Never been a great blogger, and will never be, but I like the idea of sharing some of my training plans and progress with the community, so I’ll give it a try!
Lately I decided that, at my level, tactics is probably the most important thing I should work on, if I want to maximize my return for the time (which unfortunately is not as much as I wished). After having looked around a lot, and following the recommendation of my coach, I have started using Chessimo (www.chessimo.com). The idea of the tool is to teach you “by doing”: you have several modules, which cover tactics, strategy, endings and openings. You start with the tactics modules (there are 6 of 51 units each, versus 3 for both strategy and endings) and the plan is to do one unit each day: in each unit, you have a combination of new problems, old problems from previous units, and a repetition of the problems from the current unit. Each position will be repeated, overall, 6 times, at which point it will be defined as “learnt”.
For the moment I am on unit 11: each unit now contains 135 problems (up from the 60 of the first units), and so far I am using a good hour to go through them. I am also regularly doing rated tactics, so to see if there is any progress.
Ultimately, I am interested in seeing if what I am doing is helping me in becoming a better tactician (which should be reflected in the graph below), and more importantly if this is reflected in my games, which of course is the ultimate target!
