I managed to stick to my plan during the whole week.

Tactics

Every day I was solving tactics for at least one hour. Previously, I used to do only standard mode medium tactics on Chesstempo. This week I decided not to limit myself anymore – partly because of it getting boring, and partly because my standard Chesstempo rating increased, resulting in getting harder tactics than I would like to solve on a daily basis.

Nonetheless, I sticked to Chesstempo for the better part of the week, mixing standard and blitz tactics. I also solved some custom sets (easy problems with a single motive for pattern recognition).

Books

I’ve never ever read a chess book before, so it was something completely new to me. This week, I spent at least one hour each day studying them.

Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move

I started with Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move. I studied a few games from it, but got discouraged rather quickly.

Firstly, most of the games start with 1. e4. As it’s not my favorite opening, and I actually never play it (yeah, this is probably a huge mistake, because every beginner should learn it), the early parts of discussed games weren’t too interesting to me.

Secondly, this book is from 1950s and many described varations are misevaluated. I know I wouldn’t be that smart without chess engine running, and also you could argue that it’s more about chess ideas, than the precise sequences of moves, but it still made me less enthusiastic about this book.

Jeremy Silman’s The Amateur’s Mind

My second choice was Jeremy Silman’s The Amateur’s Mind. Right now I’m on page 46 and I’m still not sure whether it’s suitable for my level of play. We’ll see – at least it made much better impression than the book described earlier.

Games and analysis

I played at least one game of 30+0 every day, trying to analyze it afterwards. I’m not too happy with the way they went – I often lacked deep thinking, blitzed out moves, or got bored later in a game. I’m not sure how to improve this element, though.

Rating summary

Playing

• lichess blitz: 1680
• lichess rapid: 1751
• lichess classical: 1713

Training

• lichess tactics: 2008
• Chesstempo standard tactics: 1650
• Chesstempo blitz tactics: 1650