When I first started using this site I was a mere 1850. I was too blitz oriented, couldn't calculate deep enough in any position, I was lazy and had poor visualization skills.
I quote from my chess article on chess.com>>
I have for many years not been doing the right thing, a lot of blitz online and little study combined with little tournament experience. This made me a strong player online but an average OTB player. While I could beat very strong players in blitz, GMs and IMs on good days, this never translated into my real chess strength.
How frustrating it was to realize that I was able to beat a GM on blitz but I was really struggling to beat regular players of my elo, 1800-1900s.
Well this came to an end when I was able to reassess my game and employed the right studying technique.My OTB rating was 1917. I realized that my biggest problem to improve OTB strength was mainly calculation. So I started a training here on chesstempo.
I quote my article again on my approach again back then>> Improving my calculation abilities
As I said before, I had to reassess my game, and I found out that I wasn’t thinking deep enough in my calculations. Somehow I was content to calculate a few variations and cutting my analysis too short to be any useful. This meant that I was not making the strongest moves, because I was unable to calculate well and accurately. My first big improvement was to train in tactics servers. I used two servers, chess.com and chesstempo. I recommend both, since they have different styles, but chesstempo without any doubt will make you the stronger player. In chesstempo my biggest improvement came in over a year when I went from 1800 rated elo, to 2050 which is really strong. Improvement comes with time, but in my case, I had to fight all the laziness that had installed in me after all those years in blitz. This meant calculating deeper and improving visualization skills. I found myself after a few months of intense training to be calculating much better. 30 min a day is enough, I did mainly 10 problems in chess.com and 2-3 in chesstempo as part of my daily routine. Chess.com problems tend to be easier and are marked with time, while chesstempo problems tend to be more complex and don’t require time management. It’s important to note that, to become good at this, you have to put some effort, and really try to go deep in the position. It is useless to try to guess a move by intuition. For example “this move looks good so let’s play it”. Here you have a chance to calculate all variants and not leave any hole behind. I was amazed about how good I became in visualizing the resulting variants, something that before my training I could never even dream of. As part of my new serious training programme I did 2 or 3 chesstempo problems everyday. I did this for many months and managed to increase my rating to 2050. At the same time my fide rating went up from 1917 to 2109 in one year having played 61 games.
See my post on chess.com about it:
http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-i-became-a-2100-fide-rated-in-1-year.
It was a good achievement. I had reached 2100 fide rating in just one year, with 175 elo point gain. I could not ask for more, but yet, we always want more. My next goal was to reach 2200 fide. However, I realized that to solve higher rated problems I would need more time. So thats what I did for the next year. I still did 1 or 3 problems per day, spending on average 1h-2h solving them all. My approach during this period was to get the solution right no matter how long it took. Some problems I remember took me 1h or my record 1h30!!
Obviously I felt frustrated to be slow. To calculate slow, to see hidden ideas only after 30min of looking at many variations. To me it felt that if I crossed the 15min mark the problem would be of no use at all in an OTB comparison.
Yet, I kept my approach of getting the solutions right, and not caring about the time. With this approach I managed to get to 2230 elo in standard mode. I still felt stupid for taking so long to solve problems. I had a brief moment of frustration where I kind of quit CT.
Then later on, talking to a chess friend about using chesstempo and the importance to stay sharp to play OTB tournaments I decided to take again my training on CT. After 6 months of instense training, I realized I could solve all those 2200+ problems that took me one hour but now I could do it in just 15-20 min in average. My percentage was about 66% so I could keep my rating floating around 2200-2230.
This perception of improvement was not only in speed (which improved by 400%) but also in my feeling of visualization of the resulting positions. I could go much deeper than before, and the important thing I was quicker. Also with CT I improved my skills in searching and eliminating variations to save time. Many times, to discard a variation with many branches you just need to prove that one of the roots is a false step to solve the problem.
Anyways, my point is that my approach of taking my time to solve problems paid off. I am now much quicker at calculation, better at visualization, better at my internal searching/calculating algorythm to save time.
So, if it worked for me, it will work for you. Take your time, eventually, you will be able to solve very difficult problems in decent amount of time ( that are useful for OTB).
Im pretty sure, my calculation is very close to that of a master (FIDE 2200+). However, I still feel I need to work on many areas, positional, opening repertoire and endings. So, becoming a master is tough, but if you put little bricks in the right direction you will eventually build your little FM house.
At least thats what im doing, and so far with decent results.
Regards
Kingzilla
