The title of this blog should be a clue that I know how to have a good time. I've been known to go out 5-7 days a week. The week before the WSO, still going out every night, I would study 2-3 hours every day to be prepared, it paid off. This has me wondering what would happen if I kept up the habit for a month. Or a year. I hear from a lot of people that they don't have time to study. That's bullshit. When you get to a certain level it becomes very hard to actually study. What do I learn next? Should I learn new openings? Should I study a particular player's games? And as you look into these things it's difficult to assess how much you are actually helping your game. Certainly spending 2 hours a day (a mere 15 hours a week) on chess is worthless if you don't feel like you're getting anything out of it. But consider this, spending any time, at a board, with a titled player's commentary, helps your chess. There is no way that you are going to gain insight on a position from playing a blitz game online in that position, when you feel that you don't understand a position, find a much stronger player that has played that position and try to understand his explanation of it. If you're serious about being a competitive chess player, then you should spend at least 10 hours a week on your chess. I am guilty of putting off studying for days on end as I'm sure everyone else is, but when I do sit down to work, I work hard. If chess is simply a hobby and you want to put your time elsewhere, that's great too, but don't complain about not having time to study. There is always time.

Now for those of you who don't know how to study I have been in your shoes. Back when I was in C and even in my early days in B I had no idea what these titled players were talking about. The variations they give end and you have no idea how they came up with the evalution they did or why they give the advantage to one side. Because they give one side a slight advantage you start to try to find concrete variations that will win for that side and there's nothing there. Then you discard the evaluation as premature and "grandmaster voodoo" and you start to lose hope that you will ever be able to look at a similar position and arrive at a similar conclusion. DO NOT LOSE HOPE! It is at times like this that you are struggling with a new concept that you have not come across on a chess board before. It is easy to apply concepts that you have already learned and integrated to a position. But to apply a concept that stronger players have learned is not easy, it takes a good author to get this concept across in a clear way. For players in the middle classes I would look to authors like Silman, Soltis, VUKOVIC, Chernev, Fine, and maybe Nimzo or Capablanca. You'll notice that all of these authors with the exception of Silman and Soltis (who tend to cater to a lower rated crowd) all wrote over 40 years ago. The theory that we all take for granted today has been built steadily beginning with Steinitz over 100 years ago. Older games are simpler, a book like Capablanca's Best Chess Endings will teach you how Capablanca dominated his generation (essentially by exchanging pieces on squares that were favorable to him). Since Capablanca everyone realizes the importance of using discretion when exchanging so this is just one thing that you have to learn if you are going to compete. One series that I really enjoy is Kasparov's My Great Predecessors. By going through each time period individually and slowly moving forward you see how the openings developed and why certain variations are preferred over others as well as how middlegame theory and technique developed and how players in different time periods approached similar positions. This will help you understand why in 2007 we can rule out so many positions as bad. I will provide more book recommendations in the future but if you want some ask me in the comments and I will be more than happy to talk with you about it (I have a very extensive library also if anyone in Reno wants to borrow something).

But I started this post to detail what I am reading now and what I want to commit to until my next tournament (which may end up being the Far West Open, unfortunately). So here it is.

As the title implies, I want to spend 2-3 hours a day, or 15-20 hours a week. When I was at school I used to just wake up Saturday and read for 5-6 hours (assuming my head felt alright :) ). That is a habit I have long since forgotten but one that I would like to start bringing back. 5-6 hours really gives you a chance to get in depth with an opening or get a good chunk out of a book, or both.

As far as the focus of my studies, for this week I want to work on Chess Strategy in Action by John Watson. For those of you unfamiliar with Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy, his first book that was not focused on openings, I suggest that if you are over 1700 you buy it right now. Seriously, forget this post, buy that book and come back to read this later. This is the single best book on chess I have ever read, period. I was in a deep slump coming off of my star summer in 2005 and I really didn't know how to progress and I read that book and broke out of it completely. This book will help you focus on what's important on the chess board. This is also the book that instilled in me a love of studying, it hasn't felt like a chore since. Then there's this other book, Chess Strategy in Action, a much, much more difficult text. Targeted at players of at least 2000 strength the issues seemed trivial to me when I first attempted to read it after SOMCS but when I picked it up to prepare for the Western States I realized that I am now ready to embark on this text. But I rarely read only one book at a time, also this week is Anatoly Karpov Engame Virtuoso, which features Karpov's refined endgame skill in great detail (I would recommend this if you are 1800+); and probably some Spassky from Kasparov's My Great Predecessors Volume III.

The bigger project is switching from e4 to d4, or rather learning d4 so that I can choose which of my opponent's openings I will face. I started to write about it in this post but I think that there will be another post to follow shortly in which I will detail how I built my healthy repertoire over the last 3 years.