Your Best Move

Innholdsfortegnelsen

• Part 1: Process 16
  • Update 18
  • Created Threats 18
  • Resulting Drawbacks 19
  • Other Changes 20
  • Select 22
  • Move Scan 22
  • Candidate Moves 23
  • Move Selection 24
  • Verify 26
  • Reply Scan 26
  • Candidate Replies 27
  • Reply Evaluation 27
  • Check 30
  • Resulting Drawbacks 30
  • Other Changes 31
  • Overlooked Replies 32
  • Execute 33
  • Move 33
  • Clock 33
  • Notate 34
  • Prepare 35
  • Prophylaxis 36
  • Objectives 36
  • Plan 37
  • Full Example 38
  • Prepare 38
  • Update 39
  • Select 40
  • Verify 41
  • Check 42
  • Execute 42
• Part 2: Potential Candidate Moves 43
  • Known Moves 43
  • Forcing Moves 44
  • Moves Meeting Threats 47
  • Principled and Thematic Moves 47
  • Pawn Breaks 48
  • Moves as Part of a Plan 49
  • Prophylactic Moves 50
  • Moves Creating Tactical Patterns 50
  • Moves Aimed at Imbalances 51
• Part 3: Knowledge 52
  • Opening 54
  • Development 55
  • Board Control 63
  • The First Move Advantage 66
  • Specifics 68
  • Endgame 72
  • Pawns 73
  • Pieces 78
  • Turn 91
  • Phases 95
  • Imbalances 103
  • Nature 103
  • King 106
  • Pieces 108
  • Pawns 113
  • Board 117
  • Time 121
  • Combinations 124
  • Definition 124
  • Threats 125
  • Simple Threats 125
  • Multiple Threats 130
  • Combinations of Threats 135
  • Specifics 140
  • Attack 141
  • Area 141
  • Weakness 143
  • Power 145
  • Time 146
  • Breakthrough 151
  • Typical Attacks 156

• Part 4: Skills 157

  • Calculation 159
  • Theory 160
  • Visualization 163
  • Termination 164
  • Pruning 168
  • Order 170
  • Evaluation 177
  • Dynamic Value 177
  • Static Value 177
  • Expectation 178
  • Uncertainty 179
  • Planning 182
  • Analysis 183
  • Synthesis 184
  • Formulation 184
  • Verification 185
  • Realization 186
  • Creativity 188
  • Time 190
  • Distribution 190
  • When Time is Running Out 192
  • The Big Think 193
  • Indecisiveness 196

• Part 5: Preparation 198

  • Physical 200
  • Rest 200
  • Exercise 200
  • Food and Drink 201
  • Mental 202
  • Goal Visualization 202
  • Attitude 202
  • Training 204
  • Process 205
  • Knowledge 205
  • Skills 209
  • Opponent 211
  • Opening 211
  • Style 211
  • Strengths and Weaknesses 212
  • Rating 212
  • Psychology 213
  • Failure 214
  • Calculation 214
  • Planning 215
  • Time 215
  • Attitude 216
  • Knowledge 216
  • Conclusion 218
  • Recommended Resources 220

Forfatterens forord

When we first learn chess, we are primarily concerned with simple traps, tactics and exploiting our opponent’s mistakes. Hopefully we also do our best not to make any obvious mistakes ourselves. The move we choose to make is often the very first move that appears in our minds and rarely do we take any time to look for other moves.

As we get stronger, we accumulate more and more experience and knowledge, which ultimately make us subconsciously choose better and better moves. Some players just continue playing like this and sooner or later find themselves stagnating. It is only natural that some form of conscious selection, some form of process to follow, would help us make more informed and better choices.

Ever since I first got seriously interested in chess and played my first tournaments, I have been keenly interested in how such a process would look, obviously to improve my own results. Surely, many of the world’s strongest players must have documented such an approach? I started to look, consuming any information I could get hold of at the time, including all the published books of Alexander Kotov. I especially remember the two books Think like a Grandmaster and Play like a Grandmaster, both of which led me to some insights, and still today contain a fair bit of important information. I remember trying to adopt his way of calculating the variation tree and starting to evaluate positions according to the elements described by him.

