MY CYBER-CHESS TRAINING JOURNEY
EARLY TRAINING
In high school, my primary training consisted of playing the chess titans program on a laptop. I could only manage to beat level 6 on a windows 7 2.1 Ghz duo core computer. Level 7 was difficult to beat.
I would also play against the chessmaster program created by ubisoft for mobile devices.
Another program I recall playing is the Kasparov chess program. Later on in my final year of high school, I taught myself algebraic notation for the purpose of recording my games and learning from my mistakes. At this point I followed along with the very first world chess championship match with Steinitz against Zukertort.
I also followed the match of Deep Blue against Kasparov using a pocket chess set I bought from the local convenience store.
TACTICAL TRAINING
So far, I have managed to solve 3334 puzzles on chess.com with a puzzle rating of 3258 as of this writing.
On lichess I attempted to solve 1439 puzzles with a puzzle rating of 2467
I would also solve puzzles from books. I have solved well over 3000 of them. Some of the books I solved from include the "Complete Chess Workout" by Richard Palliser and "Chess Training Pocket Book" by Lev Albert. There is also a volume of chess puzzles written by a Russian author whose name I cannot recall.
Some examples of my training notebooks in which I solved some tactical problems:
ANTI-BLUNDER TRAINING
I noticed that in my more serious days of training, right after completing high school, blunders were rife. It was later in 2017 or 2018 that I decided to take steps to remedy this weakness. Consequently, I would begin with a warm-up of solving several tactical puzzles and then proceed to play a training game against a bot. My main chess.com bot was Naomi, who was rated 2200. I would also play the shredder program, which is available on the Google Play Store.
POSITIONAL TRAINING
This is the harder aspect of chess for me. I struggled with it. I have read several chess books here but could never apply the principles in practical play. Some books I read include:
- Play like a grandmaster by Kotov
- "How to reassess your chess by Silman" (both 3rd and 4th editions)
- Can you be a positional genius by Angus Dunnington
- Aaron Nimzovitch's "My System"
- Strategy and Planning by Dr. Max Euwe
- Think Like a grandmaster by Kotov
For the most part, most of the most rudimentary positional ideas, like putting your rook on an open file, came from watching chessnetwork's live blitz sessions. He would explain some ideas like exchanging a bishop for a knight in a closed central position, etc.
ANNOTATED GAMES COLLECTION
Annotated games collections were from the books:
- Masters of the chessboard by Reti (uses old descriptive notation)
- My 60 memorable games by Bobby Fischer (advanced but I went through it)
- Modern chess ideas by Richard Reti (also old notation)
- The complete chess course by Fred Reinfeld
Special mention of chessnetwork and John Barthamelow. I followed their annotated games. I also learned a lot by watching Banter blitz sessions by Peter Svidler.
Other media influences:
ENDGAME TRAINING
For my endgame education, I began by reading Capablanca's book called "Chess Fundamentals," which taught me basic king and pawn endgames. I also watched a tape by World Champion Anatoly Karpov and Roman Dzindzichashvili on Youtube.
Some books on endgames that I perused:
- Silman's Endgame course (very fine book!)
- Capablanca's "Chess Fundamentals"
- "100 endgames you must know" by Jesus de la Villa (the best book out there)
- "The complete chess course" by Fred Reinfeld also had some endgames
OPENINGS
How did I learn openings? Well I did so from online videos. Mainly by watching videos on youtube. For example, I learned the queen's gambit by watching a video by Roman Dzinzi
Learning from books is really hard and tedious. Best is to store variations on the ChessBase software. It makes it easier to track and store variations. It also simplifies the review process.