No leads...

I'm at the point where  I don't think I can get much stronger unless I study a whole bunch of random things intensely. So I enlisted the help of Vojislav Milanovic, an International Master.

I came to this conclusion pretty easily, as I have a library of chess books of about 35 books, and that I am one of those  "have all of Dvoretsky's books and still haven't got anywhere with chess" players. It's slightly depressing being in this group of chessplayers. It's almost like owning these books is like some sort of cardinal sin.

Anyway, I feel even with Voja's help, I think it is going to take a massive load of work on my part as well - as he can only help me with identifying weaknesses, not covering them. I believe this is a crisis many players have - discovering their weaknesses, through analyzing their own games, or having professionals identify them, and doing absolutely nothing about it except play another 300 blitz games, or are lazy.

Alright...

First post!

I one day said to myself, that I'd try to become at least category 1 chess player (2200). For some reason amongst my other hobbies, I chose to dedicate myself for this one for now. I guess its an arbitrary choice.

I decided to look around for other blogs and see what methods other people are using, and this is basically what I found.

There are a lot of blogs out there, I can't really recall how many of them I've seen where they just give up and never make it, or relying on a type of cookie cutter method, or ineffective, or cumbersome methods.

I may not remember correctly, but I saw someone was trying to lay out a daily training method that is about 4-5 hours long. I think most people will burn out from studying chess for 1-2 hours a WEEK let a lone daily.

Another popular topic revolves around CTS (Chess Tactics Server @ chess.emrald.net, where there is a lot of free tactics puzzles), where chess enthusiasts solve over 60,000 of these beasts, and their user rank wasn't moving very much.

Another one I've seen, is some sort of "cycles" method proposed by Michael De La Maza, which is interesting to me. I think it develops good tactical intuition, but not necessarily strong analytical technique, such as calculating deep variations.

So yeah, so far these are the "shortcut" methods I've seen in chess training on the web, which basically consists of solving thousands of exercises. I'm going to enlist some professional help, although I can already guess that it will contain a more classical regimen in chess studies, such as openings to middlegames to endgames.