Weekly Chess Study Planner

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This planner splits the minutes you have each week across study topics and spreads them over your sessions. It is based on published documentation and reports and on conventional coaching advice, and it promises no rating gain. The starting weights are ours and are meant to be edited.

How the starting split works

Enter how long a session is and how many sessions you have, choose a rating band as a starting template, and change any topic's weight. The planner shows minutes per topic and a day-by-day schedule that adds up to your total.

The templates are illustrative. They follow a coaching convention that players at lower ratings put most of their time into tactics and reviewing their own games, with openings getting a smaller share and endgames and strategy growing as the player improves. That is received wisdom, not the output of a study, and no seller's plan is used. ChessMood and ChessFox publish study plans, which our 1000 to 1500 study plan page compares; this planner does not reproduce any of their splits or percentages. If you want a published structure, ChessGoals offers a free 12-week plan (its sign-up form asks for an email address) and says it is supported by Amazon and Chess.com affiliate links.

What the research says, and does not say

Three studies shape the advice, and none is a test of this planner.

• Serious study matters. A survey of tournament players (Charness and colleagues, 2005) found that time on serious solo study, tournament play and formal instruction each correlated with rating, and that serious study was the strongest predictor in both samples. It relied on self-report and is correlational, so it cannot show that study causes improvement.
• Spreading practice out. A review of 317 experiments (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006) examined spaced practice in verbal recall tasks and found that the best gap between sessions depends on how long you need to remember. It was not about chess, so it supports shorter, repeated sessions in principle without proving it for chess.
• Testing yourself. In a study of prose passages (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006), students who took recall tests remembered more after a week than those who simply restudied, though restudying felt more confident. It used students and prose, not chess.

So the planner puts the same topic on several days instead of one long block, and it includes time for solving or recalling instead of only reading. That is a design choice, not a proven benefit for chess.

How to use the result

Treat the schedule as a draft for a month, then adjust. If most of your losses come from dropped pieces, raise the tactics weight; if you reach winning endgames and fail to convert, raise endgames. If you are following a course, enter its weekly minutes as "already committed" and the planner takes them off the top. Our adult 30-minutes-a-day plan and the 1000 to 1500 study plan are written plans for specific cases, and the rating bands hub shows what to work on at each level.

If you want material for a topic, try the course finder, the repertoire mapper, the price-per-hour calculator and the price and refund tracker. Free options are in free chess training resources. The tools hub lists the others, and how we review explains what this site can and cannot establish. Nobody at ChessCourseFinder has used a paid plan or taken a course.

What the seller's pages do not tell you

Most course pages we read list running time or line counts, and few say how long the material takes to absorb once exercises and revision are included. Treat a listed length as a minimum, and do not read it as a finish date. Sellers also do not say how to split time between their course and your own games and puzzles, so the split here is a starting point for you to adjust.