Novice Nook & Chess Tactics for Students

Novice Nook
I finished reading most of the articles from Dan Heisman's excellent Novice Nook series at ChessCafe last night. I skimmed a few that I didn't think were immediately useful to me in the process of building my own study plan, but I will go back and review those later. If you are an adult player (or maybe even a younger player) trying to improve, I highly recommend you take advantage of this fantastic resource. Dan seems to be pretty good at presenting things clearly, so his articles are well worth a read.

Based on what I already knew and Dan's suggestions from Novice Nook, here's what I'm going to work on:

• Playing more slow games (G/60 or longer)- I'm working on getting some set up. I already review my games, look for opening improvements, etc.- I just need to play more.
  
• Thought process- I need to work on this, but playing more games will help.
• Tactics- The MDLM plan helped, but I still have more work to do in this area.
• Evaluation- This is a new one I think I need to improve based on Dan's articles. In particular I need to focus on evaluating "quiet" positions where material and king safety are about equal.

Note that your list may vary, so read Dan's articles and figure out what you need to do for yourself. For example, Dan recommends learning general principles like rooks belong behind passed pawns, etc., but I think I know most of the big ones. Of course how often I put them into practice is another question, but whether or not I need to work on this more will become apparent after playing more games.

Bain's "Chess Tactics for Students"
I did the first 100 problems in Bain's CTFS book last night (spent maybe 45 minutes right before bed). Overall they are pretty easy after having completed the seven circles and most of them I solved in a few seconds (most of the hard ones were ones I had seen in CT-Art). However, there were maybe 5-10 easy problems that I had to think about or overlooked something in the problem, so I will probably go ahead and finish the book (a few more hours I expect), and maybe do another pass or two just to be safe. I might cut the problems out of the book (or scan them) so I can mix the problems up. They are all sorted by theme right now which makes it too easy.