2. Become proficient at finding offensive and defensive tactics.

3. Stop playing “hope chess”. Analyze at least 4 ply deep, and make sure that your move improves your position and does not lead to #1 & 2 above.

4. Be aware of your opponents tactical and positional threats.

5. Become proficient in basic endgames (king and pawn and rook endgames in particular).

6. Learn the basic positional themes.

7. Work on improving your thought process.

8. Create a basic opening repertoire that fits your style of play, and does not rely on too much theory.

9. Play stronger opponents and review your games afterwards.

10. Play over annotated master games.

Assumptions

1. I played over 3 random games from each of the masters on the list.

2. I gave myself a 0 for needs work, 1 for average, 2 for good, 3 for very good and 4 for outstanding.

3. I averaged the scores for the three games, and gave myself an overall score.

4. I will now begin reviewing  in detail, the games of the master with which I have the most affinity.

In my case I scored an average of 2.67 when playing over Tarrasch’s games, and the second runner up was Karpov with a score of 2.0. I observed that I did better with the more positional / classical style players than with the more modern / dynamic styles.

I will continue to go over master games strictly focusing on Tarrasch’s games using Guess the Move, and then compare my annotations with his annotated games collection( Three Hundred Chess Games ).

What I am planning to do, is to review one or two games from a list of masters in chronological order so that I might find the master whose games I would like to delve deeper into. I will be looking for games where the play is clearest and the outcome is artistic.

Master list:

1. Paul Morphy
2. Wilhelm Steinitz
3. Tarrasch
4. Emanuel Lasker
5. Akiba Rubinstein
6. Jose Raul Capablanca
7. Alexander Alekhine
8. Mikhail Botvinnik
9. Mikhail Tal
10. Tigran Petrosian
11. Bobby Fischer
12. Anatoly Karpov
13. Garry Kasparov

I will chose games based on the following criteria:

1. Won games

2. Preferrably annotated

3. In chronological order

4. Plays my openings

Threat Based Evaluation Process

1. What are my opponent’s threats?
    a. Is there a mate threat?
    b. Is there a threat of material loss?
    c. Is there a tactical threat?
    d. Is there a positional threat?

2. Do I have any threats I can execute?
    a. Is there a mate threat?
    b. Is there a threat of material loss?
    c. Is there a tactical threat?
    d. Is there a positional threat?

3. Based on my threat analysis I need to compare both my threats versus my opponent’s and come up with a plan based on:
    a. ignoring opponent’s threat
    b. creating a counter threat
    c. stopping opponent’s threat

4. If neither I or my opponent have any threats, then I proceed to a positional evaluation of the position which can be based on either Silman’s imbalances or Karpov’s method.

[The evaluation method for sub 1800 players  might be simplified to focus on piece activity and harmony...but I need to look into this further.]

Threats in Chess Pt. 1

We make a mistake when we think of bishop pair advantages or of knight outposts before we consider all of our opponent’s threats. The result is our knight getting to a wonderful central outpost, but on the next move our opponent forks our Queen and King and we lose yet another game. While positional knowledge is important and required, particularly at the +1800 level, recognizing threats and having good tactical vision is more important to winning games at the <1800 rating level.

This does not mean that you need to spend your entire game reacting to your opponent’s threats, this will only cause you to play a dull defensive game dictated by your opponent’s moves. What this means is that on every move you need to ask yourself, “What is my opponent threatening?” and “What is the consequence of my opponent’s last move?”. Once you identify your opponent’s threats and plans you need to decide how you are going to react to your opponent’s plan and how it relates to your own plans.

According to Dan Heisman, there are three things one can do against a threat:
1. Ignore it
2. Create a bigger counter-threat (counterattack), or
3. Stop it.

The point is not to play your game based on your opponent’s moves, but to always be very aware of what your opponent is trying to do, and to either prevent it or continue with a more threatening response of your own. What you cannot do is not consider the threats your opponent is making, and then end up playing a positional move or a rule of thumb move which causes you to lose the game. Hopefully, by simplifying our thought process we can play better chess.

Original Post 7/27/2010

I have slightly modified my training in the last week to include a new way of training tactics and a method to focus my training time.

