How i went from 0 to master level at chess in 2 years.

This is the training regimen i did to go from 0 to Master level in 2 years.

• Watch/Complete all the Josh Waitzkin Chess Master Lessons. Vital.

• 10 Tactics a day on ChessTempo On hardest difficulty, standard no time limit. Take a minimum of 20 minutes for each tactic. The goal is to train your brain to calculate accurately. That involves being patient, vigilant, disciplined and careful with each move you make. I Often take +1 hours on a single move.

• Have exactly 1 correspondence chess game on chess.com or lichess.org with a 3 day per move time limit. Everyday work on playing 1 move in this game as accurately as possible.

Iron Rules to follow for all the above.

• No Blitz, NEVER, Blitz only serves to reinforce bad habits.

• If you don't see the solution DO NOT MOVE. When you see the solution, look for a better move, ask yourself what can i see/learn from the position that i did not see before. Sit there until you learn something new about the position.

• Develop a Challengers mind set. Make everything into a challenge.

• All time spent on chess has to be focused on developing good habits. Its not about winning, its about learning. If you did not learn you failed, wasted your time.

• Your only goal is to be better then you where yesterday, if your not, you lost. This is the game your now playing.

Vital Questions/Reminders to keep in mind.

• Ask high quality questions, at Key moments. Example: Before making a move you spent +10 minutes calculating. Pause, ask yourself, what can i learn about this position that i don't already know? Don't move until you see/learn something new. This is one of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself in chess or in life. This will train the brain to see the possibilities. Eventually this question will become rooted into the subconscious. Where its being asked constantly (... THE GOAL, THE POINT).

• Chess is a game against yourself. Chess shows you the limits of your mind. The only way to progress is to identify bad habits and vigilantly replace them with better habits. This involves developing high levels of honest self awareness.

Edit: Useful Extras

Play in a few live tournaments, useful for learning about and experiencing the psychology of competition and good practice for 3D board visualization. But overall tournament games are more for application of training, not vital for progression.

Endgame, Middle game and openings are practiced during the tactics training, in the 1 correspondence chess game, as well as watching a lot of master level videos. When i wasn't training i was always watching chess videos, not necessarily concentrating but in a relaxed state of consumption. With this the brain only sees chess all day. Priming it to prioritize chess as a vital skill for survival. Once you start dreaming about chess and waking up to chess in your thoughts, that's when you know your doing it right.

Note: Middel game and Endgame are all covered in the tactics training being done. After 1800+ rating on chesstempo, the problems require full rounded game awareness, not simply “tactics” anymore. The problems after all are all derived from real master games.

For videos i recommend Saint Louis Chess Club youtube channel, its packed with high quality videos nearly all of them from IM and GM level players. And its fun… the videos are genuinely entertaining, not a lecture.

Small change to study plan, before a tournament i would look at a few opening lines to get an idea of some of the openings i wanted to experiment with. Lichess has a good opening explore for this . But the main training for openings is in the correspondence game and chess videos on openings.