En spennende bok av Kristiansund Sjakklubbs tidligere trener IM Axel Smith, og forordet er skrevet av eleven ... Aryan Tari! Boka inneholder åpenbart masse spennende erfaringer både fra Axels egen og elevenes sjakkutvikling.

Her er det lærestoff i alle spillets faser, og ikke minst mange tips om hvordan organisere egen sjakktrening, og derunder unngå altfor mange feil som har en tendens til å være lette å gjøre.

Preface & Contents

I have been playing and coaching chess fulltime for five years. To friends and family, I have said I enjoy travelling the world. Playing chess isn’t a socially-acceptable reason for giving up a normal life, but visiting fifty countries is. As a matter of fact, I have spent those years with chess only because it’s so fascinating. The game itself has always been my main driving force. However, during the last couple of years I have also had another aim – to write this book. I wished to become a Grandmaster before I started; the working title was Grandmaster Training Manual. In the beginning of May 2012, I suddenly realized that the book was more important than my results. It was time to start writing, immediately and at once.

I want to teach how to ‘think chess’ and how to practise chess. It is not a small aim, and there are inevitably other views whatever I write. Nevertheless, I strongly believe in what I say. I feel that the book holds a part of me that I will lose when it’s published, but that is a sacrifice I am happy to make.

There is a reason I have a strong opinion of how to practise chess: I started training seriously only as an adult and hence know which methods worked for me and which didn’t. The first year after I started to practise methodically, in 2006 when I was 20 years old, I improved from Elo 2093 to 2205. The second year brought me up to 2458.

During the past five years, I have made chess my priority over other hobbies (often), friends (more often) and school (always). However, I have often found myself coaching rather than playing. In 2011-12, I lived and worked as a coach in Kristiansund, Norway, and had the chance to teach the methods I propose. In that way, I could see which parts the students understood and which parts had to be explained in other ways.

Thus, those students have helped me with the book, as has every student I have coached over the years. At the time of writing, I have moved back to Lund in Sweden, but I am still coaching the Swedish and Norwegian National Junior Teams from time to time. I spend more energy coaching than playing, and even though I have not made any GM norms (yet), I am happy about the three norms that Nils Grandelius and Aryan Tari achieved when I was their second. There are also a lot of other people to thank. Jesper Hall was my first coach when I started to play chess, and his pedagogical approach has been an important source of inspiration. In the final phase of writing, he read the whole draft and gave me a lot of advice.

Håkan Lyngsjö has helped me extensively with the language; my last name is English but it was 400 years ago one of my ancestors left Scotland to try his luck as a gardener in Sweden. There are also many friends who have read what I have written and given fruitful feedback: Stellan Brynell, Nils Grandelius, Andreas Skytte, Hagen, Jens Karlsson, Brede Kvisvik, Silas Lund, Sebastian Nilsson, Henrik Olsson, Daniel Semcesen, Aryan Tari, Hans Tikkanen, Michael de Verdier and Patrik Öhagen.

I have to thank Quality Chess for believing in the idea, and last but not least my wife, for accepting everything I do, like writing all night. --