A New Way of Training Tactics

I came across a forum post by IM David Pruess where he gives excellent advice on truly learning patterns when training tactics. Below is his advice:
The original post is titled Chess Advice Most Chess Player’s Don’t Like to Hear and it’s a must read.

or when i give players in the 1000-1800 range advice on improving their tactics, viz: 10-15 min per day of solving simple tactical puzzles. the goal is to increase your store of basic patterns, not to work on your visualization, deep calculation. remember that is your goal. you are not trying to prove that you can solve every problem. if you don’t solve a problem within 1 minute, stop. it’s probably a new pattern or you would have gotten it by now. (with private students i’ll take the time to demonstrate this to them: show them through examples that they can find a 3-4 move problem in 10 seconds if they know the pattern, and that they can fail to find a mate in 2 for 10 minutes if they don’t know the pattern). look at the answer, and now go over the answer 3 more times in your head to help the pattern take hold. your brain can probably take on 2-3 new patterns between sleeping, so you should stop once you’ve been stumped by 2 or 3 problems (usually will take about 10-15 min). there is no point in doing more than that in one day. and any day you miss, you can’t make up for. a semi-random estimate on my part is that you need about 2000 of these patterns to become a master. so you need to do this for 2 years or more.

i would guess that less than 1 in 100 of the people i have given this advice to have followed it to the letter. if they enjoy it, they’ll waste their time doing it for 1.5 hours in a day, choosing to ignore that it’s not helping them [after 15 min]. or some with ego issues will insist on trying to solve every single position (if only they linked their ego to their self-discipline ).

- IM David Pruess

A Specific CurriculumWhile I am disciplined in spending a minimum of 30 minutes per day doing chess studies, I am usually jumping from book to book and topic to topic which ends up losing valuable time. In the past I have tried to work from a training schedule, but the problem has been that the schedule has been too general. What I started doing is creating a specific training curriculum, where I create a schedule 2 weeks into the future, with the exact content I should cover everyday (an example can be seen here).  The schedule is created on a Sunday, and it takes no more than 15 minutes to create.

Here are a few of the recommendations from the article:

* Study your own games with an instructor

* Don’t study openings…study structures and plans instead.

* If you play blitz, play with a 5 second increment and always try to find the best move

* Review your blitz games just like if it were a standard game.

* Do tactical exercises everyday for at least 30-40 minutes.

* Keep physically fit.

Read the full article at the USChess.org site.

When solving a tactical puzzle of intermediate to advanced level I either:

1. Have no clue how to go about solving it and get it wrong.

2. Have multiple ideas that look promising, but after further analysis don’t win {usually end up playing one of the two and get the answer wrong}.

3. Solve the puzzle correctly.

This post is going to focus on solving the 2nd category above. I have found that you will get many more puzzles correct by combining ideas that arise by analyzing different candidate moves. Unfortunately, by not making a link between the two, or forgetting about your first idea when looking at the second, I mainly fail to connect the dots and only after reviewing the correct answer do I see that I had been on the right track and would have answered correctly  if I had combined my candidates.

You might want to solve this puzzles on your own before reading the answers below taking into account your thought process while doing so and then see if you encountered the same issues as I did.

Here’s the first position we will look at:

White to move and win

The first candidate that came to mind was 1.Bb6 attacking the Queen. I analyzed the response 1…Nxb6 2.axb6 Qxb6 which loses a pawn for White and the Black Queen lives on. So I abandoned this candidate and looked for a better move.

I then found that Qh6 looked promising and I began to analyze 1.Bh5 with the idea of Bh8 and then getting my Queen to h6. But I soon found that 1.Bh5 was a slow since it allows 1…Kh7 and White is out of gas. What I missed, and where I think there is room for improvement, is if I would have combined both moves. Attacking the Black Queen with 1.Bb6 with the idea of freeing the diagonal for my Queen to get to h6 with mate was the winning combination and one I failed to see by not connecting the dots.

Let’s look at another example, and one which occurred right after I had attempted to solve example #1 above.

White to move and win

In this position quickly saw that both the White rook and Queen were attacking the Black d8 rook, and that there might be a tactical opportunity if the Queen were deflected from its defense. The candidate that came to mind was 1. b4 but after further analysis I saw that the Queen could seek shelter by moving to 1…Qc7.  The other candidate that stood out was 1.Qf6+ but the King can easily get out of the way with 1…Kg8 and there aren’t enough White pieces in the vicinity to force the issue. The third candidate I analyzed was attacking the undefended bishop with 1.Qe7 but I found that the bishop can get out of harms way via 1…Bc8. If I would have combined the two ideas or even looked a few ply deeper  I would have found the answer 1.Qe7 attacking the bishop and preventing the Queen from seeking shelter at c7 after deflecting her with b4. 1…Bc8 2.b4! and Black resigned.

2. Playing and reviewing my games – This allows you to learn from your mistakes, and to prevent you from repeating your mistakes over and over again. This important training tool provides you with the appropriate feedback loop, so that your chess training is focused on those areas that you need to improve the most.

3. Revisiting my thought process – Learning more about how other chess players think, and then taking an inventory of my own chess thought process. I documented a process that made sense to me, and then reviewing it while going over positions and / or annotated games.

Feel free to add a comment of your own list of things that have improved your game.