2025 Training / Study Plan

Chess is a complex game - What is your training / study plan and how to find it?

Happy New Year my dear readers. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and start to 2025. I know it has been a little bit since I have been in front of you all. I will be making some changes to be posting more here about my journey and various chess topics as it seems it’s highly recommended. You all really enjoying it. I want to write more in 2025 to discuss all sorts of various topics within the chess arena. What better way than to put together a training plan and template for what I will be working on this year. If you have an idea for a topic you’d like to read about leave me a comment and I will add it to the list.

The Chesslobster aka

Evan Seghers

told me in a book he read (Tiger’s Chaos Theory) we should work on one claw. This claw for me being TACTICS! Yes the old saying goes “Chess is 99% Tactics”. Some may agree or disagree with this but ask yourself this question… How am I losing my games? Whether they be blitz, rapid or classical how are YOU losing your games? It can be difficult to answer this question for many especially if you are new to the game. Losing can be perceived as failure; however in chess, it is absolute you must learn from your games. Namely your losses which offer the greatest amount of information to learn from. If you do not you are destined to repeat mistakes and keep losing games. Then plateau which many have found themselves on.

For those having trouble finding out the “how” of why you are losing your games I have two recomendations. Number one is find a coach or a stonger player to help go over your games, such as in a postmortem (these are SO valuable), allow them to show you what you are missing in your games whether it be postional, strategical, tactical, in openings (highly doubeful) or endgames. And here is the most important part of this step… LISTEN! It is paramount you listen to their advice. Be curious and open. I have yet to meet a chess player who will steer you in the wrong direction or have ill intentions for people working at improving their game. Number two is you can do it yourself by learning how. I learned how by reading the wonderful book by Axel Smith called Pump Up Your Rating. I wrote a post about it in 2024 found here. Highly recommended for any “Adult Improver”. I have extreme disdain for this moniker that has been bestowed upon us. For me - at least what I see on Chess Twitter / Bluesky online - people seem to use it as an excuse as to not improve. Unfortunately I do not have a better title for us other than simply Improvers. If this is you - feel attacked. I want you to stop making excuses. My goal is for everyone to learn and improve. I digress, in the book Axel talks about how to find your mistakes plus much more worth reading. He puts together a wonderful list in chapter 5 for players to use and classify your mistakes. I tell you when you see all of them in a single pane of glass like I show below it’s jarring as to where your main issues are. Here are my 12 classical game losses in 2024 based on category.

You can see where my issues are. All over the place yes I know, however this is valuable information to have at your fingertips. Without it you are wandering in the dark forest without a torch to light your way. Out of 12 games I lost in 2024 you can see I have many issues with Tactics, Openings, Misevaluation (over evaluating my position - one of the seven deadly chess sins), Thinking Model, and Attitude. With this knowledge you can fix the issues. You can see in some cases I have over 12 listed which indicates such things happened more than once per game. It is recommended to solve the biggest issues first. For me it was Attitude, Tactics, and Thought Process. So with this information we can setup a study plan to work on that claw and sharpen it so it is no longer a thorn in our side. I hope this helps get you all to a point where you can start to identify your own mistakes. Now for MY study plan.

2025 Study Plan

Rapid Chess Improvement (RCI - 7 Circles / Woodpecker Method) - Tactics Time 1-2
Swaping Courses out as needed - Sticking to only easier puzzle courses. TBD. If you have suggestions for the easiest tactics courses you are all working on I would love to hear about them.
Puzzle Storm - A LOT. Quick tactics are a must for me.

