The Plan--Flash Cards

An important part of Wetzell's method is to create flash cards of key positions pulled from your own mistakes. These mistakes can come from your games, chess problems, or missed moves in solitaire games. I had no current games of my own, but a year's membership to Playchess.com came with Fritz 12, so I began playing 15 minute games there. I had game collections on my shelf, that I could try solitaire chess. And there are lots of sources for chess problems.

Flash cards are to be gone through periodically, and as a warm up.

I am creating my flash cards with a word processor. Fritz can send a position to a jpeg file or I use Apronus chess to create an image of a position. (UPDATE: 10/7/2011 I am now mostly using the Chess Alpha font to enter board positions. It is a little harder, but I think more portable in the long run.)

This is an example of a flash card I made from an internet game position. The 'W' at the top indicates it is white to play. I have begun to place the source at the right on the top. In the box at the bottom is a meaningful (to me) short phrase indicating that I do not need to simplify this position (cxd5) and that no progress is made with Nc3, but that I should have formulated a plan to advance e4.

For places to play online there is the Internet Chess Club,  the Free Internet Chess Server, and many other places to play online (google is your friend).

Tactical chess problems can be found on the Shredder chess site and on chesstempo.com.

Crafty,  good free chess engine to help analyze your own games can be found at craftychess.com