Tag: lichess

A New Training Plan For This Adult Improver

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

Scid vs PC. Thoughts About The Getting Started Process

I think I now have the very basics of Scid vs PC together. Initially I was somewhat hesitant to get involved with the setup because I wasn’t really sure where to go or what to download. And because I wanted to focus on other things chess. Then there was the word “database”, which can often translate to “Byzantine”, which was also a turnoff. To try to warm up to the idea I watched parts of a few (mostly dry) videos and chose to dive in.

Here’s how I got started:

I downloaded Scid vs PC here.

I ultimately decided to start with just the OTB (Over The Board) files at Lumbra’s Gigabase. It’s actually about ten zipped files containing 9 million+ games of OTB, split up by years or decades (or more). The free unzip utility I used was 7-Zip (here).

The “trick” is to download all of the zip files, create a new database on Scid vs PC, then load each unzipped file into that database so all the games are in one larger db file. Then save *that* file to a new name. That’s the file to be used going forward.

There are millions of online games available at Lumbra’s as well. My feeling is that I may download them at some point, but for now I’m mainly interested in parsing the database for masters OTB games. For example: as White when I play e4 and Black responds with the French defense – I like to play the Tarrasch variation. For model games I can search the main database for just that ECO code, and further narrow my search for GMs I’d like to try to emulate in that opening, for example, Michael Adams. Even better, search terms can also include things like “White Wins”, or “Only games with between X and Y total moves.” I used that last feature to remove super long games since what what I’m really interested in are the openings and middlegames — I can study endgames separately. All of these options are available in the General Filter.

In Scid vs PC there is always a “scratch pad” database open called “Clipbase”. If I search and get say 15 games from one GM and 20 from another, it’s literally a drag and drop process to combine all of those games into the Clipbase, which can then be saved as a new database or exported as PGN game files (or a bunch of other options I haven’t really played with yet.) Note that Clipbase doesn’t and won’t save, so make sure to save what’s in Clipbase as something else if you care about the contents before you close the program.

One neat thing about the PGN export option is that by combining the model games into groups of a maximum of 64 PGNs they can then be easily imported into (also totally free! yay!) Lichess Studies, and Lichess Studies automatically divide the PGN files out into one game per Chapter. So I can have a Study of model games of one particular opening I’m interested in, (or one GMs selected games), and I can share those Studies with friends. (If you want the Study to stay “yours” then Select Unlisted (no one else can see) when creating it and invite your friends as Members. It’s also possible to set “Allow Cloning” and “Share and Export” to “Only Me” if you’re concerned with a Study getting broadcast. There’s no way to “un-ring the bell” if a Study gets public.)

A Note regarding importing bulk PGNs into a Lichess Study: I like to work through model games with the color I intend to be playing at the bottom of the screen — Lichess Studies give you that option to have Black or White at the bottom at the time that you import. If you forget to toggle Black or White at the bottom during a bulk game import then the only way to flip the games is one at a time. Which means you’re better served just trashing the Study and getting the import orientation right the second time.

With Scid vs PC it’s possible to download different analysis engines. It’s also possible to download your own games from your chess website of choice. I haven’t done it yet but you can search the database for specific positions, or specific pawn structures, or search by the material that each side has remaining.

That’s not close to everything you can do with Scid vs PC, I’d recommend checking it out. I think it’s a really nice tool that when combined with the Lichess Studies makes viewing selected games on the go very convenient. I’ve also used the Scid vs PC and Lichess Study combo to put games that are in a paperback “Opening” book into a Lichess study, so I can follow along on my phone or laptop rather than getting a board out and moving pieces around.

Again, highly recommended and not nearly as scary as it all sounds.