. The strategy chapter offers a lot of other alternatives that I need to get better at recognizing. This represents 26 games, which I have loaded as a private Lichess study as well.
Rock Solid Chess: Tiviakov’s Unbeatable Strategy: Volume 2: Piece Play. Now that’s a title that lacks any pretense of modesty, isn’t it? To be fair Tiviakov claims to have gone 110 games without losing. I’ve just started really focusing on the book and at least one idea has already won me a game. I feel like the book is making me re-examine what I’m prioritizing for the better. As of today I have my bookmark in the “Centralization” chapter, though I think the more of this book I can work through the better.
The last book even newer to me and I’m pretty excited about it-
Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953 (Bronstein). I just received this a couple of days ago, but the combination of era, level of competition, and level of annotation makes many consider this book a classic and a must-have for annotated master games. Because it’s 1953 and because it’s pre-computers it makes the games more relatable for players who aren’t masters themselves. There are 210 games here, which is completely overwhelming. I did some digging around and came up with a list of 18 games that received multiple recommendations as “must sees”. My plan is to start with the “must see” Nimzo Indian games then go through games in groups that share an opening. The 18 games are listed at bottom of this post for posterity.
I’m going to use a couple of other books to supplement those three: Fundamental Chess Openings, mostly to clear up plans and ideas in out-of-fashion openings from 1953 that I’m not familiar with. And: Chess Structures – A Grandmaster Guide by Mauricio Flores Rios. I *may* play through some of the Chess Structures games as well.
One final tweak to the training plan will be doing Puzzle Streak instead of Puzzle Storm. Puzzle Streak is not timed, it starts easy and gets progressively harder the more you puzzles you get right. It ends when you miss. I think this will be a better use of my study time — it forces me to really focus on the puzzle at hand and not just guess because I’m under a time crunch and the move looks plausible.
And of course there’s Youtube for ideas and “not 100% engaged” entertainment. Naroditsky is still the best. I’ve been branching out to Bartholomew, Finegold, Hanging Pawns, and others but it’s not the same.
The Zurich 1953 games list:
Averbakh v Kotov, game 96, Old Indian
Bronstein v Euwe, game 39, Nimzo Indian
Euwe v Smyslov, game 19, Grunfeld
Euwe v Najdorf, game 58, Kings Indian
Geller v Euwe, game 9, Nimzo Indian
Keres v Smyslov, game 168, English
Najdorf v Stahlberg, game 68, Queens Gambit
Najdorf v Averbakh, game 148, Queens Indian
Reshevsky v Petrosian, game 12, Nimzo Indian
Reshevsky v Stahlberg, game 38, Queens Gambit
Reshevsky v Kotov, game 51, Kings Indian
Smyslov v Stahlberg, game 23, French
Stahlberg v Boleslavsky, game 7, Kings Indian
Szabo v Bronstein, game 31, Old Indian
Tiamonov v Averbakh, game 41, Nimzo Indian
Tiamonov v Euwe, game 54, Nimzo Indian
Tiamonov v Petrosian, game 134, Nimzo Indian
Tiamonov v Najdorf, game 28, Kings Indian
FlatbreadGarden 