Chess Training

Dick Cavett Interview

The Psychology of Chess Napoleon Hill, well-known author of various personal achievement books like " Think and Grow Rich! ", expounds on some very clear psychological ideas that can be related to chess training in meaningful ways. This article attempts to make some useful correlations between personal achievement and the progression one makes in chess training and performance. Definiteness of Purpose Definiteness of Purpose is the starting point of all achievement. A lack of definiteness of purpose is the stumbling block for about 98% of all people who do not achieve their goals for the simple reason that the never clearly define their goals and start towards them. What does that mean in the context of chess performance and chess training? Performance in modern chess is depicted in the useful ELO rating scale as somewhat a rough indicator. It is, if you will, the 'money' of chess. If, for instance, you are determined, motivated, and obsessed with reaching a rating of...

Find the correct winning continuation for Black. Answer tommorrow.

Mark Crowther writes for The Week In Chess : The winner of the Grand Prix will play with the winner of the 2009 World Cup for the right to challenge the World Champion in 2010. Each Tournament will be a 14 player all play all. 14 players have the right to compete in the circuit and they have to play 4 of the 6 events (there will be local players too), these will be allocated to them. Below are the details as announced. It will be interesting to see who signs up for this event, my bet is that a number of the top players won't. This was supposed to be a held on different continents but the majority are being held in Europe. Secondly the presence of reserve cities suggests that some of these venues are not certain. Of course there is a certain chicken and egg situation, getting sponsors for the events without the players having signed up will be hard (they could end up with a distinct 2nd string) and the players won't sign up without venues being in place. Things will no doubt be...

Here are some useful observations for those of you out there trying to complete the Seven Circles tactical training suggested by De La Maza. I not so much discovered these, but rather suffered in their absence. Observation #1: Stay true to the number of puzzles you solve each day AND the amount of time you take to solve them. For example, for the first 64 days, you are asked to solve 16 tactical puzzles each day with the puzzles getting more difficult as the days go by. Now 16 tactical puzzles can be completed in a matter of minutes if they are the garden variety 2-move mates and such. But as you get through your problem set and they become more difficult, you'll find that it takes longer and longer to truly solve the 16 puzzles. My advice is to not fret and have the answers handy to be disclosed to you. This is not *cheating* because, and remember this, you are training your tactical eye, and that is the entire purpose of these drills. It does you no good to sit and dwell over a p...

Is the United States Chess Federation in Trouble? By Dylan Loeb McClain A statement from a meeting about the finances of the United States Chess Federation was posted over the weekend on the federation’s Web forum by Bill Goichberg, the president of the federation. In the statement, Goichberg talked about the federation’s finances, saying they are not in good shape and the federation is projected to run a significant deficit (significant from the federation’s standpoint as it does not have much in the way of financial reserves and its revenues are about $3 million a year). Full Story Here .

I have embarked on completion of the Seven Circles of Hell - the tactical marathon recommended by Michael de la Maza in "Rapid Chess Improvement". I do not possess CT-ART 3.0, so I am using a good old-fashioned paperback book to complete this hell race called "Sharpen Your Tactics" by Anatoly Lein and Boris Archangelsky. The book is structured in a manner that the problems start off relatively simple with obvious 2-move mates and increase in difficulty to more complex tactical ideas. The number of problems in the book is 1125 - more than the 1000 that is necessary. They are also all positions taken for real games, yet another requirement met. Why am I doing this? If you saw my blitz play you'd not be asking me that question... In any event, I am also doing the Chess Vision Drills as well. I marked a deck of cards a1 through h8 on one side and the square color on the other side for that drill, as well as doing the Forks and Skewers, Knight Flight, and Pawn Grab ...