Core Evaluation
1. How has the opponent’s last move changed the position?
2. What is he trying to achieve?
3. Has he weakened his position (positional concession, piece en prise, open to a tactic) ?
4. Are there any threats?
Tactical Evaluation
If 1 or more of the following exist, then perform a...
I wasn’t planning on making this a series of posts on threats, but I feel I’m on to something. My chess has improved since I have restructured my thought process to incorporate threat analysis .
Threat Based Evaluation Process
1. What are my opponent’s threats?
a. Is there a mate threat?
...
I have been away for a few months, in which time I have been through a long plateau and a bout of chess related self-doubt. The reason for the self-doubt is that I feel that I should be at a different playing level than that which I am (1300 USCF), and I am a bit frustrated that my chess improvement efforts...
In Kotov’s great book “Think Like a Grandmaster” he taught the average chess player the inner workings of how a chess master thinks about a position by creating a tree of candidates and then proceeding along the tree. While there is much to learn from Kotov’s work, I have always been...
I have created a PDF document that is based on Karpov and Mazukevich’s thought process guidelines, and includes Herman Grooten’s modifications. You can download it here. The idea is to use it when going over annotated games, or when performing Stokyo exercises. Hopefully, by using it during your...
