Training suggestions for U1500 players - part 1

Chess is like body-building. If you train every day, you stay in top shape. It is the same with your brain – chess is a matter of daily training --- Vladimir Kramnik

1. Get into the discipline of daily puzzle training. Doing 200 puzzles on one night and then two weeks nothing, and then 100 puzzles on another night is unlikely to be very useful, unless you are extremely gifted for chess. It would likely be much more fruitful to do 5 puzzles each day, and then keep to that daily streak, and not skipping days in between, unless you have very good reason to do so.
2. Do checkmate in 1 and checkmate in 2 puzzles daily. This sounds like an easy job but it really is not always the case. Some checkmate in 1 puzzles are pretty difficult, and some checkmate in 2 puzzles can keep you busy for some time. The advantage of doing such puzzles every day, apart from your other training is that you get familiar and probably will be much faster with tactic motives like for example pin tactics, blocking tactics and so on in your chess games. Another side effect that may happen is that you start to feel good. It is okay to do some "cheapo" puzzles every day. It could even boost your chess confidence.
3. Do the daily puzzles on https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/puzzle.php Monday till Saturday. Step 1 is easy, Step 2 is more difficult and so on. At first you can limit yourself to only the first two or three steps, and later when you progress, try the more difficult ones.

Here some checkmate in 1 examples to get you started.

4. Stop or decrease your amount of daily bullet chess games. Bullet, for a U1500 player, can damage your chess skills development, and it can turn you into a flagger, and it can destroy your patience and inner peace in slow time control chess. It can also destroy your deep thinking, and the ability to make nice quiet positional moves or moves that have a deep strategic meaning. You can also ask yourself : Do I want to raise my dopamine or adrenaline levels ? Are you still a friendly person to other people when you just lost ten 1 0 bullet games in a row, or will bullet turn you into an acid person ? And does bullet give you real happiness or is it just short term pleasure ? To me a reasonable quality game that I lost where I played a creative move matters a hundred times more to me than a mediocre game where I flagged my opponent (I do not like flagging at all, but sometimes in blitz time scrambles, where I play without premove, it happens that my opponent loses on time while I still have a second or two). And what you want from chess ? Gain rating ? Win "at all costs" ? Or do you want to try to create a small piece of art that you can be happy about and which content you can share with others ? Or do you want to enjoy the progress of your own chess skills, and share your knowledge with others ?

5. Use the Replay options from the Puzzle Dashboard on Lichess to replay the puzzles you failed before.

Enjoy your chess journey ! :)