David's Chess Journey - Installment 47

Week 1 Training Plan

My Week 1 study schedule is as follows:

Lots of playing and tactics this week, which is great. I ended my playing fast this past Sunday and it was nice to get back to playing after taking 8 days off. I feel it was a good reset and helped me approach playing with more intentionality. That said, my play hasn't magically improved and the games still leave a lot to be desired. But, I believe improvement is ahead.

A Significant Change in Tactical Training

After some extremely helpful content about how to learn and study in general, Next Level Training first handles tactics. While the approach is helpful on many fronts, the most helpful aspect for me was his guidance to write down the moves before you make a move and really be at 110% focus - even if you are doing the tactics online. This is a perfect remedy to my tendency to just guess a move. If you have to work out the problem to the end before you touch a piece, the effort level goes up significantly and the guessing is left behind.

A second very helpful point was to allocate a third of the time that you do tactics to evaluating the mistakes that are made in that tactics session. I never thought to do that. I applied that guidance to my first Aimchess Daily Workout after working through that section of the class and it significantly changed the way that session went. The session took much longer and I realized some insights that I had not been able to previous obtain.

There were 15 problems in the daily workout. I got 11 correct and missed 4. Two of the misses were because I failed to recognize a defensive resource and two of the misses were because I simply miscalculated. So, now I can keep a tally from session to session to track the type of mistakes that I'm making and then let that guide what I work on from session to session. I've started to track mistakes in a mistakes tracker to trace themes. So far, missing resources and calculation errors are dominating, which is not a surprise.

Bottom line, the training was much more difficult, but much more productive. It really feels like things are starting to work in the right direction! A long road ahead for sure, but early signs of positive change.

Reflections on The First Lesson

My first lesson with Noël was very helpful. The title of the lesson was "The Story of the Game." He took 9 games where I lost (pretty easy to find losses these days!) and we worked through them together. It was incredibly insightful. One of the key attributes I've found in chess (and in many areas) if you want to grow is to be able to look at your mistakes in all of their horror and objectively own it and think about what led you to that decision and how you can avoid going there again.

When walking through the games, we would stop at key points and ask four questions:

• What is the material balance?
• What is the main idea for each side?
• Are there any threats?
• Based on the answers, what are the logical moves, continuations and plans?

It is amazing the delta between what I see and what Noël sees. I struggle to find one or two moves and he rattles off 5 or 6 without giving much thought. Truly amazes me, but also shows me how much growth is possible in this game.

All in all, a great first lesson and first week. My entire view of chess and training has changed in a week and I think that is a good sign. When looking at how I spent time on chess before working with Noël I've realized that I was only training for about 4-5 hours per week while I was spending 20-30 hours with chess. The biggest cause of that reduction was playing without analyzing. Again, my previous practice of playing mindlessly.

A lot of growth to go, but definitely a new chapter of the journey!

Until the next installment!