Blunder Checklist

To help track the reasons why a mistake was made during the game. Health 1. Not enough sleep 2. Headache, cold, etc. 3. Food problem: hungry, ate too much, too much sugar, etc. Concentration 1. External distraction (noise, light, etc.) 2. Internal distraction (worried about prior mistake, other issues,...

Kotov's Method for Chess Improvement

The Road to Chess Improvement Ruke Vin Hansen in his amazing article Mind Games: Who is Doing the Playing? comes to the conclusion that the best way to improve chess skill is not through reading chess books or watching DVDs. He argues that reading more books only helps fill your short term memory whereas...

The Outpost

The diagram shows that White has the center and the d-file. In other respects positions are equal. White with the move will attempt operations on the d-file. This presents difficulties since the protected Black pawn at d6 represents a “granite block”. The key move in this position is 1.Nd5 and...

The Step Method in Chess

I stumbled upon a blog post that mentioned the Step Method in Chess, this piqued my interest and I began to research it further. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of information on the Internet, so I have tried to compile as much as I could find about this chess teaching program. The step-by-step method has...

Most Popular Posts

Below are the six most popular posts on beginchess.com of the past few years: Key Squares Chess Exercises Visualization Exercises These Things Take Time Chess Books by Rating Training...