I have added you as a friend.
It is a lot of work and may take a long time.
My work with Woodpecker has already been quite useful. I have gone from starting with getting less than 25% of the easy problems to over 95% now and close to 0% of the intermediates maybe 50%.
Re: positional play, I have 3 reasons:
- want to get to 2000. That will require positional play skills.
- Also, there are certain games I am losing positionally - black vs grand prix, black vs 1. d4. I think pp may be what I am lacking
- More generally, the woodpecker work means I am seeing attacking ideas in good positions. But it is also pointing out games where I have no tactical ideas. I expect pp might impove that.
I've been thinking about the same problem (coming back to chess after > 20 years away.) I played for my school, but I've never been stronger than 1600 (optimistically) and my Rapid score on chess.com is 1230 today.
This is what I've come up with (and would welcome comments).
Generically, I have identified 7 areas in which I could invest in concentrated study.
I'm also leaving a phase of doing a ridiculous number of tactics on chess.com. Disappointingly, over multiple runs, I have capped out my puzzle rating at 2400ish (highest ever was 2512) . For tactics, I try to maintain a success rate of over 60% (and I reset if my success rate drops below that.)
Instead, I'm going to focus more on two things:
* learning the solutions for problems I missed
* (long-term goal): trying to get puzzle rush survival score to 50. Current best is 40.
As an aside, I did an enormous amount of puzzle rush 5min last year and have realised that this should be avoided like the plague. It teached me to guess when I don't have the right answer.
Chessable retests me so the optimistic endpoint is I'll have memorised 1100 positional "tesuji" at the end of this.
It also feels like this will be the first thing to be finished, and I'll need to decide what to work on next. Either Shereshevsky or Hellsten have books with "Endgame" and "Strategy" in the titles. I'll probably pick whatever is available on an Elearning platform.
In spite of this, I'm learning the Pirc as a social thing with a friend who is slightly weaker than me. I also use the same openings a lot and slowly learn from the engine in game review.
My repertoire atm is
* Kings Gambit as white
* Try to get a Najdorf as black
* Not sure with black against 1. d4
My long-term plan here is to cycle through several openings. My list includes:
* Nimzo-indian
* Slav
* Caro-kann
* French
What is also suggested in the reading I've done it to find smarter friends. I've not done that (yet). I have one friend of roughly the same strength that I chat with occasionally.