Chess Training Lessons

Chess Books/DVDs (To be Updated)

• Tactics
• chesstempo.com : This site has been amazing to solve tactics. I only came across it in late 2009. But this makes solving tactics lot more serious since there is a rating assigned to each problem and your rating goes up or down depending on whether you solve a puzzle correctly or not. The rating of the puzzle also fluctuates little bit depending what rating people solve it. I spend abotu 5-10 hrs in a month (averaging 15 min. a day) solving the puzzles.
  Here is the chesstempo's daily chess puzzle
  Chess Tactics
• Forcing Chess Moves - Charles Hertan(Level 1500+; Rating 4.5 on 5) : My latest addition to my collection has really been very different and useful. Its hard to put in words the uniqueness of this tactics book as opposed to others, but really practicing the idea of calculating and identifying forcing chess moves is critical for chess improvement. I would strongly recommend this book to all serious chess learners.
• Find the Winning Move - Garry Lane(Level 1200+; Rating 4 on 5)
• Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games - Laszlo Polgar and Bruce Pandolfini(Level : Universal; Rating 5 on 5) : I have heard many people comment negatively about this book saying "Oh, these are so easy ..., I can solve them so fast and they are so boring ... I can always solve puzzles when given one, but during the game its different". Well its tough to read this book with that attitude. It is true that when given a puzzle, the mind starts to look for unsual moves and indeed solves it, but fails to identify and use such combinations during a real game. But the plain truth is, unless the mind is saturated from seeing such positions over and over again (by looking at these boring puzzles) its not going to identify them at a real board. So I completely disagree with all those who think solving short mate puzzles is not going to help you at the board. Rather I would say this is almost mandatory even though it may be boring at times, but who told serious chess training is always fun.
• School of Chess Excellence 2: Tactical Play - Mark Dvoretsky(Level 1800+; Rating 3.5 on 5) : A very slow read book. Some of the puzzles are really hard (speaking for myself). But most chess experts around the world will agree that Mark Dvoretsky is one of the best chess trainers in the world. And his books are always great. I have only come to appreciate this lately as the book is meant for 1800+ or even master level players.
• Openings: I have not sutdied opening books since 2008 as my opening repertoire was to an extent complete with my lessons. To build my repertoire before that I used the below books along with my lessons
• Starting out series: These are a bunch of books with eg. "Starting out the Ruy Lopez". I have those that I use in my games and built up my repertoire (enetered and saved in Bookup/Chessopeningssoftware and more recently also in chessbase 10). These books are very nice, they are not bulky and at the same time give out the all the main variation along with the main ideas involved.
• The tricky and dynamic lines of ...a6 slav : I play this variation and did not find a starting out series for this and hence purchased this book. Excellent in depth details of this variation
• Endgames : I have studied this from several sources, I will list those from which I have benefitted the most
• The Endgame Manual - Mark Dvoretsky : A great but slow read. Very nicely illustrated principles, but this book has to be combined with the next in the list since not all positions are explained.
• Basic chess endings - Rueben Fine : It is the encyclopedia of chess endings. Its a must have for studying pawn and rook endings. Again, its a slow read, but it covers everything that you would want to know about endings. As I study positions from this book, I enter them in my endings book in Bookup/Chessopeningssoftware software.
• Carlten Mueller Endgame Training (4 dvd series) : I recently purchased them after a recommendation from my friend in my chess club. A great instructional video lecture series from chessbase. I listen to it over and over again to grind the ideas into my head. It is easier to use than a book since you just have to listen and follow.
• Misc
• My Great Predecessors - Garry Kasparov(Level 1500+ although some game/analysis are well over that) : A classic piece of work and I own all five volumes. The best way I have found to use these books is to take a particular opening (say Ruy Lopze ECO C80) and study all games across all the five volumes (and the three books that I mention next) in choronological order. This gives an idea of why certain move choices went out of fashion while other prevailed. This is a very slow read. It takes me sometimes one hour of study for upto 5 days to complete one annotated game. In between, the political stories and facts are also interesting for light read. I have heard many many GMs say, that one of the good ways to improve your chess is to study classic game, and there is no better place than this set. More recently (as of Jan 2010), I have began to use these books in a more conventional way. I am currently studying all of Lasker's games, and will follow with all of Capablanca's games.
• Kasparov vs Karpov - Garry Kasparov(Level 1500+ and same comment as above) : Here again I own the three volumes published so far. I believe there is still one more yet to come out. These books follow the five volumes I mentioned before and I use them exactly in the same manner.