Chessable Courses
Tactics Time 1-2 - more TBD
Art of Attack
Mastering Chess Strategy

Books
Simple Chess - Reading a second time with more diligence - going over all games
Mastering Chess Strategy
Chess: 5335 Problems, Combinations and Games
Rewire Your Chess Brain
Steinitz: Move by Move
Nunn’s Complete Chess Course

Finsh all Mate in 1s, M2s and M3s in Chess: 5335
Start / Finish Rewire Your Chess Brain
Finish / Mature Art of Attack
Reread Simple Chess Primer for MCS
Make a HUGE dent into MCS book and course
Learn History of Steinitz and Lasker with presentation on my channel

No Changing Openings PERIOD!
Keep up with Chessable Reviews when possible outside of tactics (on a personal schedule)
Game Analysis and Annotation - also presented on my channel
Reps - Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, Classical and Correspondence
Add all blunders / mistakes into personal chessable course

WHOA! Whoawhoaweewah as Borat would claim. I have accounted for my main issues in my chess game with this plan above. This plan is NOT for you. You will most certainly have different areas that need attention than mine however this does not mean you cannot use it as a templete to begin. That does look like a lot but, that’s for the entire year. I will work best not to deviate from this plan. I am working on the Tactical claw of my issues so I am going to sharpen that claw until it’s Razor Sharp. Then through out the year I will continue to analyze my games and catagorize my mistakes as I have done in the past to help find a new claw to work on in 2026. Some of you keen observers might look at this and say “Hey, what about your thought process and attitude?” Well for that I have already corrected, at least for the attitude part anyways. In the back half of the year I fixed my mindset by reading 7 Deadly Chess Sins and Chess For Zebras by Rowson. I also have other methods of getting my mindset back on track as well that are not related to chess. I am happy to share them with others privately if you would be interested. Thought process I am actively and currently working through as well. That will be an ongoing process throughtout everyone’s chess journey. It is not handled in a vacuum but on a regular basis and it evolves as you do as a player as one jumps up the ELO ladder.

There is an endless supply of chess content and material out there to consume. It is extremely difficult to find what will work best for you as a player and improver. Did you notice there were no openings on my study plan? Why? I expect many of you are asking. My openings are top notch for my level. They are far above my peers and I need to get my other areas of my game up to that level now. It is quite typical for me not to have issues in the openings and come out usually at least equal by usually better. My list above does show out of 10 games I had some issue in the opening - they are mainly about understanding and knowing the proper plans overall which I did not know but still knew more than my opponent. Middlegame is where my game was falling apart namely do to some simple tactics or missing opponents simple tactics. So I created this plan to correct that.

Some of you have most certainly heard we are only as good as the weakest part of our game. I beleive this is true for many of us. Also in addition to that I think the weakest part of your game holds back the stronger parts of your game. I have experienced this in the last month. I can tell now that the tactical arm of my game is becoming stronger my other areas are also improving though I am not working on them. Interesting concept to explore for sure.

Now some of you already know I have been working on this plan already for quite some time and what I can say is my normal daily workload is the following: RCI (wherever I am at in my 7 Circles cycles - currently at the time of this posting it’s Circle 4 which is x240 a day of Tactics Time 1-2), usually 2-10 Puzzle Storm runs trying to reach new all time highs (currently 35 in 3min) and playing blitz, rapid or bullet games with light analysis. I do this every day. What I can say and what others have already noticed over the last month is my game has become a lot more crisp and clean. I am not missing basic tactics or even intermediate level theats. Another wonderful side effect of this study plan is I am now seeing tactics in advance and working to set them up for my opponents to deal with moves ahead of time. The highest level of improvement I have seen is being able to quickly see what plans my opponent wants to accomplish, I then can work to stop those and create my own threats. I look forward to five or six months from now when the Chess Lag Time catches up to me. For those uninitiated please check out that artical I wrote last year. Main overview is it takes time for your brain to organize and comit the new information to working memory. An interesting concept I am sure neurologiests could study in chess players. What I think many improvers fail to realize is we have to improve our skill, not just our knowledge. Adults are fantastic at aquiring more knowledge which is an asset to the improver however; knowledge in chess is not power, skill is! As

Evan Seghers

coined it to me recently - Lifting Chess Weights. How do we get strong? We lift weights. Improvers have to work to convert that knowledge into skill and for that it requires play and study work. Aquiring more knowledge is futile if one cannot turn it into practical skill.