The Plan

Needless to say, an ambitious goal needs a proper plan to have any chance of success. There is no getting around the fact I will need to work on all aspects of my game to get there, and need to have some measure of control to ensure I stay on track. With today's immensely rich resources on all manner of platforms, there is no shortage of tools to work on one's game, and I plan to make use of a wide variety of them.



My technical background, not just with ChessBase, but with software in general (I was a designer of Chess Assistant 6 and 7 back in the day), does mean I have a certain tendency to choose modern tools, and find ways to integrate them. These may change over time of course, but as of now, here is how I plan to proceed.

I have broken down the areas I need to work on quite simply as:

• openings, 
• tactics, 
• positional play, 
• endgame, 
• visualization, 
• practical play (i.e. playing games). 

Furthermore, I will have two tools to keep track and log my progress, one of which is this blog.

Openings

While many players tend to be very openings oriented, I must admit to having a nearly non-existent repertoire based on a helter-skelter mix of safe-ish (not always) lines that are less likely to lead me to be ambushed early on such as the French Exchange with white. The opening I probably know the best with any color is the Giuoco Piano, which I have been playing since long before it ever became fashionable with the elite. I'll need to organize this with ChessBase 14, but for the moment I will study the ChessBase videos by my colleague Alejandro Ramirez on the Sicilian Taimanov, and Erwin L'Ami's work on the Dutch Stonewall. I can't do it all at once, so one step at a time.

Tactics

This one is easier to choose, and I will be making extensive use of the Tactics app in the online ChessBase Premium suite. The choice was really between it and Chess Tempo, but Chess Tempo has always left me a strange impression, with solutions and lines that just don't feel normal. I hesitate to say they feel computerish, since I might seem biased, but really that is my feel every time I give it a go. The ChessBase app is quite cool, has nice problems that adapt to your results, thus become harder as you improve, and keeps good track of your progress with a rating. It isn't perfect, to be fair, and I have run into more than one dual solution (confirmed by the computer), but it is still a great tool.

A screenshot of the Tactics app in ChessBase Account

At the same time, I plan to work on Jacob Aagaard's book, Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation, the first in his superb series. I tend to believe that tactics and calculation are inseparable, and will consider this in the same category.

Positional Play

Here I looked at the many books on the topic. Nothing against the ChessBase family of products here, but i just feel I will be better served with a slower, more introspective study with a book. We can talk about stopping a video at anytime all we want, but in practice, unless you are specifically told to stop it to find a move, the presentation will go unhindered. With a book, even played on a computer screen or tablet, each move will go slower as we study the position, see the aspects pointed out by the author, and question other moves with greater scrutiny. My first book of choice is Mastering Chess Strategy by GM Johan Hellsten.

My first choice for positional play

I bought it on my Kindle (I'm a huge fan of ereaders, and you can see more about it and my favorite one in a review I wrote on the Kobo Aura One), and will study it in conjunction with a board in ChessBase 14 (or alternately on my tablet).

Endgame

I used to be embarrassed by my lack of even the most basic endgame knowledge, but working with ChessBase News has alleviated this after seeing many a strong grandmaster lack technique in a fundamental ending. The choice here is fairly clear I think: the modern masterpiece Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. For this I am using the Android app, Forward Chess, which I discovered recently and think is utterly fantastic.

In a nutshell, it is a normal ereader, meaning it reads ebooks like a Kindle or other, but with chess functionality embedded. Any chess move or chess diagram that is tapped on will open a board you can see the position. It allows you to test in exercises as well, hiding the solutions. What is more, they closed partnerships with various chess publishers such as Quality books, Russel Publishers, and New in Chess to name a few. I bought two books on it after trying it out: Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation mentioned above, and Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. It has other features I will bring up in a later post, but suffice it to say I was very favorably impressed.

A page of Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual shown in Forward Chess. Just tap on the diagram (in blue) and it opens the board to displaying it.

Visualization

It's clear that good visualization skills are essential to good results, and while all the above will certainly help, I also plan specific work aimed at developing it. To this end, I will use the famous series, My Great Predecessors by Garry Kasparov. About a year and a half ago, a good friend and writing mentor, Esdras do Nascimento, an award-winning author, passed away. He was also a chess aficionado, albeit not a strong player, and had the hardcover set of the books, which I inherited. I have read at least one account of a player (I cannot recall the names now) who studied it with great results. They had played the moves normally on a board, but would insistently follow the analysis to each move only in their mind's eye.


I like the idea, and it will be an excuse to not only enrich my chess culture by seeing the games of the giants of the past, but read the books. I will use my tablet together, and it will be my board and pieces. To those wondering why not on a normal board, it has to do with consistency. To maximize the development of my visualization skills, it would be unproductive to mix both the 3D and 2D representations. Almost all the above is on a 2D board, so this will be too.

Book one has about 150 games in it, and if the others follow suit, that means 750 games roughly in all. Were I to do one game per day that is about 2 years. I will have to see if I cannot do at least 2 games per day, but need to see how much time this takes. It may not seem like much, but some of the games contain very extensive notes.

Practical play

This is the trickiest part of the plan frankly. I live in Rio de Janeiro, not Moscow, and while chess tournaments certainly take place, they are somewhat infrequent and distant. Rio is a big city, and the nearest good club is the Clube de Xadrez Guanabara, which is about a half-hour away, while my actual club, the Tijuca Tênis Clube, is a good hour. In the latter's case it means two hours of transportation for each round, in addition to the game time. That said, I cannot get around the obvious need (and pleasure) for practice.

I plan to try to complement my live play with a tailored, dumbed down computer opponent, if that is doable. My concern is whether it will work, since in the past that mean it would play 5-6 moves like a god and then play some bonehead move even a rank beginner was unlikely to do. We all have our ups and downs, but they don't tend to look like that on average. I'll test the options and see what comes of it.

Tracking the progress

My general commitment right now is to invest an average 2 hours per day on this project. This is quite feasible, though it means just cutting down on other things such as a favorite TV program, or what-have-you. Whether or not that is enough only time will tell.

To make sure I do, and to also keep track of how much time is actually spent on each subject over the course of the week or month, I added a neat little program I found for the Android called Gleeo. It is a time tracking app that you start when you begin something and then stop, and it will keep track of the time for you, tallying cute graphs with easy-to-read results. It is free and the one I liked best after trying some of the alternatives. Some had far more functions, but they were burdensome to set up, and I could not see the need for what I want.

A sample of how Gleeo tracks time and reports

Finally, there is this blog. In a way, it is the ultimate record and guarantor of accountability. The plan is to post once a week, more if I feel the urge, but never less. Once a week it will also contain a screenshot of the Gleeo (or some other form of displaying its results).

Things may change over time, and certainly I am receptive to new ideas and works, but right now the above constitutes the overall plan.