Studying the right material and the right way

I just want to share some experience I had yesterday regarding my chess study in attempt to improve my rating (Currently 1600). Maybe this can inspire others with similar improvement problems.

Disclaimer: Most of you might know this already and this topic might seem silly!

I study all kinds of books. Openings, middlegame etc. Reading books like Reassess Your Chess. When I read those books the explaination makes sence why the N belongs to the created outpost etc. When I then play OTB I am not able to use much of the theory I have read about.

Yesterday I decided to change priority and focus a lot more on annotating. In my library of about 80 chessbooks I looked for annotated games of a player closest to my style and found the game in chessbase.

PROLOGUE:

I study many annotated games. Well at least I thought so! Reading through the moves and look at the ideas that the author points out. After reading study recommendations from Dvoretsky and the "Studying Chess Made Simple", I tried the following new approach.

STEP I:
I put the game in Chessbase - training mode and played through the game trying to guess the next move and not to look at the actual moves. When I had different candidate moves, these were put in as variations. After playing through the game, I looked at my candidates with computer running to see the mistakes or if my candidates were playable.

STEP II:
Next I played fast through the game again to repeat the development of the position.

STEP III:
Then I took my annotated book and looked at the authors explainations and variations and used computer or played new variations if I missed some explainations and wanted to why an obious move could not be played.

STEP IV:
Now I made some conclusions about the game and used the recommendations of eg. Dvoretsky to make a positional sketch. You find one or more positions in the game and save only the position and maybe the different possible variations in the position. Remove the previous moves. This was saved into my positional sketch database for later repetition.

CONCLUSION:
This was the first time I did so much work on one game. Took me about 2 hours and only 3 pages in one book!

I think I learned more of this single game than I did reading 50 pages of Reassess Your Chess or similar books. (Silman: I like Reassess Your Chess a lot )

When I did this study I came very close to the way I think when I play OTB and it surprised me to see how I explored my own weaknesses by looking at a GM game.

In my case I saw how weak my positional tactics/visualisations actually are! How I get lazy OTB when I have to calculate difficult positions in the middlegame and start playing "hope chess".

I learned a lot about the ideas in the games, but even more about my own chess!

That was interesting, thanks.

From which book did you take your study games?

I currently study Kramnik and use the games with him in the book "The art of planning in Chess" and the next is "Giants of Chess Strategy". Both books that I think suits my level at the moment.

I thought of that same method:

Doing puzzles is good, but even better is doing puzzles from mistakes from your own games.

As for positional chess books, there are many books with examples and explanations, but none with problems to solve. I've really looked. I've read books with such good examples, but the closest I can come to puzzle solving is to cover up the explanation and try to solve the example myself aftering seeing it the first time. Once the explanantion is given, there is no practice to come after. We have to make our own. I bet we make many of the same mistakes repeatedly, so it is worth our time to make our own puzzles with computer help.

I could not find any book with this name.

But there is "Studying Chess Made Easy" by Soltis. Is it that you mean?

STEP I. How much time do take for your moves?

STEP II. I'm not so sure that checking the own moves immediately with a computer is so wise.  I think it's better to FIRST try understand why the variation (your own move) was not played, and THEN check with a computer.

I love the term 'hope chess' and I often find myself playing that way. But if you are like me, average club, then some positions are hopelessly complicated, infact many middle game positions just baffle me I do not know what to do so I just avoid making silly mistakes.

Easier said then done!

Sorry! My mistake. I ment "Studying Chess Made Easy".

I. Well it depends a lot on my time available and which part of the game I'm in. I still use to little time on each move which is similar to my OTB games were I use my time too bad. So from maybe 30 seconds to 5 minutes per move!

II. I agree that it might is a bad way to use the computer. I use the computer to see if my move is playable or a blunder or positional weakness. Another way could be to plot in my variations and look at them after step IV. Maybe evaluate my variations as step V now that I know more about the game plans and after that compare with computer.

There are of course a lot of ways to improve the steps to the individual person. My main point of this topic was to inspire players to try out this type of training. I think we are a lot of players that are using many hours of browsing through maybe 3-5 annotated games and think we learn enough from that and miss the gains that you can get from working with only one game for several hours.

(Sorry for my bad english. This was written just before bedtime )