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2. Study Chess Tactics

Ask almost any strong chess player (not just Larry Evans) for advice on how a beginning to intermediate chess player can improve and most of them will tell you the same thing: study chess tactics. Successful chess plays depends a lot on pattern recognition - seeing a position and recognizing it as being similar to one you've seen before - and solving tactical chess puzzles is a great way to strengthen your pattern recognition skills. And being able to identify and use tactical motifs (pins, forks, x-ray attacks, promotions, etc.) is what separates the proverbial "men from the boys" in competitive chess. Learning and studying chess tactics is key in becoming a successful chess player.

 Chess Tactics For Beginners:

You have to learn to crawl before you can walk, and a good way to do this is by solving tactical problems. The best starting point is Intensive Course Tactics, which contains thousands of tactical exercises for you to solve. The exercises are categorized into groups according to various tactical themes. When you load an exercise in the ChessBase interface, you'll see a training box appear which gives you a set amount of time in which to solve the exercise. The training box also provides hints when you ask for them. The quicker you solve the problem, the more points you receive (you might even score higher than 100% - bonus points for quickly providing the right answer). Points are deducted for asking for hints or for taking too long to arrive at the solution. When you think you have the answer, you just make the move on the screen's chessboard. If you're right you'll see your point score for that problem. If you're wrong the training box will tell you to try again. There's no "instructional" material on the CD; it's all exercises, so you'll "learn by doing".

After you've finished this chess tactics CD (and it'll take you a while - there are a lot of exercises here), you should step up to Intensive Course Tactics 2. It contains nearly 3,000 tactical problems (many with instructional commentary) as well as some instructional text on various tactical themes. While it might look like we're doing things backwards here (since the second disk contains instructional text) I recommend doing the two chess software disks in order; some of the instructional material may not make sense to beginners unless they've had prior experience with a variety of tactical motifs.

Another good chess training software CD for beginners is ABCs of Middlegames, which provides a good introduction to positional chess by showing the close bond between chess strategy and chess tactics (tactical opportunities often arise from sound strategic play). You'll want to tackle ABCs of Middlegames after you've completed the two Intensive Course Tactics disks; the tactical problems will give you a good foundation for understanding the ideas on the ABCs disk.

Chess Tactics For Intermediates:

All three of the "beginner" chess software offerings mentioned above are also well-suited to intermediate players. The Intensive Tactics Course CDs are good "chess tactical drill practice" while the ABCs disk might show you some ideas you missed along the way.

Your next step in tactics study should be Killer Moves, composed by the same author as the Intensive Course Tactics series. It's more of the same, but geared mainly toward intermediate to advanced players - the problems are harder. This disk also contains minimal text instruction; it's a lot of tactics drill, with over 1,600 tactics problems appearing on the disk.

After Killer Moves you should move on to Deadly Threats (also by the same author). Here again you get tons of tactics problems (more than 2,500 of them) with a single purpose in mind: honing your tactical abilities by creating threats (which, in turn, set up your tactical possibilities). Deadly Threats isn't about spotting existing tactical opportunities - it's about creating them, so it's a bit more advanced than the previously-mentioned tactical drill disks.

Finally (as far as straight tactics goes) there's the disk School of Elementary Tactics. Players are often misled by the title, thinking that it's a CD geared toward beginners. It's not; in fact I would never recommend this disk to a beginner. The title refers to the act of breaking tactics down into their component elements (hence the use of the term "elementary" in the disk's title). There's a lot of text instruction on the CD as well as tactical drill material. You might want to tackle this CD before you do Deadly Threats (the ideas of the CDs are much the same) or even do both of them concurrently, since the material is related.

Chess Tactics For Advanced Players:

Here I'll make similar recommendations to those I made for Intermediates. If you're after tactical drills, I'd recommend Killer Moves and Deadly Threats; both CDs contains "Advanced" sections geared toward more skilled players. Some of the problems on these CDs are even challenging to Grandmasters.

You can check the Chess Middlegame Training page for a look at the chess tactics software available from ChessCentral.

