What are your chess goals for 2018?

GM Gregory Serper has posted an excellent and relevant article "What are your chess goals for 2018?" over at Chess.com.  It's the season for New Year's resolutions, and he takes on several of the most common ones for chessplayers.  In particular, I found the below observation to be valuable in helping define how often one should play serious games:

2) Play more tournaments.

This is a very good resolution, provided that you use your common sense. It is difficult to get better in chess if you don't play serious over-the-board tournaments.  However, if you play a new tournament every single weekend and don't have time to analyze the games, it might be very entertaining experience, but you are not going to improve your chess much. 

Ideally you need to find a tournament frequency that will allow you to analyze the games, learn from your mistakes and play every new tournament as a new, improved self!

As mentioned in The Long Journey to Class A, over the past year I've found that playing tournament-level games on a monthly basis has let me strike a good balance between staying "warm" with competitive chess and offering enough time in between for meaningful study.

It was also a pleasure to see his reaction to the "gain rating points" goal:

When you set a goal to gain a certain amount of rating points, you shift your focus from chess to rating and therefore the fear of losing will ultimately stifle your creativity.

It's far better to set a goal of becoming a stronger player, ideally identifying the particular areas for personal improvement through your own analysis, and then let your rating catch up in its own good time.  Becoming a stronger chessplayer is fundamentally a lifestyle choice (establishing positive study/training/playing habits) and a longer-term commitment to excellence, rather than a quantitative goal.

My top chess goals for the year, in no particular order:

• Integrate additional openings (or variants in my existing repertoire) into my play, by employing them in serious games, to help broaden the number of position-types that I'm familiar with and inject some variety into my game.  I've already started playing the Dutch Stonewall, to good effect.
• Learn additional fundamental endgame positions by heart and delve further into the different types of endgame strategies (in rook endings, minor piece endings, etc.)
• Make an effort to learn more comprehensively all of the typical middlegame structures and plans on a strategic level, so I better can recognize and apply them in my games.