Temposchlucker

  It is tricky to use Stockfish for positional assessments. Because when Stockfish deems your position somewhere between - 0.5 and + 0.5 it can mean the following: Your opponent has several acceptable possibilities and the position is easy to play Your opponent has only one correct move, and the position is difficult to play What we actually want to know is point 2. We want to steer our games in the direction where the computer says that it is equal, but that are difficult to play for humans. But Stockfish doesn't tell you that.

 Now we have discovered the trick, it is time to think about how we can acquire the trick more efficient? The trick starts with a plan. The plan must be triggered by salient cues. How can we learn these salient cues the easiest? Diagram 1. White to move 5rk1/pQrnqppp/4p3/2bn4/4N3/2B1PP2/PP2BP1P/3RK2R w K - 0 17 Everything revolves around f6. Who are the defenders and how to deflect them? Diagram 2. White to move Once you KNOW that everything revolves around f6, it is easy to come up with a plan. 1.Qxc7 to distract one defender 1. ... Nxc7 2. Rxd7 eliminating the second defender 2. .. Qxd7 distracting the third defender 3. Nf6+ luring away the 4th defender by a royal fork This leads to the following position: Diagram 3. White to move From here it is easy to execute the mate. 3. ... gxf6 4.Rg1+ Kh8 5.Bxf6# I'm thinking about making a FEN viewer that helps to find the salient cues. In this case, you need the mate pattern (diagram 3) and the fact that everything revolves around f6 (dia...

 This is a tricky one. I'm going to use a rather random example I had trouble with. YMMV and if you see it without any trouble, still try to understand what I want to convey. We are searching for the rules that govern the acquisition of understanding in the most effective way. First of all, we must abandon all rules that are commonplace and that are just a waste of time. don't bother about visualisation don't waste your time with feeling the need to make an effort you are in learning modus here, so don't waste your time with trying to find the solution yourself, because you need elements that you haven't learned yet. There is no need to invent them yourself. when the tree of analysis becomes bushy, trial and error is a waste of time What you need is to get an understanding of what you are trying to accomplish in a position. It starts with the goal. When you know the end goal, you can judge for every move whether it contributes to the goal or not. White to move 2r1r1...

Robert Asked: I'm curious about your training process. Do you work on the problems by just visualizing the solution (along with recognizing the patterns involved) without an actual board or do you set up a board with each position and shuffle the pieces around in order to "cement" the visual patterns into memory? I'm glad you asked. After the fire 3.5 years ago, I haven't used a physical board in my house. I do everything digital. Except for playing, much to the frustration of my opponents who tend to search for my games when they know they have to play me. The last two weeks I noticed a difference in my training approach. All of a sudden, I feel that my training becomes much more efficient. That was actually the reason for my previous post. Before anything else, I wanted to stress the fact that there is only one trick (System 1) that you must learn Besides the trick, you must acquire some knowledge (System 2). But that is usually not the problem. If you compare t...

 This might well be the most important post from the last years. So what's the trick then? Understanding and scenarios are closely related. You can't learn the trick without scenarios. But scenarios are not the essence of the trick. The trick is to see what a move does. You can find out what a move does by fiddling around with standard scenarios. Take for instance the following scenario: White to move r1b2rk1/p1qn1ppp/1p1bpn2/2ppN3/3P1P2/1P1BP3/PBPN2PP/R2QK2R w KQ - 0 3  In this diagram, you are close to a standard scenario in the Colle Zukertort. It is not winning yet, although Stockfish gives it about 0.5. Black must do a few things wrong and white must do a few things right before you can count a point. The idea is to open the long diagonal by two tempo moves (Nxd7 and dxc5), then throw the two bishops to the king position to get rid of Nf6 and h7 (again, with tempo) and mate the black king with Queen, Rook and / or Knight. I was fiddling around and asked myself the questi...

 Learning chess by investigating how the scenarios emerge from the variations is a daunting task. The logical way is of course the other way around. When you know the scenario, you should be able to propose a possible variation. In practice, you will always have to work with what a chess author provides you with. A chess author has a few reasons to withhold information from you. Usually with the best intentions: he doesn't want to overload you his publisher doesn't want the book to be too thick he wants to protect you from too complicated matter he wants to be complete so he floods you with irrelevant details to give it a scientific impression he makes choices for you he leaves out what is obvious for him Personally I suffered a lot from some books of GM Euwe about the opening and the endgame, which I experienced as quite boring. Even to the extent that I quit chess for 14 years. Only when I found the books of GM Joe Gallagher about the King's Gambit, I rediscovered my joy ...

Of the past 26 years I spent 23 years on how to learn chess. Only the last 3 years I have begun  to think about the game itself. I happen to play the French defense these 3 years. The French revolves around two main ideas: get rid of the French bishop on c8 nibble on the pawns of the opponent's center until it dissolves White has usually a lot of space behind his pawns. He must use this to attack the black king. Without his light squared bishop it is close to impossible to make this attack work.  Once the white center dissolves, the white position is vulnerable for invasion because the pieces cannot protect so much space. Furthermore, when black has two center pawns and white has not, you can use your center pawns as a mobile steamroller to invade white's territory. Instead of telling you this simple story, chess authors have a tendency to flood you with 600 variations. Because they themselves are addicted to concrete calculation. They use writing a book as an excuse to indulg...