3. Studying Positional Chess

In his Chess Life column I mentioned above, Evans downplayed positional chess a bit. Here's where I disagree with him - in my opinion, you can't become a competent chess player (that's "competent", not even "good") before you understand the rudiments of positional play. I didn't get even halfway comfortable with my chess play until I'd read a couple of positional chess primers (back in the days before electronic tools).

Positional Chess For Beginners:

A beginning player should really concentrate on tactics above all else, but when you're ready to dip your foot into the positional pool, start with ABCs of Middlegames (described above). It's not a positional chess course, but you'll be exposed to some rudimentary elements of positional play.

Positional Chess For Intermediate Players:

This call's dead easy - as far as electronic materials go the three-disk series Basic Positional Ideas is the "Bible" of positional play. Read and play through this entire chess training software package. Then read and play through it again. Then again, over and over until your eyes bleed. I'm completely confident that if you read, understand, and apply the material on this DVD your chess play will improve dramatically. You won't be lost at sea when trying to come up with a plan anymore; you still might come up with the wrong plan occasionally (hey, that's chess) but you'll have a good grasp of "what to do when there's nothing to do" (i.e. when there are no immediate tactics on the board). It's pretty well-known that good positional play gives you the opportunity to set up successful tactical shots (even though he had no idea what "positional chess" was, Paul Morphy was a pretty good positional player).

That leads us straight into the next recommendation. After you've completed the Basic Positional Ideas course, the next course of study should be Strategy and Tactics. While some of this material might be over the head of the typical intermediate player, this CD of instructional videos will illustrate the close bond between strategy and tactics and show the practical application of converting a positional advantage into a material one through the application of successful chess tactics.

Positional Chess For Advanced Players:

In addition to Strategy and Tactics (described in the preceding paragraph), I also recommend Right Decisions (which may also be suitable for higher-rated [Class B] intermediate players). The CD contains more than 500 games which include over 4,000 timed chess training questions, many of which are very difficult. The title says it all; we're often confronted with positions in which more than one course of action looks good. Right Decisions will help hone your skills in making the correct choice when you come to a fork in the road.

Squares Strategy 1 & 2 (with further volumes in the works) deals mainly with color complexes. While the concept might be appropriate for intermediate players, the execution on these disks is a bit complex (some might say unnecessarily so). You'll not only need to unlearn what you already know about analyzing positions, but you'll also need to learn a complex new acronym terminology that the author employs. It's not for the squeamish, and I think only advanced players (and perhaps some very driven/dedicated intermediates) should tackle this one.

Another disk geared mainly toward higher intermediates and advanced players is Isolated Queen Pawn. It's a common positional theme in chess, yet it's also paradoxically somewhat specialized.

Before we return to our list of areas of chess study, we're going to make a detour into an area which combines tactics and strategy (although with an emphasis on the former): attacking chess. Many of our favorite chess players (like Alekhine, Tal, Shirov, and Kasparov) are fearsome attackers, and we'd all like to learn to play the same way. Our detour here is a sort of "sub-course" on attacking chess.

Attacking Chess For Beginners:

Check & Mate is a good basic to intermediate course on how to attack your opponent's position. It's not only good instruction, it's also pretty fun. Each game contains ten timed training questions which challenge you to find the best move. The entire theme is how to build and maintain an attack. It's always more fun to attack than it is to defend, so that's why I say that this CD is fun as well as instructional (and some of the video clips are a riot, too).

Attacking Chess For Intermediate and Advanced Players:

The two disk series Attacking Chess provides you with a great instructional course in how to create and maintain an attack. The instruction is provided via videos which also use the on-screen chessboard as a "wallboard", illustrating what the instructor is saying. The commentary is lively and entertaining and I highly recommend these disks as the "next step" after Check & Mate.

Check out the Chess Middlegame Training page for the positional and attacking chess software available from ChessCentral.

1. Chess Playing Software
2. Chess Tactics Software
3. Positional Chess Software
4. Chess Endgame Software
5. Chess Openings Software
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