Quite often after a serious amount of time of regular training sessions, some people still struggle to show better results at tournament practice. How is it possible, one may think, after studying so much to still perform poor and sometimes even worse than before training periodically? It can sound strange but this scenario is not rare at all. Chess is a complex game and the victory lies in many factors; some can be trained and others you only learn how to deal with when you grow a more mature mindset.
Time trouble is a common thing in chess practice. No matter how strong a player becomes, the difficulty of the game increases as time starts ticking low. For some players it is even a chronic defect; they always get in time trouble and then they become used to responding under time pressure.
That being said, it is not the case for the majority of people. Usually poor time management comes from poor decisions on earlier phases of the game.
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.
For the first time since 2012, when Boris Gelfand used it as his mainstay weapon with Black after 1 e4 against Viswanathan Anand in their World Championship Match, the Sveshnikov Sicilian returned to the biggest scene in this year’s World Championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana.
In a curious twist, in 2012 Anand first tried the Sveshnikov once only to revert to the Rossolimo, which eventually won him the match.
One of the things every chess player has to do in order to improve at chess is seen many games played by strong Grandmasters. This is a great method of enriching your knowledge and getting to understand a wide variety of positions – not only in the middlegame but also opening plans and endgame. However, an important step of this journey is how you do this – you have to take your time and understand the positions and the plans employed.
It is common knowledge that the key to making progress in chess is the consistent and deep analysis of your own games. Once you have learned the most typical nuances of positional play and tactics, it is worth finding out what you miss in your own practice. It is necessary to try to get to the source of your mistakes and learn more about your own strengths and weaknesses.
Going serious at chess all by oneself is something truly admirable. It is unnecessary to say that chess is one of the most difficult things to master and every day it continues to become more difficult as the level of the players keeps rising. How to become better at chess? That is a difficult question with more than just one answer.
In this article, we want to shed some light on the aspect of the training process from scratch and onwards.
2018 finished on an exciting note for the chess fans all over the world, with two last major events – the World Rapid and Blitz Championships. In spite of the fact that the details of the event were announced only a few weeks before its start, the strongest players from all over the world lined up to the start. All eyes were, as expected, on the current World Champions – Magnus Carlsen in the open section and Ju Wenjun in the women’s.
It is well known that tactics play a major role in the chess game. The ability to spot tactical motifs and hidden combinations is a must have for every chess players who wish to obtain notable results.
However, the vast majority of players does not shine because of their talent in spotting tactics; in fact, many are just average in this aspect. The reason for this may well be that it is an element of chess that hasn’t been trained properly or even not at all. There is the thought that tactical vision, or let’s say tactical style, is something innate; you either have it or you don’t.
Can you recommend me a book? If only I had a dime for every time a player searching for improvement asked me this question. Books are of course extremely useful in our learning but with so many writers and the extremely high flow of information, we got these days choosing good material can be difficult. For this reason, we have decided to make an article with the 10 books every player aspiring to be stronger must have and most importantly, read. We’ll also add explain why we consider the books useful and with what purpose one can employ each one.