I went on vacation recently, which disrupted my chess playing and chess study routines. But it also gave me a chance to reflect on my chess journey to date. I’ve been studying chess seriously for about six or seven months, taking group classes and private lessons. I analyze all the games I play with a chess engine and I also study tactics. But is my self-developed training program rigorous enough? Am I improving? Because chess has rating systems by which players can measure their progress, I thought it would be easy to tell how I was doing. But getting a rating, especially your first one, can be difficult. In the Before Times, people normally got a rating by participating in official in-person chess tournaments. These opportunities are beginning to come back, but during Covid most players have had to rely on lichess and chess.com for their ratings. For reasons too complicated to go into, my rating on lichess is still classified as “provisional,” and I don’t trust my chess.com rating because I have only played 23 games there.
Because of these uncertainties about my chess progress, I decided to add another element to the mix. It is the new training program offered by Chess DoJo, “a self-described hub for chess players, improvers, and coaches” founded by three distinguished chess sensei (their word, but I like it). I have just begun to explore the training program, but its content and organization seem very promising. The program is customized by rating band, starting with 0-400, 400-600, 600-800, 800-1000, and then going up 100 rating points at a time all the way to 2400+. You get access to the contents of all of the training programs when you subscribe, although you have to choose one in which to be an active participant at any given time (that group becomes your cohort). The videos they are posting on YouTube describing each rating band are very informative; I watched How to Make 400 Using the Chess Dojo Training Program and was hooked.
After I subscribed and chose the 0-400 band, I was given access to the “Training Program Scorecard” spreadsheet, which lists the various chess activities that the sensei have determined will help you to move up to the next rating category. You check off the activities as you complete them, providing some accountability. The required activities include the kinds of things I had been doing (and more), but they are more specific and quantified. For example, in the case of tactics training, the spreadsheet says, do the first 50 exercises on tactic X in book Y, which is a refreshing change from my floundering from book to book trying to determine which exercises were appropriate for me.
The real meat of the program is, as it should be, playing games. When it comes to playing, Chess Dojo is also serious about time controls. For the 0-400 level, they insist on thirty minutes per side, which is quite a lot in today’s online chess world, where time controls of five minutes or fewer per side are the norm. They require longer time controls as your rating increases, which makes sense, because the more you know, the more possible positions you will be able to visualize, and you need time to do that. Another helpful function of the scorecard is that members of the cohort list their time zones and when they are available to play. Thus you can find opponents around your skill level who are seeking to play games with the same time controls.
But you don’t just play the games, you play and then annotate them. Annotate? I had heard of analyzing your own games using a chess engine, but not of annotating them on your own. In chess study, we use collections of annotated games, but these are games played by masters. I have begun learning to annotate my own games, and this practice is a revelation. I want to give it its due, and this is getting long, so I will discuss it another time.
Recommendation of the Week: The Candidates Tournament is under way, with eight players competing to determine who will be the challenger for the World Chess Championship 2023. There are many reports and recaps available, but my favorites are those by Matt Jensen of Chess Goals. His explanations are concise yet thoughtful in terms of explaining obscure chess terms (today it was the isolated queen pawn, or “IQP”). In addition to recapping that day’s play, Matt uses his background as a statistician to set odds for each competitor, so you always know how things stand.
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