When I started working on my intuition, I started with what I knew, which was the model games approach. When I had started learning chess in the first place, I had loved collecting and analyzing the games of strong players who played the way I wanted to play, and immersing myself in good patterns made sense to me. Now, after having spent years of working with model games (or some form of them) as a directed training tool, I continue to believe that they do a good job as a central part of the development of good intuition. There are multiple reasons for this.

First off, good model games naturally tie ideas together. Some plan in the opening is connected to a benefit in the middlegame, and the leveraging of that benefit in the endgame leads to a win. In a way, a game can be described as a series of connected ideas that tell a story. Human beings remember stories. Ideas that are connected are much easier to recall than ideas that are separated, and since the whole idea is to ingest and retain patterns efficiently, model games make sense.

Second, model games are a good way to see the middlegame and endgame ideas that you’re likely to see from the openings you play. If you’re trying to ingest patterns that are relevant to positions that you’re relatively likely to see on the board, model games are a great way to ensure that.

Third, model games can be inspiring. Quite literally, playing through beautiful games made me fall in love with chess and want to play better. When I didn’t want to study anything, I still wanted to do that. When planning out my personal training, I knew I was going to spend a lot of time executing it, and I wanted to design some elements to be something I would look forward to doing. If you’re committing yourself to training for a marathon, find someplace that you like to run. You’ll thank yourself later.

As far as how to best ingest model games, I had two approaches that I was familiar with when I first started to train. First, there is the solitaire chess method. That is, play through the game and spend meaningful time on each move trying to guess the winning player’s move. The second method is more time intensive, and that is to memorize the whole game. That can feel like a lot of work, but because games often have connected ideas it isn’t as bad as it might seem. Although clearly it is more effort, fully memorizing a game does make the ideas much more available to recall. I’ve found both of these methods of ingestion useful for training.

When I started to build my training plan in late 2020, I started with collecting model games. As it happens, I also felt like my openings needed a complete overhaul, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I would pick players who I wanted to emulate, see what openings they played, find other strong players who played those same openings, and make a collection of good games from all of these players in my new targeted openings. I would review and memorize these games, and thus would learn the opening, middlegame and endgame plans that accompanied the successful treatment of those openings. Then I would turn into Anatoly Karpov (who, incidentally, was on my short list of players to emulate).

That whole approach turned out to be very problematic.