THOUGHTS OF A CHESS ADDICT

Sometimes I wonder to myself what would be the most satisfying moment for a chess trainer? Is it the huge amounts of money that he can get from dishing out lessons, or rather, just the joy of the students' faces when they have achieved their goals? So far, 2010 has been a good year for me. Most of the students that were with me for more than a year have achieved mostly 50-60 rating point increases. The ones that joined me this year, some for just 5 months or less, have also performed well. I would rather not mention their names (mainly to protect the innocent) but display their photos. S has been with me for more than 2 years now, he has seen steady improvement from the days of scoring 3 to 3.5 pts out of 7 back in 2008.  His latest  SCF rating stands 1358 as compared to 1008 when he started. 350 pts in 2 years. He has just scored 5.5/7 and finished 6th place out of 120 registered players at the recent Toa Payoh West CC Primary School section.  The chief factor that prope...

Apart from the books that I have recommended, there's some works that the aspiring chess-player should at least read, once, in his career: This is the pioneering work by GM Alexander Kotov that explores the idea of how one should conduct his game in terms of thinking. Though a little dated in approach perhaps, one should at least attempt to start thinking systematically first before branching out into other methods. The Tree of Analysis indeed gives one a structure to organise a player's thoughts. So I highly recommend this book as a starting treatise before venturing to other books. It is indeed puzzling to see some marvel about joint analysis of positions as a possible training method. Kotov has explained that he embarked on this discipline, filling his notebooks with variations he calculated (without moving the pieces of course) over complex positions derived from actual games. It is propelled him from a finalist in the Russian Championships to GM. So honestly, deep analysi...