on the study of chess

I have some time to kill and no moves so I figured I'd write a bit on a topic that seems to intrest people here.
Ok,I never really studied chess in the way the books tell me I should because I'm far too lazy and lack ambition in the field of chess.Here's my,controversial,way:
-openings: I go over the main line and then just start playing it and weed out weak continuations as I go along.I usually check lost games afterwards to see where I went wrong but not always.

-endgames: I take a book on,for instance,rook endings and play over some examples and exercises.I do NOT try to solve anything,just play over them to see how it works.In my games I try to use what I can remember.Again,after a lost game I usually check to see where I went wrong.

-tactics: I do puzzles but,again,I do NOT try to solve them.I play over them to learn the themes and imprint the patterns onto my brain.After a lost game I check for missed opportunities and check if the tactics that did get played were sound.

-positional: I never really studied this aspect at all.What I know about it I picked up from annotations,various chessforums,postmortems and chesstalks with other players.

-I also play over mastergames.Again,I do not study them in depth but play over them quite quickly.When something catches my eye I do stop to take a closer look but I rarely do a torough investigation.

I fully realise with more effort I could've been a much better player but,as I said above,I lack the ambition.I do manage 1800+ OTB performances so my approach can't be that terrible 🙂
Especially with tactics it seems to work well.The themes and patterns I've seen many times are well imprinted and on a board they stick out like the face of an old friend,I rarely miss them.On the other hand I'm almost completely blind to the ones I've seen only sporadically.The main drawback is that there's no structure in my 'studies' resulting in big gaps in my knowledge.It's all a bit haphazard really.
Killed enough time now.Cheers 🙂

Originally posted by Katastroof
I have some time to kill and no moves so I figured I'd write a bit on a topic that seems to intrest people here.
Ok,I never really studied chess in the way the books tell me I should because I'm far too lazy and lack ambition in the field of chess.Here's my,controversial,way:
-openings: I go over the main line and then just start playing it and weed out ...[text shortened]... s in my knowledge.It's all a bit haphazard really.
Killed enough time now.Cheers 🙂