Start here
Two inputs — your rating and your honest weekly hours — produce your training week, your current rung, and a realistic timeline. Everything else on this site is the reasoning behind that output.
Build your plan
The generator uses base rates from the best available dataset on amateur improvement, scaled to your available time. It will tell you things you may not want to hear — including, at low weekly hours, that 2000 is probably not reachable.
What makes this different
It says when the evidence is thin
Everyone tells you to play longer time controls. We do too — but no study has ever compared improvement rates across time controls at matched effort. That is strong coach consensus with a plausible mechanism, not a demonstrated fact, and this site says so at the point of advice rather than burying it.
It names the folklore
The famous 40-40-20 rule has no identifiable originating source and omits game analysis entirely — the one activity multiple datasets single out as the top predictor at novice level. And there is no credible figure for "% of beginner games decided by a hanging piece." Any such number you have seen was invented.
The method has two independent lineages
Seven principles, each pairing a verified passage from the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean or Xunzi with the modern research finding that arrived at the same place two and a half thousand years later. Confucius withholding instruction until the student has struggled is the testing effect, stated in 500 BC.
Every position is on a board
Forty-four diagrams, and every notation line on the site is steppable — walk the moves one at a time and watch the position change, on the page, with no account and nothing to install. The boards are generated from verified FENs at build time, so the diagram you see here and the one printed in the book are produced by the same code and cannot drift apart.
The chess is checked
Every move sequence in the repertoire has been replayed through an engine for legality and cross-checked against published theory. Four errors were caught that way — including a line containing an illegal move. Where a line is playable but not main theory, it says so on the spot.
The uncomfortable arithmetic
This is the part that belongs on the front page rather than hidden three clicks in.
The best dataset on adult improvement (n≈384 self-tracked players, median 7 hours a week) gives expected annual gains by band: +215 from 800–1099, +121 from 1100–1699, and +37 from 1700–1999. Integrate those and 800 → 1800 is roughly a nine-year project at seven hours a week. 800 → 2000 is closer to fourteen.
Independent cross-checks land in the same place. One documented improver went 981 → 2000 USCF in 14 years. Another went 1474 → 2007 in 10.5 years — with only four productive years out of eleven. The fastest well-documented 800 → 1800 took 3 years 2 months and required 10–30 hours a week and around 30,000 games. That is a near-professional load, not a hobby.
And in that same dataset, the 25th percentile of players rated 1200 studying eight hours a week gained exactly zero across a year. A flat year is normal. It is not evidence that you are doing something wrong.
Why that is not a reason to stop
The same screening that produced those timelines also found over a thousand adults who gained 200+ points after 25, and around two hundred who gained 500+. The single factor its author named first was consistent play — "more important than studying, coaching, chess psychology, or anything else." What the data rules out is the fantasy of a fast leap. What it supports is a long, unglamorous accumulation. Which is exactly the thing Xunzi was writing about.
How the site is organised
| Page | What it does |
|---|---|
| Build My Plan | Your weekly schedule, current rung and timeline, generated from your rating and hours. |
| The Method | The seven principles. Read this once, properly. It is the actual content. |
| The Ladder | Six rungs from 600 to 2000+, each with one job and a hard exit criterion. |
| Train | The six trainable skills, each with its own page: tactics, calculation, endgames, strategy, analysing your games and mindset. |
| Train | The six trainable skills — tactics, calculation, endgames, strategy, analysing your own games, mindset — each with a curriculum by band. The material itself. |
| Openings | A complete low-maintenance repertoire you build once and never replace. Plus exact refutations for the junk. |
| Tools | What is worth using, what is worth paying for, and what is actively bad value. |
| Play OTB | Finding a club anywhere in the world, your first tournament, and how FIDE ratings actually work. |
| Training Log | The artefact that compounds. Error classes, streak, spaced puzzle queue. |
| Sources | Every figure, with its caveats and its weaknesses stated. |
If you read only one thing
Read Principle Ⅱ — analyse your games with the engine off first, before you look at anything. Write down what you were thinking at the moment it turned, from memory, then commit to a better move, and only then turn the engine on. Once you have seen an engine line you cannot un-see it, and your own reasoning — the entire diagnostic — is gone. It costs fifteen minutes a game and it is the highest-leverage habit on this site. Analyse Your Games runs the whole protocol over one complete game, so you can see what the fifteen minutes actually looks like.