Customer Reviews

Practical Chess Analysis: A Systematic Method for Analyzing

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Like the other reviewers, I thought this was an excellent book. The author's goal is to pass on practical methods for developing the ability to calculate several moves ahead and to do so accurately, minimizing unpleasant surprises. The methods worked well for me; I am much more able to calculate now than I was. Many of the techniques in this book appear nowhere else in the chess literature, but here they are all assembled into a single book, along with the best methods from other sources. If you are serious about chess but find yourself getting lost in calculation or unable to see far enough ahead, this book is the best of the lot -- better than Soltis, better than Kotov, better than "Improve your chess now."

After my first ever tournament, I submitted my games to a grandmaster for advise on how I can improve my games. One thing he told me is that I am wanting in calculation skill. ...

The author is not a grandmaster but why would I care. He is a master and much much stronger than me. There are a lot of grandmaster authors out there but none of them, as far as I know, revealed the method of calculation as much as this author. No, not even in Soltis's "The Inner Game of Chess" and Kotov's "Think Like a Grandmaster". These grandmasters will always tell you to improve your calculation skills (Soltis also suggested playing games in the books without the chess set). But how many among them tells exactly how to improve this skill.

For example, do these grandmaster authors tell you that the very first thing to do is to memorize the chessboard? how to do this? that you should memorize the name of each square like c5 is a dark square and then you know that it is in c-file and 5th rank?

At last after a long search, I found it!

There are all of these "Secrets of ... whatever ... in Chess" books on the market and they hardly "reveal" very much. Well, finally, here is a book that could have been titled "Secrets of Chess Analysis" but the publisher chose a much more modest title.

This book really does present information that is hard to find, if it even exists, elsewhere, and presents it in concentrated form. You will need to use supplementary books and game collections to fully practice what is in this relatively short (165 pages or so) treatise. The book is all about visualization, calculation, and the elements of analysis.

The material in the first chapter, on visualization, is excellent; it requires serious work and practice but I can already see some advancement even after just a few days. Unlike other brief treatments of this topic, here there is enough text and explanation to really make it work. (I think it's even better than the material in Inner Game of Chess, which up to now was the best I had found.)

The next chapter is about intuition and how to develop intuition, which the author puts forth as a key element in being able to select plausible moves to consider for deeper calculation. But the third chapter, "Preparing to Analyze" is where the real "secrets" are to be found. The author bridges the gap between general principles and specific analysis: where else have you seen that covered? Nowhere that I know of! The practice techniques the author suggests are really worth our attention and effort.

The book continues with chapters on the elements of planning and what the author calls "schematic thinking" -- another "secret" found, seemingly, nowhere else.

Used market prices for this book come and go. I paid about $30 for a copy that is beat up and yellow-highlighted to death, but it was still worth every cent. Sometimes there are $20 copies; grab one!

This author offers suggestion for improving one's approach to the game. But to me, the suggestions were not that helpful. They suggest memorizing the color of every square, but this did nothing for me.