What went well?

  • I started using Aimchess on a regular basis and I really like it. There are puzzles that are directly from my games, like the “retry mistakes” or the “360 trainier” puzzles. Each day there are a new set of puzzles/lessons specific for me, and I completed them all each day this week, for a total of 236 lessons. There is also a “warm up” feature that is 2 minutes that I tried a couple times but want to use before each game. It is too early to know if this is any improvement, but it is a good way to make sure I do a set amount of puzzles.
  • I got over 1600 In Puzzles on chess.com. This was after a bad week last week where I dropped close to 1300.
  • Slowly working on just a few variations in Chessable. This makes it much more manageable.

What could have gone better?

  • I was sick for a couple of days but still tried to play games, which led to losses. I should have spent the downtime on other activities that did not take so much concentration.
  • I lost a bunch of 10-minute games because I wasn’t focused. I was a little tilted trying to gain back some wins, but I should have just quit after the first few losses and moved on to a different chess activity.

What will I try next?

  • Get back into studying annotated games. I think I was putting too much pressure on each game, trying to take notes on all the great annotations and ideas. I am going to shift to more of a “quantiy over quality” approach.
  • I am going to limit the number of games I play this week because I am not taking my time or analyzing games very well when I play too much. I am going to go with what Aimchess recommends, which is 10 rapid games (I’ll do 10-minute games), 2 classical games (I’ll do 30-minute), and 4 blitz games (5-minute).
  • I am keeping track of how long I spend on all chess-related activities this week to see where I spend my time.