Your Chess Goals – by Grandmaster Igor Smirnov

Let’s talk about your chess goals in this issue.
First, I recommend you analyze your chess progress during the past year. Think about your training and your practical results. Which aspects of your game did you improve during the past year?

What problems have you experienced in chess?

The owners of the course
“The Grandmaster’s Secrets” can make a deep self-analysis easily. You can find the guide in the 3rd video lesson.

It is very important work, because it will help you effectively organize your future training.

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Next, let’s think about your chess goals for the next year. I have 2 recommendations for you:

Your goals should be realistic.

Your goals should be a bit more than realistic.

Perhaps it sounds illogical 🙂 Let me explain.

First, your goals should be realistic. For example, you may expect 10 rating points increase per every tournament. Therefore you may calculate how many tournaments you need to play to gain 100 rating points.

Then you may calculate how many tournaments you play per year (based on your past experience). Finally, you can calculate how long it will take you to reach your goal (to gain 100 points).

Of course your planning may be different. I just gave you an example of REALISTIC planning.

You may say: “I want it all and I want it now!” 🙂 Unfortunately it doesn’t work like this practically.

Your goals may be very HIGH, but it should be your LONG-TERM goals. Then everything is fine.

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Secondly, your goals should be a bit more than realistic.
Your goals should motivate you to work hard! One of the key ideas concerning training in sport is “the principle of high, but surmountable difficulty”.

That’s why your goals should be a bit higher than you expect normally. They should thrill and inspire you!

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Have you set your chess goals for the next year already? If no – then do it now! Here I’d like to give you another useful advice: write down your goals.

When you need to write something, you have to formulate it clearly. This will help you to clarify everything. Also you will save these goals and will refresh them sometimes during the next year. Finally, writing your goals is a promise to yourself! It becomes “a document”, an obligation.

I gave you 2 tasks so far:

1. Make a summary (analyze your chess progress during the past year).
2. Set your chess goals for the next year.

Here we come to the most interesting part: How to make your future training (progress) more effective than it was previously?

Probably you’ve heard about the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s principle). “20% of your efforts give you 80% results”. An opposite rule is fair as well: “80% of your efforts bring you only 20% of your results”.

It explains why some players progress much faster than others.
Therefore you need to focus on the most effective ways of training and forget about all the other stuff.

Here is a question for you: “What ideas (ways of training) gave you the greatest practical results in the past year?”

In the next issue, I’ll tell you the answer, but I want you to think about it on your own first.

Also a new interesting task is waiting for you in the next issue.

Regards,
GM Igor Smirnov

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