Everyone’s chess journey is different, and mine has certainly been unique so far. When I decided to make a run at master, I knew I had to completely remake myself as a player. I knew I had to learn a really significant amount of information - to become much more comfortable in a significant variety of positions about which I knew very little at the outset. This guide has been about the steps I took to do that, many of which involved building techniques that worked for me and which I found discussed nowhere else. To summarize, they were:

1. Artfully constructing long lines - ‘custom model games’ - showing key moves and ideas in openings I wanted to learn.
2. Memorizing those lines, talking through the ideas in those lines as I would play them through.
3. Playing lots of online games using my new openings, taking special note of positions I reached where my intuition was deficient.
4. Revising or adding to the lines I was learning to address gaps in my intuition.
5. Repeatedly playing problematic positions against Stockfish from both sides to practice positions I wasn’t playing well, especially endgames.

Once I started regularly playing rated over the board tournaments - nearly two years after I made my personal commitment and started my work - I incorporated the analysis and improvement of several other factors in OTB play. At this stage I especially focused on optimizing my mindset and my time management. The community aspect of OTB chess has been perhaps the most important addition - I came back to tournament play to make a rating goal, but I will stay because of the people.

Read the blog or explore the tools section to explore some of the techniques discussed above and practical methods of applying them, if you want to improve your own chess intuition. Radically improving my chess understanding in a relatively short amount of time allowed me to make significant chess improvements and achieve my goal. I hope these techniques help others to achieve their goals as well.

This finishes our discussion of techniques for improvement, but it leaves my personal story at the stage where I had made a commitment to myself. Read on to see what actually happened.