What Should Your Daily Chess Routine Be Right Now?
One of the most commonly-asked questions I get is how to spend your time on chess, especially if you are currently not able to be playing over-the-board tournament games. In an itemized list, I will keep it simple. Assuming you do not have the full day for chess, I would recommend:
1. Warming up with tactics: starting the day with one or two cycles of Puzzle Rush on chess.com, which takes a total of about 10 minutes if you look up the puzzles you got wrong.
2. Playing high quality training games with a person you know or in online leagues.
3. Analyzing your games (30 minutes to an hour per day) with the questions in my book Applying Logic in Chess in the chapter on analyzing your own games.
4. Looking up openings you play or analyzing them and saving the results (30 minutes per day). This can be done in ChessBase with a purchased database, with the free online database on ChessBase, or with databases or opening tools on online servers like chess.com.
5. Following the high level games of the day from 2700chess.com or chessbomb.com. If you cannot find any games on there, chessgames.com can also highlight what the recent new tournaments are, with the games easy to click through right on any browser. Going through these games should only take around 15 minutes a day, but you may want to analyze some of the interesting positions from them for 15 to 20 minutes to understand them better. I made a video showing how I do this here: As seen here.
6. Studying from a high quality book or source for 30 to 60 minutes a day in an area that you think you uniquely can benefit from as temporary or long-term study. That can be anything from games collections, to endgames, to positional play books, to calculation exercises that are quite difficult, to any number of other things like chess improvement books.
That leaves us with 10 + 30 + 30 + 30 + 30 minutes = 2 hours and 10 minutes of high quality study outside of the time you spend playing. These should all be fun, motivating, enjoyable things that diversify your chess experience so that it isn't in any way boring so that you can do it 365 days a year without any problems or any excuses.
Let's see this in action. Today I will:
1. Do two 3 minute Puzzle Rush sections and look up the ones I got wrong.
2. Next I will analyze two of my older tournament games that I forgot to analyze seriously in the past. They were in a closed Sicilian structure that bothered me.
3. Then I will update my analysis in a King's Indian line that I believe gives Black good practical chances. I will be running Leela to check my analysis and help search for ideas as I do this.
4. I will follow the final game of the TCEC SuperFinal (on now) at tcec-chess.com and later find the games from the Magnus Carlsen Invitational on chessgames.com and play through the decisive games.
5. Last up, I will spend an hour going through Alekhine's Best Games.
In total, that's 2 hours and 40 minutes, which is a little bit more than I do on average because of my busy coaching schedule. I will do all of this right before coaching an International Master and a young 2000 player. I will look up the openings in the games I will go over with them and briefly check the games with Leela before I discuss them with them so I have spent some time thinking about the games before plunging into them in a lesson.
And for passive learning, which I also consider to be very important, especially when we are tired or mentally exhausted, tonight I will listen to a chess podcast and watch a couple of ten minute chess videos on YouTube. My third podcast episode of The Logical Chess Thinking podcast is on the interplay between static and dynamic elements in chess and is on Spotify and Anchor here (it is free of course, and for those who enjoy thinking about chess topics and breaking them down): https://anchor.fm/logicalchessthinking/episodes/Episode-3-Understanding-Static-Versus-Dynamic-eco9k8
I chose the Frozen character in the thumbnail to remind you that your chess improvement is not frozen right now. It is very much active and in motion. Let's get after it.
