Chess Training

Pattern Training is solving hordes of basic chess positions (2-move and three-move mates, to be exact) as fast as you can. This type of puzzle-solving will train your eye to recognize mating patterns with certain combinations of pieces. One of the best books to train this method with has to be "Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games" by Laszlo Polgar, father of the Famous Polgar sisters Zsuzsa, Zsófi, and Judit. Start by doing one or two pages a day and increase your solving as much as possible, hopefully getting up to 6 or 7 pages in a day, without too much fatigue. As you progress, you will see that you begin to have 'ah-hah!' moments when you begin to recognize patterns from previous diagrammes already solved. That is a sure indicator that you are progressing in your tactical, mate-solving training.

Improvement in chess over years is usually related to the frequency of play and the addressing of discovered weaknesses as a result of your losses. One facet that I have discovered is that people tend to get stuck in a method of so-called 'training' and revert back to that method after a series of less-than-spectacular games played on their part. One tends to 'hunker down' and retrain using the same methods they used previously. The unfortunate thing is that those training methods, whatever they were, led to their current predicament, and are thus flawed in some way, were not executed properly, or did not meet the current needs of the player. One way to address this phenomenon is to make available several different training methodologies to yourself and rotate from one to another. This enriches one's chess knowledge and makes available to the player differing perspectives from some of the great chess teachers throughout history. But what does that mean? Here is a ...