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Week 7 Plan

My goal this week was to work on my openings. I know this is a controversial topic. How much time makes sense to work on openings? I don’t want to memorize 100s of lines of theory, but I also think it is important to have a simple opening repertoire that helps me get through the opening and, ideally, gives me some idea of the plans in the middle game.

My Openings

Over the past few years I’ve jumped around to a lot of different openings.

White:

  • Italian - I never really took time to understand this

  • London - I did OK with this, but got deterred by the negative reputation

  • Scotch - This was good, I liked this. So why did I start doing something different? (I don’t have an answer for that)

  • Reti (1. Nf3)

  • Jobava London - This is what I mostly play now, which I am liking

Black:

  • Najdorf - Ha! As a beginner I didn’t realize that this was way too heavy for me

  • Caro Kann - Decent, but I never took the time to understand the plans

  • French / Dutch - ChessMood’s suggestion

  • King’s Indian Defense

  • Accelerated Dragon

  • French / QGD - This is what I’m trying to learn

How I Learn an Opening

Since I’ve switched a number of times, I started to find a system that works for me. Here is the basic overview:

  • Find a course by a good author on Chessable logseq.order-list-type:: number

  • Use Chessbook to build the repertoire. Use the suggestions from Chessable. logseq.order-list-type:: number

  • Study using Chessbook logseq.order-list-type:: number

I like Chessbook instead of Chessable because you can tune it to your level and how deep you want to go. But knowing what moves to make and plans comes from Chessable. You can read more about why I like Chessbook here: Chessbook: A Game-Changer for Adult Chess Improvers.

Tactics

I stopped doing tactics on Chessable. I spent a year doing almost all my tactics on Chessable, with around 13k puzzles done over about 400 days. This certainly helped, but now I’m ready for something better.

I re-started using the book Chess Tactics for Champions by Susan Polgar. I set a timer and see how many puzzles I can get through. I write them down in the book and then at the end I check my answers. I think this is a much better way for me to study tactics.

Playing

I played a few games using my new ChessUp 2 board connected to Chess.com. This is great for me. I like playing with actual pieces, but I can now do it without the distraction of having a phone/computer.

My Weekly Plan

My plan this week was to review a new black opening based on GM Jon Ludvig Hammer’s My First Opening Repertoire for Black. I picked this because I wanted to get back to basics and have an opening that I could use to have a solid start and get me into the middle game at least close to equal. In this you pretty much always play 1…e6, regardless of what white plays.

I got a start on this, but did not get as far as I intended. More on this below.

My Chess Improvement Score

Read about Noël Studer’s scoring system here

My score this week was: 1.4

What * How * Time = 0.8 * 0.5 * 3.4 = 1.4

The biggest negative impact was around “How” and “Focus”. I played some games where I was totally not focused so I marked myself down for that. Also, because I was not feeling very motivated (see below), my time was low, about 30 minutes per day. Usually I feel that I can do more than that.

This is the first week I’m trying out the score. I built myself a calculator so I can evaluate each week. We will see how it goes.

Reflections

I had a good plan this week to read about the plans for my new black opening. However, I only did about half of what I planned. I had a hard time being motivated for chess this week. It was just one of those weeks. I will try to finish my plan next week.

Next Week

I will continue to work on learning the plans for my black opening. I had planned to spend 3 weeks on openings, so that is what I will keep doing for now.