5 a Day

In the UK, the government has a longstanding public health campaign that everyone should try to eat 5 portions of fruit or vegetables a day. This is both a terrifyingly low target and yet unachievable for many, especially now considering the scarcity of fresh food on the shelves - but that is another story!

Being as it is so ubiquitous as a campaign, its slogan jumped out to me as a possible answer when thinking how to tackle the problem of online chess binges, which would often see my rating fluctuate wildly. Practice is good, yet somehow, too much is bad. All quite easy to understand in the cold light of day, but late at night it becomes hard to navigate as "just one more blitz" takes over and the accuracy slides.

The biggest worry is you're just practicing to play bad moves.

So the idea came to aim for a specific number of games throughout the day. 5 each of Rapid, Blitz, Bullet. 5 puzzles on normal setting and 5 puzzle storms.

The rest of the time (and yes, that is a fair amount of time already), should be spent analysing the games - studying them individually and collectively for trends. One example for this is to use the Lichess opening explorer to analyse your performance against different lines to highlight any weaknesses - I have found a great deal of success from taking a "top down" approach to this, drawing out my opening tree and seeing my overall performance against for example all 1.e4 e5 as black, or all Sicilians as white, as well as for more specific lines. This allows me to target my study, with some understanding of what impact that might make to my rating considering the frequency these lines occur.

Overall the approach I take to my study is influenced heavily by my experience as a Quality Engineer within Manufacturing supply chains. Here there is a cyclical approach called "PDCA - Plan Do Check Act" where a plan is constantly updated with information from observing the impact of decisions. This is an approach which has achieved incredible levels of reliability in some manufactured products. I continue to explore new ways to apply Quality Engineering principles to my chess study.

I was dead set on making the perfect picture for this by completing my 5 a day and posting as above, but then I accidentally made a move on a standard puzzle, thinking I was doing another puzzle storm and ruined the whole thing! It would have looked good with the blog post in there as well!