Chess Softwares

Most recently I have started to use Firebird 1.2 and stockfish 1.6. They seem to be extremely fast and much more stronger than what I used before (Fritz 9 and Rybka 2.3). You can download Firebird 1.2 from here and download Stockfish 1.6 from here. Previously I used Rybka 2.3 and Fritz 9; all using the fritz 9 interface. Here too I have started to prefer chessbase 10 interface as I can also keep track of the opening database simultaneously. Generally I use it to analyze my games (but only after I analyze it myself without the engine first) and also to look for strong moves in unfamilar openings (if nothing concrete can be found by searching through my database). I feel turning on an engine to analyze one's game without analyzing it yourself over the baord is a very bad habit. You will be surprised as to how many good moves you can find yourself in post-mortem and this can build up your confidence when later verfied by the engine. Hence I recommend to use the engine (atleast for my level of play) sparingly and only to verify your own analysis.

I never found the necessity to upgrade to a stronger engine (like Rybka 3 or Fritz 12) since for my level that was unnecessary. I may upgrade in future, but this will be solely for the purpose of better user interface -- especially in searching through database of games. The interface provided by Fritz 9 in searching through databases does not provide search parameters like "search by time control" or even "All games between Anand and Kramnik (colors ignores) which Anand won". The problem is you can specify "0-1 or 1-0" searches, but not "Anand win". You will have to do this in two separate searches.

• ChessBase 10 with Big Database 2010: I purchased this very recently (March 2010) and yet to cope up with its capabilities. With ChessBase I must warn people of bugs, but at the same time if you are faimilar with softwares like this you can really exploit its functionalities very well. The main reason I got this was to keep my database well tagged with motifs -- especially for my own games. I can tag my games with say missed win or say missed opponent tatic or whatever it may be and then just before tournament, I can just take a quick look at all of these using the keys I have defined in ChessBase 10. Ofcourse apart from this, the Big Database serves as a better reference database than what I was using earlier (TWIC - below)
• TWIC: This used to be main source of games until I got ChessBase 10. I think I will still continue to download games from TWIC as my subscription to online games will end in 2010. May be I will subscribe to games from chessbase after that. If you are going the TWIC path, then you can update your database from TWIC. They provide the games in chessbase format and this populates the main database. You need to have some starting point though. I used to just have the 1.2 million games that came with fritz 9 as the base. However, this is not enough since none of the games obtained here are annotated. Rather than purchase the mega database (annotated games database) I have worked around with cheapter alternatives as below.
• ChessToday: I (used to) subscribe to the daily chess news letter provide at ChessToday and they provide annotated games/endgames/puzzles everyday covering the games played internationally on that day. I did not find the time in my routine to study the daily annotations and unsubscribed after a year of trying. But if you have the time to go over, then its great. All great players including Anand subscribes to this (fact reported from ChessToday).
• My Games: I also maintain a database of all my games played at the club and tournaments. Once in a month (or before the next tournament), I take a look at those and their analysis to identify some common patterns of mistakes. Now with the help of ChessBase 10, I hope to benefit more.

• ChessOpeningSoftware (Prior name Bookup): I have found the ChessOpeningsSoftware (Bookup) to be a useful tool to study and practice openings. Basically it allows you to enter moves for white and black and then train a give opening from either side. I use this on a weekly basis to constatnly memorize certain openings.
• ChessVibes: I used to subscribe to the ChessVibes openings which provide weekly news letter annotating important opening novelty games and providing an uptodate status of new moves in chess theory. I tried this for close to a year and then unsubscribed mainley because of the lack of time on my part to fully read the articles.

• ChessEye: I have used this ChessEye simple tool (freely available for limited use) since mid 2009 only, but it has been useful to improve my chess visualization. Basically it asks questions like "What color is square a2", "Are a3 and g7 the same color", "Are squares b2 and g7 on the same diagnol", etc etc. Quite often at my level I feel the problem I face during calculation over the board is I make mistakes in my visualization of the boardtwo or three moves deep. This training has probably (I say that because I know my visualization has improved but not sure if this was the main reason amongst several others) helped me to see it better.
• My Own Knight Routes: My trainer suggested this idea to solve knight routes to improve visualization and I developed a program(fairly trivial) to ask me questions (at random) for knight routes (eg. b3 to h7) and I must enter the route (b3 d4 e6 g5 h7 or any corect route ) in order to get that question correct. For about two months, I trained on solving 100 questions a day. A preliminary version of this program can be downloaded here. Please email me if you have questions. In future I plan to create more capabilities for visualization training.