Perhaps I'm one of the rare ones
We can distinguish between hobby practice (enjoying a few casual games online) and deliberate practice. I aim to get as much of the latter; basically serious time control games, tactics exercise solving, and playing out strategical positions against engines, as possible. Surprisingly, for one of the allegedly most popular sites, I find scant opposition for anything beyond even 15 0 on Playchess despite being a member. ICC is another story since they rather kindly closed their door to me in December; FICS is no better, and Chesscube has become a blitzers' paradise rather than the paragon of 90 0 as it used to be. That said, last June in prep for the British Championships I managed a healthy block of games on 2 servers, most at 60 0, many of which are still very instructive/telling of my thought process or meshing of calculation and positional knowledge together. I've tried to move with the times though, and actually started playing Warzone tournaments and blitz/rapid on Cube (those 2mins each things where you try to garner as many wins in the half hour as possible) and always seem to come near the top. It's a sort of extended tactical observation practice that serves a good corollary to blitz tactics practice on Chess Emrald. If I'm making positional errors they'll soon show from my lack of constructive planning that way. When I do get a long game, I've managed to do that much tidying of ephemera in my mind that I seem to be in some decent form now, and instead of worrying about
how to think, I'm getting better again at just doing it. This is a never-ending cycle. It has the added effect that some of my wins - yes, against weaker opposition - are very clear and I can use them in future to reattune my antenna, but the close games with stronger opposition are giving me good grounding in the repetitive errors I make as mentioned with blitz.
I must also be one of the few who reads many chess books! I devoured Rowson's 7DCS and Chess for Zebras in a matter of days, though admittedly both left me wandering in such a forest of fog that I felt I might never exit (whenever you feel so deep, you're halfway to an improvement). Silman's Reassess 3 (still not got 4) is an ongoing work, Simple Chess is something I might come back to soon, and I'm enjoying doing bite-sized chunks from my endgames bible as well. I think the crux of the matter is that most players at most times in their life feel settled in their innate potential strength, and instead focus on maximisation of performance as opposed to enhancement of knowledge. NM Dan Heisman said something like,
it isn't important to know more, it's important to understand more and advocates a marked difference in training depending on which are are doing. I guess most players know that interfering with thought process to kick away the mental ladders of understanding (the rotten as well as the healthy) is a dangerous business and may rather enjoy playing as they do - after all, they may on the level of a GM make mistakes; but everyone does, so each player has his/her foibles they can use to steer the game into their comfort.
I personally (though others may find differently) find that my thought process shadows the media I'm studying. It may sound insane to state without the above, that if I read Botvinnik I become strategically deeper, dogmatic, and weaker at specific calculation, but I think you might agree when I say that if I watch tournament commentary (LCC for example) my play quickly becomes airy and conceptual, and lacks the specifics of calculation required to justify the weighty pseudo-positional play I attempt. That's one reason at least for me, that I find it sometimes helps to look at my own annotations - when my mind is making circles I can see how to make the square again.
