Jeffrey Ashton

Someone emailed me a question. If you have any questions that you think are suitable for everyone to view, please post it in the "comments" area, and I will respond in the same way. I will dedicate a post to answering the question though: The person wrote: Thanks for the "inside" information! You wrote that your goal is to spend 2 hours/week and that you did practically no studying last year. May I ask if you became weaker without training or are many things so "hardwired" in your brain that you do not need much studying to keep playing at a given level? I definitely became a little bit weaker, but not by much. The main thing that happens when I am not studying is I might forget a few opening variations, but this shouldn't weaken a player significantly. In my opinion, once you learn something in chess it becomes somewhat hardwired (generally speaking) into your brain. Chess masters rely on intuition and experience for most of their playing strength, an...

Ok, what I am doing normally turns out horrible for most people. You see this pattern with many people. It is like I'm trying to run a marathon, but sprinting the first mile. This leads to burnout, and this happens in many types of training. For example, when people make new years resolutions to join a gym and excercise. You see the gyms are packed in January with people excercising 3 hours a day. Come February, the gym is empty again. The point is, to not get burned out. So when studying.. try to stay with your reasonable goal. I am already over-training. But I should be mindful of this, and not get discouraged when my training slows down a bit. I should make sure to stay with my small 2 hour a week goal. Anyway, I just studied a nice game between Alekhine and Euwe. Here it is: Click Here