My dad and I in Lisbon (Open Portugal 2018).
In the next posts, I am going to share a few thoughts on how to decide what to play in difficult chess positions. I have been working on this topic with some friends (beginner chess players, but with the passion of grandmasters!) during the past weeks, and I feel to share these lessons with everybody - as other chess players may find it useful. What I consider difficult might not be what you consider difficult, and what I am going to teach here is not an alternative to the study of positional play, strategy, dynamics, endgames, etc. Nevertheless, this topic is discussed seldom and yet, it is as important as the rest.
Instead of providing my friends with trivial situations where the solution is obvious, I gave them positions where there is no clear winning line. Actually, there may not be a winning line at all (be careful - sometimes there is). The best move may be what gives you just the equality. It is tricky but realistic. This is what happens when you play a chess game, most of the time - you have to make decisions in a non-tactical context where there are no forcing variations. My wish was to teach them the good habitat of looking for candidate moves, train their calculation skills and allow them to compare their analyses with mine. If you want to make the same training for yourself keep reading.
You have 30 minutes to think per exercise. Strictly no more than that. This is already more time than we should normally spend on a move. Write down on a piece of paper 1) all candidate moves considered and 2) the variations analysed. Also, 3) indicate the move you would play. The point of these exercises is not that you play exactly what I played (all positions occurred in my games); it is to unveil the thinking process of a strong(-ish) player and give you the chance to compare our analyses. I want to share my toolbox for decision making. I don’t claim that this is comprehensive of all existing methods, but it is a good starting point and might help you to solve the next problem.
Here you can download all the pdfs with the exercises. Good luck!
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