For Christmas I picked up the speed reading program Eye Q for my kids. It has exerices that are supposed to increase your vision, in paticular your peripheral vision. I've done the program a couple of times and recently my rating has taken a 150-200 rating jump at FICS blitz (10 0).

It might just be a coincidence, but we spend all this money on education, but how much money gets spent on developing our vision. It makes all the sense in the world to me, but I've never seen it discussed.

Any thoughts?

Happy New Year, everyone!

One of my goals for the new year is to move up to class C. Although I do have an official tournament rating, I think I am currently a class D player since my FICS rating is 1227, I can regularly beat people who play chess regularly but who do not know much theory, and I can draw with 1600s OTB.

I have been playing chess on and off since childhood, but I first got more serious about chess a couple years ago. Since then, I have been steadily improving my chess, raising my rating from 800 FICS when I first started to around 1200 FICS now.

Some areas of my game that I feel more comfortable with are the opening (I have a decent repertoire), the endgame (I can draw even when down on material and know how to work towards getting a favorable endgame), and positional play (I can identify weaknesses and attack combos decently).

However, I am relatively weak on tactics, not so much because I do not know the different tactics but more because it can be difficult for me to identify ways to tactically exploit a weakness in my opponent's position. I almost never put my pieces en prise now, but I occasionally lose material to tactics. Attacking play is also a bit weak, as I usually throw a lot of material on the right side of board (i.e. 1 N, 2 Bs, and the Q all attacking my opponent's kingside) but cannot actually gain any significant material or positional advantage from my attack.

What are some things that players should know before they can successfully advance to Class C? Are there any particular books that would be helpful for a player such as myself?

One final note is that my favorite playing styles are those of Karpov (solid, but not overly defensive) and Anand (more aggressive, but not as tactically wild as Tal). I have game collections of both players and have learned much from going over their games.

I’m new to the forum, but I figured I’d start one of these since a lot of people seem to have them. I’m a weak player, so there is plenty of room for improvement. My goals for 2010 follow:


Improve My Tactical Recognition: I still fall into way too many tactical traps. I’m in the middle of making tactics flash cards, a process which might take a month or so, and I’m hoping that those improve my basic tactical pattern recognition drastically if I work with them enough. I need to keep my pieces safe, and I think I can improve significantly if I’m doing that on a very consistent basis by the end of 2010. At the very least, I'd like to be making very few huge blunders (hanging pieces, not noticing that a piece is being attacked, etc.) any more by the end of this year.

Improve My Time Management: I’d really like to improve my time management in 2010. I play far too quickly in many on-line slow games and I think this greatly hinders my play, because not only do I not keep my pieces safe in many cases due to this, but I don’t consider all of my viable candidate moves. I’m confident that I’ll be able to improve this significantly in 2010 since the first time I ever played against a clock was two or three months ago. I’m still learning to gage how much time I need to use to use most of my time in my games.

Find Some people on the ICC who are willing to play slow games regularly: It can be difficult to find a game at slower than a 60/5 time limit on the ICC, and it’s very frustrating when someone accepts a longer game and then requests an abort or resigns when they realize that you want to take your time. I’d like to meet some people who are willing to play slow games of 90 minutes or more regularly, as I believe the longer you have to think about a position, the more instructive it is. Also, I’d like to find some people who are willing to post-mortem games on-line. I understand that that’s a big part of improvement, but it’s difficult to get anyone to do that, especially when you’re a weak player like me.

Improve My Endgame Knowledge and Technique: If I didn’t throw away won games, my ICC rating would probably be a couple hundred points higher than it is. I think that some of this will come with experience and the reviewing of my games, but there is doubtlessly some material that I can read, too, and I have a few endgame books, so maybe I’ll try to work through those.

Maybe Join the Local Chess Club or Play in Some OTB Tournaments: I’ve never played in an OTB Tournament, so I might want to play in my first at some point during 2010. At the very least I’d like to get the courage up to join the local chess club and play some OTB matches.

Perhaps try to analyze my own games before I feed them to the computer. I tend to go straight to the computer and I think I'd probably get more out of it if I tried to figure out where I went right and wrong first and perhaps annotated some of my own games and then saw whether the computer agrees with the moves I said were good/bad.

I think that I can improve several hundred points this year if I work hard and play a lot due to my low ICC rating and very limited experience playing serious chess. I think my two basic priorities are working hard on my tactical recognition (which includes the safety of my own pieces) and taking my time during my games. I think those are the two biggest obstacles between me and a better rating right now. I don't really want to set a specific number goal because I have no idea what it would be, but we'll see.

Enjoy chess (seriously)!

As I am lacking in time and commitment for serious improvement I have decided to set the bar very low. Passing the 1700 mark again would nice but this depends more on luck/form of the day in those few rated games I play.

On the eve of a new year, I think it's time to start a new thread for my goals for 2010. I did pretty well in 2009 advancing from 2158-> 2235 and even hit a high rating of 2249. I also feel like I got a lot better at endgames and had better results with black than I had in the past, though there is still room to improve.

