Tips on how to study this lessons:
First of all it’s important to look at the theory. Those “important positions” are something like a handout for you to look at them and memorize them so you can immediatly recognize the necessary motif and method how to handle that position!
Content
Here i’ll write down my trainingprogress and my DWZ-Development.
All those things i’m posting here, will be postet also on my blog as a lecture for you to study! And thats important! Not just reading and learning, you have to study this material to really understand and use it.
August 2010
03.08.2010
Today i’ll dont make any training because of my birthday. I’ll practise tomorrow again and write down what exactly i did. 
Have a nice day!
05.08.2010
Today i started studying those material. Even i already knew it i studied the basics of pawn endings again.
Endgame: Pawn endgame – The square of the pawn
Tactics: 20 exercises – 19 right / 1 wrong
Opening: Sicilian Defense – Alapin variation – 2. … d5 black playing aggressively
Welcome
i would like to start this blog with a short introduction of what it is about and what it aims for. Just recently i’ve began to develop a training course for the clubplayer to reach a playing strength of ELO 2000. Soulds ridiculous isn’t it? But well, i’ve got a theory and want to test it during the next years. I invite you also to join this project and try to improve your strength. It will be more attractive if players reach that level by following this course.
How had all began? Well, on the biggest german chess forum i’ve asked how players above the 2000 mark actually practised to reach that level of play. There have been a lot of answers and differend views. The one side said, that learning openings is all and everything, the other side argumented, that practising tactics is the only reasonable method. After actually one week, i collected all those informations and got to a conclusion. I’ll start my own theory maybe a bit attached to what those players answered to my post, but actually developed by myself. And thats what this blog is for and aiming for. To present you a traning course to improve your playing strength of ~1600ELO up to 2000ELO. I will follow this project not only through my next club saison, but also about the next few years and write down my progress and development in ELO (or as it is in german: DWZ (german rating). So enjoy your stay and keep up the track.
Content:
1. Introduction
1.1 Studying scheme
1.2 Theory
2.0 Material
2.1 Books and DVD’s
2.2 Repertoire
3.0 Game analyze
3.1 Games of our Idol
3.2 Tournament Games (own and others)
1. Introduction
Well, i already gave a short introduction to what you can expect here. But there is still some information to be revealed. This blog will follow this theory:
To improve the playing strength, we have to learn how to play chess instead of learning variations and copy moves without putting some sort of thinking into it. A lot of players tend to play openings that require huge tones of theory and they learn a huge amount of theory just to win the game in the opening stage. But thats not what chess is about. Personally speaking, i think it’s about understanding the play, so that you get kind of a “fealing” for it and know how to play it. In this project i intend to reduce the need of opening study to a minimum and concentrate more on principles and learning to understand the game. Because of that, i created a “low theory”-repertoire to avoid the need to study openings for more than 2 hours the day. My aim is to focus on endgames first, followed up by regularly practise of tactics. Thats the two main points we should focus on. Behind the tactics, i set the positonal play and then at least the opening.
1.2. Studying scheme
Our intended studying scheme looks like that:
1. Endgame
2. Tactics
3. Positional play
4. Opening
A. Endgame
The reason i put the endgames before anything else is rather simply. I believe that accurat knowledge of endgame theory and technique is the base of improving your understanding of pieces and the other stages of the game. It’s because in an endgame, there are less pieces left on the board than in the opening or the middlegame and you learn how to play with less pieces and how important each on of them becomes. That may encourage you now to play moves or to trade pieces, you may need in an endgame (where they still could play a decisive role). Additionaly in an endgame, tactics plays a vital role because when there are less pieces left the options of your opponent becomes less broad and you can calculate variations far longer than in a middlegame where you have to look for a hidden discovered check or a zwischenzug that blows your position up. So in the endgame you have all you need to learn precisive calculation of variations.
B. Tactics
Tactics is far more important than the knowledge of positional play or opening theory. Why is that so. Well the following quote may bring some light into the dark room called a chess game.
“To win a game positionally you may need several moves but to lose a game due to tactics seldom needs more than 1 move.”
So you can imagine yourself how important tactics is. It does not matter if you are excellent at positional play if you hang your pieces permanently. You have to learn not to lose pieces and pawns and be sure you don’t miss any hidden tactics before you start studying the deep jungle of positional play and opening theory.
C. Positional play
Positional play means the subject of weaknesses, strong and bad pieces, open files piece activity and so on. This subject belongs to the most complicated of the whole games of chess. It’s that complicated that we have to study it deeply, maybe even for several weeks just to learn one chapter of it. But because this part of the game is so complex we have to be “save” in the endgame and tactics in order to prevent that my quote above becomes true. If we want to win a game positionaly we have to be sure not to lose the game because of tactics.
D. Opening
Finally we reached the beloved part of the game at clublevel. Opening theory seems to have a good and a bad influence on the clubplayer. A good one because it’s encourage a player to study this beautiful game but a bad one because he often forgets that there are still other stages of the game left. So here we will concentrate on plans first, before we continue with some master pieces and look for deep analysis.
1.3 Theory
Here are some rules of thumb you should never forget while using this training course.
2.0 Material
I’ve tried to select just a few material which we will need to study. Some of them are written in german so i’ll write the german title of it. But if i present it to you i’ll translate it, always considering the copyright!
2.1 Books and DVD’s
Books:
1. (Endgame) „Fit im Endspiel“ by Bernd Rosen
2. (Tactics) „Lehr- Übungs- und Testbuch der Schachkombinationen“ by Carl Colditz
3. (Positional play) „Mein System“ by Aaron Nimzowitsch
4. (Opening) „Starting Out:-Reihe“ by Everyman Chess
5. (Positional play) „Stellungsbeurteilung und Plan“ by Anatoly Karpov
6. (Endgame) „Schachendspiele in der Praxis“ by Karsten Müller
#Additional#
7. (Games collection) „Das Schachgenie Aljechin“
8. (Games collection) „Zürich Tournament 1953″
DVDs
1. (Endgame) „Schachendspiele“ by Karsten Müller
2. (Tactic) „Taktikmotive erkennen!“ by Martin Weteschnik
3. (Positional play) „Power-Play-“ by Daniel King
4. (Positional play) „The Power of-Reihe“ by Adrian Mikhalchishin
5. (Opening) „A World Champions Guide to the Petroff Defense“ by Rustam Kasimdzanov
2,2 Repertoire
Last but not least our repertoire we will use over the next few years!
1.e4
White:
Open defence: Scotch Four Knight
Sicilian defence: Alapin (2.c3)
French defence: Advanced variation
Caro-Kann Defence: Panov-Botvinnik-Attack
Petrov Defence: Nc3-Variante (5.Nc3)
Pirc Defence: 150-Attack
Alekhine Defence: Exchange variation
Center Counter: Nc3-Variation
//
Black:
against e4: Petrov defence
against d4: Queen’s Gambit Declined– modern Lasker Variation
against c4: (Queen’s Gambit Declined – 1.c4 e6/d5)
3.0 Game analyse
3.1 Games of our idol
3.2 Tournament games
