How a Good Plan Can Solve your Chess Problems
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer, and today I want to share a great update with you. My courses have found a new home and they are now to be found at courses.nextlevelchess.blog. So they are very well integrated with my other written content. I'm very happy about that.

So if you want to check out my courses, you can just go to courses.nextlevelchess.blog and you'll find Next Level Training and Beginner Chess Mastery on there. And if you are an early listener, if you're listening to this before Sunday, the 24th of November, then it is a great time to actually check out these courses [00:01:00] because both of the courses have a discount.

Right now, you can get a hundred bucks off Next Level Training and you can get 30 bucks off Beginner Chess Mastery. So make sure to go to courses.nextlevelchess.blog to check them out, or just click the links in the description to this podcast and you'll get to these courses. Okay, now let's get to today's topic, which is planning a chess plan.

And I want to talk about how chess plans can help you do better chess training. And then I'll also talk about how you can actually create your first chess plan or how if you already have plans can maybe improve your plan to get better and better and thus improve your chess more consistently. Okay, so what I see with most people trying to improve their game is, well, they want to improve, they know that solving challenging positions, analyzing their games [00:02:00] are really the keys to chess improvement, but somehow nearly nobody ever does it consistently.

So many of my students, when they get to me, they,, say, yeah, I know I should analyze my games, but somehow I basically never do it. Or, well, I know I should solve difficult positions and I should do it the right way. I should do it without guesswork, should really sit down, think, write out my full solution and then check what the book or the online trainer is saying, but I rarely

do it. Instead, what these people do, they play too many games, they tilt they lose their hard earned rating points in one blitz session of 20 games, where they lose 100 points plus. And there are other people that actually don't play at all, which is also bad, because they're just so scared that they might lose rating.

So if you can relate to any of these things, today's episode will really be [00:03:00] ideal. for you. Now what happens often if you're not having a plan is that you're spending hours scrolling through, some different opening courses, or you might go scroll, social media, see what's up on X, see what's up on Reddit, who is recommending what you might buy books and strategy courses that you never finished, but you have a lot of them, right?

You have like a book library that is just exploding of chess books, but you maybe have read like. 10 percent of what's in there. And all the time you're just debating what would be the ideal way of training chess. And that's a lot of time wasted. And so with a plan, you can remove this friction and get a clear way of improving your chess.

So there are three main ways that a plan can help you with your chess improvement. Way number one is you actually stay balanced and [00:04:00] work on the things that matter most, right? I have this one third rule where I just give a very easy way to structure your training. One third of your time you're spending on tactics, one third of your time you're spending on playing games.

and actually analyzing them and then the last third of your time you're spending on openings, endgames, strategy, all of these things combined. So you stay balanced thanks to a plan because you plan in advance and you make sure that you stick to this one third rule. Then point number two is that you actually stay consistent.

Now let's be honest, life gets in the way very often, right? You have a busy week at work, you have maybe a family at home, there are all these things that can take your energy and if you're not planning, chess will be pushed out later and later and either you just don't train chess in these busy weeks or you train it at 9 p.

m. 10 p. m. where you just can't [00:05:00] focus at all and you might as well not train because your brain is not taking any knowledge and you're not absorbing anything and learning anything. Worst case, you might play and lose a lot of rating points. So it was actually negative that you've done it. And then way number three is to stay focused and set yourself limits and do only what really, really matters.

Again, this is mostly about playing, but it also matters in studying. But if you were having a plan and you're telling yourself, okay, I play four games, then you actually play four games and you're not playing seven or eight or 10 or 15 because you're telling yourself, well, I have a little bit more time and I just won so many games.

So let me win a little bit more rating or the other way around. You're losing a lot of rating and just say, Oh, I just finished with one good game. And then I can finally finish. A plan helps you stick to your plan. Well, what you want to do, which is play [00:06:00] a limited amount of games. And I can understand that if you're not an expert, it's very easy to second guess your plan.

So you not only need a plan, but you need a good plan and one that you trust, because it shouldn't be that you lose one game in a rook endgame. And you're like saying, okay, I need to throw it, everything out the window. I just. need to study rook endgames, right? . So that's why I think it's so important and that's why I help my students create plans and for my private students, I create plans for them so they can just say, okay, my coach has taken care of this.

I don't need to think about it. Even if I lose in a rook endgame, he will see it and he will think about it if we have to adjust anything. And if you're not able to work one on one with me in Next Level Training, my course, I'm helping my students, these core students create their own plan and actually understand [00:07:00] what is a good plan and how you can come up with it.

But now I already want to give some advice as to how you at home can create your own training plans. And it's,, pretty simple if you know, the basics of planning. So step number one, and this is exactly how I teach it in Next Level Training, step number one is you have to keep your plan simple.

You shouldn't start with a 20 hour plan that is very unlikely to actually get done. When you start out with a new plan, you want to make sure that you get in these winds, that you can tick off these boxes and actually make sure that you're studying what you planned to study. So don't go with a perfect plan from the get go, don't go with too many hours that you plan for your week to study, but keep it very simple and start small.

