Chess Tips, Articles and Guides to Help You Win Chess Games

Known as one of the best coaches of our times, Mark Dvoretsky left us a valuable legacy to help chess players improve their training technique and take that much-awaited leap forward. His books are a great source of inspiration and help for every aspiring chess player. Mark Dvoretsky learned how to play chess before elementary school, but back then he was mostly interested in mathematics, so the game wasn’t given that much importance. He started to take chess seriously and began going to the district’s chess club and studying only when he was in the fifth grade.

Chess Engine and Databases: One of the most important tasks every chess player needs to do in order to improve his level is to analyze carefully his own games, regardless of the result. Analyzing your own games has existed forever. Mikhail Botvinnik was one of the most notable world champions to recommend this practice as the essence of chess improvement. If we look back to the days when it was possible to adjourn games, chess players spent nights and days analyzing a position.

BEWARE: this may change the entire trajectory of your chess career! When you think about studying chess tactics—also known as chess puzzles—you may imagine a set of moves that transform some initial losing/neutral position to a significantly more winning one. Though that is true, the reasons you should study them are not only to help you find those winning combinations of moves. In fact, thinking solely in that way will ruin your chess improvement and strategic thought by making you more prone to find “cheap tricks” to win.