Week 2 Plan

My original plan for this week was to continue work on the fundamentals. I focused on two different tools this week:

Endgame Drills

These are a series of 5 puzzles on a specific theme. The ones I did this week are:

These are good tools to drill these themes, though they were all pretty easy for me. I had done these drills before and feel like I know the concepts.

Lessons

I went through all the Mastering The Endgame lessons on Chess.com from Anna Rudolf. I found these very instructive, but were probably a bit advanced for what I was going for. When I was looking for lessons this one seemed the most interesting. She referenced some earlier endgame course, but I couldn’t figure out what that was.

Each lesson had about a 20-minute video that explained the topic and showed some example games.

I found myself trying to use these concepts in my games, which was a good learning experience, even if I didn’t fully do them correctly.

Playing

I played 4 focused rapid games (15|10) this week. I like that I’m breaking my bad habit of playing mindless blitz games. For each game I would play on Chess.com, then add the game with my analysis to a Lichess study.

I also am working on a log of my games where I highlight 1-2 things I need to work on each game. I still get to situations where I just “forget” to calculate and just make a move. I need to work on that and will be focusing on calculation in the coming weeks.

Tactics

I continued my daily tactics work. I spend 15-20 minutes a day on tactics on Chessable.

I also reviewed any open reviews from Silman’s Endgame Course (parts 1 and 2) on Chessable.

Reflections

When I started this year-long plan, I thought it would be this great resource and tool for other people. Now, after just 2 weeks, I’m already realizing that there is no perfect plan. I have an idea of what topics I want to study each week, and I am going to find things that are interesting to me in those areas. For example, for “basic endgames” I could spend months on this topic. Even with that knowledge, just having one topic to focus on for a week feels much better than what I had before!

Next Week

Next week I’m going to work more on tactics, with a few more challenging themes than Year of Study Week 1