So a very simple plan, [00:08:00] for example, could be On Monday, I'm studying 20 minutes of tactics or solving 20 minutes tactics. On Tuesday, I'm playing one game and I review it. On Wednesday, I take one strategy book and I read it for 20 minutes. On Thursday, I'm repeating Monday, so I'm repeating the tactics. On Friday,

I'm doing the playing one game and analyzing it. And on Saturday, again, I'm picking the strategy book and I'm reading 20 to 30 minutes in that strategy book. So that would be a great first week of a training plan. You do something on six days a week, you do something that matters and you're hopefully doing it with the right focus.

And then you can slowly, slowly start building up and increasing the amount of time you spend on chess. Point number two is: make your plan actionable. This is so important and I see it everywhere in my own [00:09:00] life, but I also see it with all of my students, readers and so on. If a plan is not actionable, it won't be taken action on.

You need to make it very, very clear and a good plan tells you exactly when, what and how you'll train. Be very specific. So for example, you're saying Monday 7 to 8 p. m. solve 10 tactical puzzles in the step method, book number two. So it's very clear for you what you have to do. You know you'll have to open up your book, you know you'll have to solve ten puzzles, you know how long you want to solve it, and when exactly you want to solve them.

And then, there is a big likelihood of that training actually happening. If instead you're just saying, okay, this week I want to, do two hours of this course, or I want to do two hours improving my tactics. It's so difficult for you actually to do [00:10:00] it because you don't know when. All the time during the week, you're thinking, Oh yeah, I still have some time, or I might still do it later on.

Also, if you're sitting down and you're thinking, okay, I actually want to do it right now, you have the problem of not knowing what does improving your tactics mean. You could study a course, you could solve tactical exercises on Lichess. You could solve them on ChessTempo, on chess.com, somewhere else.

So there's so much questions still open. And when there are too many questions, what usually happens is you're going to the easy thing that doesn't really improve your chess. So you need to be very, very clear with your task, when, what, and how you will train, and then you will actually do it. Point number three is follow the one third rule.

I've talked about that already. Make sure that your plan follows this one third rule. Just makes it super simple. And to start, I would suggest that if you're training on six days a week, you're taking one day off of chess, then [00:11:00] you're just doing two days of tactics, you're doing two days of playing and analyzing, and you're doing two days of either opening endgames or positional.

chess chess Now this is very important. Don't overwhelm yourself with working, 15 minutes on openings, 15 minutes on endgames, 15 minutes on positional chess in the same day. But instead, what I recommend doing, is you get one resource. So you're saying, okay, at the moment openings are my biggest weakness.

So you focus on openings. You do that for, , a few weeks, maybe even a month or two. And then once you feeling, openings are taken care of. Now you can get one resource for endgames or strategy, positional chess. And then you do this one as well. So you try to keep it as simple as possible. So at any moment in your training plan, you're working on tactics.

You're playing and analyzing and you're having one resource for the. third And then point number four [00:12:00] is: a plan helps you using fewer but better resources. Now if you're thinking back at what I just said is I said that you should have tactics, you should have playing and analyzing and then one more resource.

So actually a good training plan has very few resources. little, amount of things that you need. You don't need a full library of, 20, 30, 40 chess books in order to improve your chess. What you need is one way to improve your tactics, then playing and analyzing, which is totally free if you do it on Lichess or very very cheap if you want to do it on chess.com and then you have this one resource that you need for maybe a month or two. You finish that resource and then you need one more resource for the next two months for this third third. So it's actually really very, small, the amount of things that you really need.

So having a plan also helps you save a lot of money. [00:13:00] That's what also my Next Level Training students usually tell me is , Oh my God, I've bought so many things. If I would have found this way of studying earlier, if ever would have found this course earlier, I could have saved a lot of time and money on things that I now realize I don't need at all. So really a good plan, if you're starting simple and starting small, will help you stop wasting so much money and time on things that you then don't finish. And the full idea of a plan is that once you pick a resource, you actually want to finish it, you actually want to get the most out of it.

And then only you move on. So it really helps you simplify your whole chess training. So if you're listening to this and you don't have a simple plan yet, I urge you to, take some time after listening to this podcast. Maybe you're driving, so you need to take the time [00:14:00] later on. But if you have time right now, just open any Word document or just take pen and a paper, start creating your first training plan.

And if you need help with that, remember that Next Level Training is a course that helps you create your own plan. It helps you understand how exactly you need to study each area of chess. It helps you understand which resources are good for your level. So if you want that kind of help, if you want to the quicker way and not having to go through all the same mistakes I did for my own planning, then make sure to check out Next Level Training. Again, for those listening to this podcast just when it came out, you have a short time window where the course is $100 off. So make sure to check it out.

Okay, guys. No matter if with or without Next Level Training, make sure you have a plan, make sure you stick to that plan, and [00:15:00] make sure you start small, and then I'm sure you will keep improving your game. See you next week.