Calculation is key to winning chess games. Converting your chess knowledge into concrete moves requires calculation and precise visualization. The bad news: calculation is hard work. You cannot rely on feeling or intuition – you will have to turn on your brainpower. The good news: you can improve your calculation skills by training. Set up a position on a chessboard and try to solve exercises without moving the pieces! Grandmaster Ramesh RB is the perfect coach to awaken your chess brain and feed you precisely the right exercises. ‘After only a month of intensive training with Ramesh, I could sense a seismic shift in both the precision of my calculation as well as my general level of sharpness,’ says GM Daniel Naroditsky. GM Ramesh is one of the world’s most successful coaches. He has trained many of India’s top talents at all stages of their development on their journey to become International Masters and Grandmasters. Ramesh understands what mistakes players can make while calculating. He knows that the best move in a specific position may be the opposite of what your intuition is urging you to play. And he serves you the exercises to correct these misconceptions and start finding the right solutions. Every chess player will benefit from the hundreds of exercises in this book. Coach Ramesh will take your calculation skills from a club player’s level to grandmaster level.

Pattern recognition is one of the most important mechanisms of chess improvement. This is well known. But what does pattern recognition actually mean? And how can you improve at it? If you realize a position has similarities with something you have seen before, you are recognizing a pattern. This helps you to get to the essence of a position quickly and find the most promising continuation. To get better at recognizing chess patterns, knowing which positions are worth remembering will save lots of time and energy. In this book IM Arthur van de Oudeweetering supplies building blocks for your chess knowledge. In short chapters he presents lots of well-defined subjects, easy to remember because of their specific elements. After working with this book you will experience something wonderful: your mind and memory will be triggered much easier and more frequently. An increasing number of positions, pawn structures and piece placements will automatically activate your chess knowledge. As a result, you will simply find the right move more often and more quickly!

The chess playing mind does not work like a machine. Selecting a move results from rather chaotic thought processes and is not the logical outcome of applying a rational method. The only problem with that, says International Master Willy Hendriks, is that most books and courses on improving at chess claim exactly the opposite. The dogma of the chess instruction establishment is that if you only take a good look at certain ‘characteristics’ of a position, then good moves will follow more or less automatically. But this is not how it happens. Chess players, weak and strong, don’t first judge the position, then formulate a plan and afterwards look at moves. It all happens at the same time, and pretending that it is otherwise is counterproductive. There is no use in forcing your students to mentally jump through theoretical hoops, according to experienced chess coach Hendriks. This work shows a healthy distrust of accepted methods to get better at chess. It teaches that winning games does not depend on ticking off a to-do list when looking at a position on the board. It presents club and internet chess players with loads of much-needed no-nonsense training material. In this provocative, entertaining and highly instructive book, Hendriks shows how you can travel light on the road to chess improvement! ,

"The Improving Chess Thinker provides representative thought processes from all classes of chess players, highlights the differences between these levels, and provides insight to help players raise their thinking process to the next level. Full of helpful tips and principles, the Improving Chess Thinker is the result of over 40 years of 'think out loud' chess exercises given by one of the country's top chess instructors, Dan Heisman. The range of subjects addressed includes everything from analysis and evaluation theory to time management skills. The instruction and lessons learned will aid players of all levels, from beginner to expert. The practical advice will be useful not only for players striving to benefit their game, but also coaches looking for new powerful teaching tools."--Publisher's description

The upgraded 2024 edition of a modern classic

Charles Hertan, an experienced chess coach from Massachusetts, has made an astonishing discovery: the failure to consider key winning moves is often due to human bias, since your brain tends to disregard many winning moves because they are counter-intuitive or look unnatural. Charles Hertan?s radically different approach is: use COMPUTER EYES and always look for the most forcing move first! By studying forcing sequences according to Hertan?s method you will develop analytical precision, improve your tactical vision, overcome human bias and staleness, and enjoy the calculation of difficult positions. By recognizing moves that matter, you will win more games!

Chess is a cruel game. We all know that feeling when your position has gone awry and everything seems hopeless. You feel like resigning. But don’t give up! This is precisely the moment to switch to swindle mode. Master the art of provoking errors and you will be able to turn the tables and escape with a draw – or sometimes even steal the full point! Swindling is a skill that can be trained. In this book, David Smerdon shows how you can use tricks from psychology to marshal hidden resources and exploit your opponent’s biases. In a lost position, your best practical chance often lies not in the computer’s best moves, but in playing your opponent – however bad the evaluation! With an abundance of eye-popping examples and training exercises, Smerdon identifies the four best friends of every chess swindler: your opponent’s impatience, their hubris, their fear, and their need to stay in control. You’ll also learn about such cunning swindling motifs as the Trojan Horse, the decoy trap, the berserk attack, and ‘window-ledging’. So, come and join the Swindlers’ Club, become a great escape artist and dramatically improve your results. In this instructive and wildly entertaining guide, Smerdon shows you how.

Have there been times during a game when you have calculated a position for half an hour, only to find out that most of what you were thinking about was of little use? If you have not, maybe the only way to improve your calculation is to upgrade your processor. But if you are human, then this book will offer you practical advice and an effective training plan to think differently and make decisions far more efficiently.In Calculation thinking methods such as Candidates, Combinations, Prophylaxis, Comparison, Elimination, Intermediate Moves, Imagination and Traps are explained to the reader, and ownership of them is offered through a carefully selected series of exercises.

The author focused in his first volume of pure chess calculation on middlegames. Romain has carefully selected 496 positions, which arose in real games in the recent past. He separated the exercises into 11 different categories, covering both tactics and strategy, attack and defence. This book is a fantastic training tool for any player to improve his level of chess thinking.

A practical guide to selecting the best move available, every time, from any chess position, packed with tips, tricks, and shortcuts from the greatest chess players. International Grandmaster Andrew Soltis brings you a foolproof guide to choosing your best next chess move, every time. There are more than 30 moves you can choose from an average position, yet Chess Masters regularly manage to select the best moves—and they do it faster, more confidently, and with less calculation than other players. This practical guide, in a fully revised and updated edition of a Batsford chess classic, explains the tricks, techniques, and shortcuts Chess Masters employ to find the best way forward, at every stage of a game. Drawing on the wisdom of some of the greatest chess players of all time, with analysis from over 180 games, it covers: • Employing specific cues to identify good moves. • Streamlining analysis of the consequences of moves. • Using both objective and highly subjective criteria to find the right move—from any position. This invaluable book provides a fascinating insight into the way Chess Masters think and is a must for all players who want to hone their decision-making skills and cultivate a killer chess instinct.