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The Virtue of Sitzfleisch
Improving at chess is all about engraining neural patterns, which means lots of repetition, which means (for most of us earthbound mortals) it’s a long-term project. It will probably be a long, hard...
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Great Escapes
Once I found myself inside a cigar-shaped windowless pod, about twelve feet by six feet, made of some sturdy space-age off-white material, with two other people who happened to be female. We were...
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How Much Should You Play?
My thinking about how to improve at chess continues to evolve. One of the biggest obstacles to my chess improvement is that I hate to lose. As a result, I don’t play enough games. I have decided I need...
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Chess Is a Street Fight
Chess is what man most delights in: a struggle. –Emanuel Lasker, 1868-1941, chess world champion 1894-1921 Chess is ruthless: you’ve got to be prepared to kill people. –Nigel Short, 1965-, loser of a...
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Train Well to Play Well
To make your training effective, you must practice the skills you will use during a game. Tactics: The most important skill you will use in a game is calculation. This is why time spent solving...
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Aleksandr Lenderman
Young U.S. GM Aleksandr Lenderman, even if he never wins another chess game, has already been immortalized in the surprisingly readable 2007 book by journalist Michael Weinreb, The Kings of New York,...
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The Best Chess Training Program
Time spent on tactics is always well-spent. You may have heard the maxim, “An hour a day keeps the blunder away.” Solving tactical problems is always useful to maintain alertness and sharpness and...
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Physical Fitness Promotes Mental Fitness
Many great players have emphasized the importance of physical fitness. Mikhail Botvinnik, that monster of self-discipline, wrote in his autobiography Achieving the Aim: I was a round-shouldered lad and...
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Waiting for Bobby Fischer
When I was a teenager, my father decided it was worth a little of his money for me to learn the rudiments of self-defense. So he paid for me to attend a series of lessons at Ozzie Sussman’s Gym in...
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10,000 Hours to Mastery
In recent years, a good deal of attention has been paid to the idea that 10,000 hours of intelligent effort is required to master a complex activity, such as playing classical music—or chess. There are...
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Youth Will Be Served
When I left the infantry to join military intelligence some years ago, my younger son Ben, then about 10 years old, asked me, “Dad, so what do you do now?” I thought for a moment and replied, “Well,...
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The Mystery of Deliberate Practice
What is deliberate practice, and what can it do for us? A recent Dilbert cartoon has the following verbal exchange between Dogbert and the obtuse company CEO. Dogbert: What is the key to success? CEO:...
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Chess Master vs. Chess Mastery
There is a burgeoning popular and professional literature on how to acquire expertise. This literature specifically targets those of us—the vast majority, the great unwashed, the hoi polloi—who may not...
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Study Endgames
Tactics are all very well; you can go reasonably far in chess if you are very good at tactics and not much else. But that is crude hacking, not chess, and adopting such a primitive style would put a...
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How Much Should You Play?
The correct answer will vary from person to person, depending on your particular learning style and non-chess factors. For example, if you are married or in a relationship or have young children, it...
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Fake Chess Improvement
There has often been something rotten in the state of chess dating back at least to the 1800s, when the so-called world champion could ignore his challengers for years on end to preserve his title and...
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All Openings Are Sound
Truth is merely our irrefutable error. –Friedrich Nietzsche Here’s a Secret You Can Use Below grandmaster level, all openings are sound. Even at grandmaster level, top players occasionally beat other...
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The Biggest Obstacle to Chess Improvement
The biggest obstacle to chess improvement is not the innate difficulty of chess, at least not in my experience. Without exception, whenever I have spent a few weeks studying hard, and then played in a...
View ArticleWaiting for Bobby Fischer
When I was a teenager, my father decided it was worth a little of his money for me to learn the rudiments of self-defense. So he paid for me to attend a series of lessons at Ozzie Sussman’s Gym in...
View Article10,000 Hours to Mastery
In recent years, a good deal of attention has been paid to the idea that 10,000 hours of intelligent effort is required to master a complex activity, such as playing classical music—or chess. There are...
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