Known as one of the best coaches of our times, Mark Dvoretsky left us a valuable legacy to help chess players improve their training technique and take that much-awaited leap forward. His books are a great source of inspiration and help for every aspiring chess player. Mark Dvoretsky learned how to play chess before elementary school, but back then he was mostly interested in mathematics, so the game wasn’t given that much importance. He started to take chess seriously and began going to the district’s chess club and studying only when he was in the fifth grade.

The ability to calculate is crucial in every chess player’s journey to improvement. There’s no such thing as a completely positional game where no calculation is needed; no matter how calm and quiet things have been going, there’s always a moment where you’ll need to see more than your opponent.

Quite often we have met club players who perform well in tournaments with classical time control and give a strong appearance of being underrated players. However, when time trouble comes they tend to collapse quite easily. The same is seen at rapid and blitz events; some players can’t even finish the game and they end up losing by flagging or making horrible blunders. We all have seen that and it is sad, indeed. Playing good blitz and rapid is important; every strong player is competitive in these modalities and it is a fun way to develop skills.