| Ken Collins |
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| By Joel Benjamin | |
| July 20, 2006 | |
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Dear GM Joel,
I'd like advice on how to arrange my study time. I'm an adult class C player, and I've been working on tactics exclusively for the last year. I'm starting to beat class B players, so the effort has paid off, and now I'm looking to improve other parts of my game. What approach do you recommend to balancing study of the opening, strategy, tactics, the endgame, and game collections? How can I concentrate on one facet of the game without neglecting the others? Also, I find that, every time I lose, it highlights a different area of weakness in my game, and I'm tempted to switch my focus. How long do you recommend concentrating on a particular approach to the game, and how did you integrate studying into your play when you were learning? I work full-time, and I'm raising a family, so I need to make every minute count. Currently, I devote about an hour a day to study, and I'm playing one 30/90, SD 60 game each week. Thanks, Ken Collins Openings: Don't try to learn everything! Just get a few books in openings that you will get a lot (one defense to 1.e4, one defense to 1.d4, and a few books from White's point of view) and an openings reference like Modern Chess Openings (MCO) or Nunn's Chess Openings (NCO). Choose books that favor explanation over heavy analysis. Anyone under master level can easily get swamped in a forest of variations. Game Collections: You can study games of a player you admire or one known for a certain style, e.g. Alekhine or Tal if you need tactical work, Petrosian or Karpov to appreciate positional play. Instructional collections can be great, too. The Mammoth Book of the World's Great Games is especially good value. Further down the road, Nunn's Understanding Chess Move by Move will be useful. [Chernev's classic Logical Chess Move by Move, though quite dated, works pretty well up to about 1300] Endgames: Go through a general endgame guide with a lot of instruction, examples, and test positions. Karsten Muller's Fundamental Chess Endgames is a particularly good one. Strategy: Peruse catalogues and bookstores for titles of interest to you. For instance, if you are weak in defense, Mikhail Marin's Secrets of Chess Defense will help, or Angus Dunnington's Blunders and How to Avoid Them if you let good positions go suddenly and horribly wrong! You should delve into books by Jeremy Silman (e.g. How to Reassess Your Chess). Tactics: It's always good to practice tactics; I suspect you've been through a lot of these books. You want to work your way up to more complex challenges, like positions where the theme you need is not specified, or ones requiring multiple themes (such as forks, pins, discovered attacks). If you have a regular schedule, I would say pick a topic for a week (gives you enough time to tackle a subject) and then rotate (so nothing gets neglected for too long). Obviously, the spectrum of chess is so vast that you will be pressed to limit your focus. At your level you will make mistakes in all facets of the game from time to time. Figure out where you are having the most problems, and devote more resources there. But don't neglect any aspect of chess for too long. I don't know how much you could apply my personal experience because I developed my game much younger! I took private lessons from age nine to fifteen, but I was never a systematic studier. I did have a lot of books, so I must have learned from them. My great strength was (and to some degree still is) an ability to absorb information from my environment at tournaments. I played a lot, and learned more at tournaments than any other time.
Joel Benjamin
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