1) Reach 2300 USCF: I'm definitely in striking distance here, but I think one of the reasons 2300 is so hard to reach is there are no floored 2300 players to pick on like there are for all rating classes below it. I scored 3 wins over 2300+ players last year and one draw against a 2600. To reach this I'll need to continue to build on that.

2) Reach 2300 FIDE: This will be even more challenging. I'm currently 2209, so I'm 91 points away. To have a chance here, I need to give myself enough opportunities. This means a certain focus in finding FIDE ratable events to play in, while also rising to the challenge of playing well in them. FIDE ratings are fluid, so with a lot of success I could jump quickly, but a bad tournament is also tough to recover from. I remember in the Chicago Open last year, I broke even in USCF rating, but lost 10 FIDE rating points, so this demands a higher quality of play to achieve.

3) Study openings actively and own my repertoire: I've been getting better at this, but I want to continue to advance. I have several opening books, but it's important to use them only as references and to formulate my own ideas about opening lines that fit my style as well as making my own assessments on positions. It's also important to be honest in my assessment of positions and not just like a position because it results from an opening I like to play. With white, I want to play openings that give me a good chance to fight for an advantage, while with black I want to play openings that result in dynamic play, and require white to play carefully and accurately to maintain an advantage.

4) Continue to Study Endgames: I'm getting better at endgames, but there is still much more to learn. I'd like to purchase 2 more endgames books and read through them in the upcoming year. I may even want to consider looking through Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual again, and especially spend some time trying to solve the tactical problems from it.

5) General Training: I want to continue to watch ICC games and analyze games I see on uschess.org etc. Beyond this, I'd like to look into Dvoretsky's Chess Training series or study strong books on positional play.

To recap 2009: I started the year rated 1540 USCF with a short term goal of breaking 1600, which I did within 5 weeks of the start of the year.

My long term goal was 1800 by September, and 1900 by the end of the year, or just 1800 by the end of the year if I wasn't there yet in September. But due to my career sucking, I ended up taking 4 months off from the game in July through November, so I never reached that goal. However, my last tournament just got rated, and I'm up to a new high of 1777, which is a 237 rating point improvement since the start of the year, so I've really got nothing to complain about.

Checking my tournament record, I played 64 slow tournament games in 2009, which is less than the 83 I played in 2008, but still pretty good. This is also the first year I've ever had a positive record - 28 wins, 25 losses, and 11 draws. Even when I gained 205 rating points in 2008, my success rate was only 46%. I guess that's what happens when you play a lot of higher rated opponents.

So the obvious short term goal now is just to break 1800, since I'm only 23 points away.

I'm thinking a good long term goal for the year is to get my rating up to the current year, thus the title of the thread. I'm shooting for a 2010 rating in the year 2010. That would be an increase of 233 from my current rating, which is actually 4 points less than my 237 rating point increase in 2009. But I realize that it gets harder to boost your rating the higher up you go, usually starting around the 1800's, so I do think it'll be just as tough a goal as the 300+ rating point increase goals that I've set for myself the last two years. Realistically, I'll probably be happy if I can boost my rating 100-150 points this year.

As for how to do it, that's actually pretty straightforward:

1. I have a little more opening reading I want to finish up in the next couple of weeks - Zuke Em, some Dutch lines for black, and I'm considering switching back to the French against e4, so that'll take a little refresher course. I just like the idea of an "e6 against everything" approach as black. :p

2. I need to keep up the tactics puzzles, 3. playing regularly, and 4. studying my own games.

5. After I'm done with the opening reading, most of my reading going forward will be Jeremy Silman books. I have Silman's Complete Endgame Course, The Amateur's Mind, and How to Reassess Your Chess. I've started reading all three at various times, but I've never finished any of them. Finishing reading all three of those in their entirety by mid-year seems like a good goal.

6. I also want to read Rudel's Moment of Zuke to help with the Colle repertoire for white. I haven't decided if that goes before or after the Silman stuff. Probably after I've read a couple of endgame chapters and decide I want a break to read something different before finishing the endgame book.

It seems odd, given how stressed out I was about breaking 1600 at the start of the year and end of last year, but I'm really not that concerned with improvement and ratings right now. In fact, I'm fairly certain my rating is going to have to go down before it can go up too much, as I focus on new things in my play.

But I'm doing chess reading as much for fun as improvement right now. I realize that reading Zuke Em cover to cover isn't the best way to improve my game quickly. I could have started playing that repertoire based on the first 3 chapters and just looked stuff up after that without reading the whole thing, thus freeing up time for tactics puzzles and endgame reading. But I wanted to read it cover to cover, so I am. And I'll be trying to finish that by the end of this weekend.

Silman's the type of writer that I can just sit and read his books, too. I think I've stopped in the middle in the past because I felt like there were other things I needed to study more urgently (tactics, specific openings, etc). My current more relaxed attitude might help me get through his books without worrying about such considerations.

So there it is. I know my study plan is missing master game study. For now, the opening study includes studying some complete games in those openings. I may throw in some master game study while reading the Silman books, but I'm not sure which. I just find it easier to focus on one book at a time, so going back and forth between Chernev's "Most Instructive Games" and Silman's books might be difficult for me.

--Fromper