And I did indeed improve somewhat, but something was not right. I realized that evaluating positions to try to magically find the opponent’s weakness and to exploit it by a plan was not enough, and more often than not actually wasted too much time. I also realized calculating variations is not really possible if you don’t have a good way of knowing what moves to look for, which was not described by Kotov.

Nowadays the number of quality chess books is so much greater, and since the best way of structuring the move selection process is still at the core of my chess interest, I think I have consumed most chess books on the subject – those published in a consumable language for me, that is.

Some books, like the classic work Psychology in Chess by Nikolai Krogius, studies the psychology of chess, but the actual way of thinking is usually not described. Other books, like the early Thought and Choice in Chess by Adriaan de Groot, Jacob Aagaard’s Inside the Chess Mind, Amatzia Avni’s The Grandmasters Mind, and Dan Heisman’s The Improving Chess Thinker, offer actual studies on how players at different levels think. This is extremely interesting reading and in particular offers insights into what actually separates the strongest players from the rest. Interestingly, it seems that many strong players still calculate almost subconsciously, sometimes actually missing moves that could have been spotted quite easily had they just looked for them.

One author describing his preferred way of reaching a conclusion is Jeremy Silman. His work about imbalances, described in How to Reassess Your Chess, is one of the most pedagogical and logical books on the subject of move selection. In it, he also describes several other processes from authors I had not heard of before. In short, Silman proposes that we should look at the imbalances at hand and then implement plans for strengthening our own imbalances while at the same time weakening our opponent’s. I still regard his work as the best when it comes to handling the important area of imbalances. One area Silman could have described in more depth is the transformation of imbalances into others, and how to identify and handle those critical moments when this is most likely to occur.

Another author, Iossif Dorfman, has tried to describe this in his work The Critical Moment. He does so in very few words and is a bit too simplistic for my taste; but his point is very valid and in a way he complements Silman’s work, even if their writing and style are miles apart.

Further complementing these two authors, by describing the art of forming and verifying plans out of positional elements, or imbalances, are Robert Bellin and Pietro Ponzetto in their work Test Your Positional Chess. Together, these three books are the main source of inspiration for me when it comes to positional play and how to select moves using strategic reasoning. This is not to say there are not better or better-known books on the subject.

Still, when I look at my own games, I realize that regardless of my increasing playing strength, almost all of them are decided in some way by tactics. Fair to say, many of the tactics would not have come about had the winning player not had the positional advantage, but it is a clear reminder that tactics is king. The same seems to be true for grandmasters and even world champions, who sometimes mysteriously miss even one-movers.

An author completely and utterly convinced about this fact is Michael de la Maza. In his work Rapid Chess Improvement, he describes a training program for increasing your tactical ability, as well as a simplified thinking process. In the same spirit, Forcing Chess Moves by Charles Hertan preaches the importance of always looking at the most forcing moves. Obviously, tactics has to play a central part in any efficient move selection process.

It would be gravely ignorant of me not to mention Andrew Soltis’ work How to Choose a Chess Move, which describes so many cues and tips on how to think, that it is almost peculiar that he did not try to bring it all together in a process. I would also like to mention the continuous work of Dan Heisman and Jonathan Rowson. I truly stand on the shoulders of these and many other authors and trainers when I present to you my findings. From them I have distilled what I believe is an effective and logical way of thinking, and hopefully also added my own logic and ideas. Eager to share and test my theories and conclusions, I have used them in many different forms in my training of young chess students, and the results have been encouraging indeed.

After years of searching and thinking, I realize my interest in refining my findings is decreasing, which for me indicates I am close to the point where I cannot add much more. It is time for me to share it with the chess community and let the next runner take over the torch.
Per Ostman, Sydney