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

In this article, I would like to share my thoughts on the topic that is, for sure, extremely important for every chess player. That is how to calculate variations. Unfortunately, this highly interesting and crucial topic had never been covered in a great detail. The only decent source I know is the book of a Soviet Grandmaster Alexander Kotov “How to became a grandmaster”. However, it is quite evident that since it was written half a century ago, some ideas are not relevant anymore, the main reasons are that 1. time controls have been decreased 2. computers have changed chess world drastically.

Many players want to find the cause of their chess problems but have no idea how to do that. Even when they analyze their games they do not dig deep enough in order to identify the very root of the problem. In today’s article, we will talk about one very famous method that can be applied for finding the problems in one’s game, the Method of Five Whys.  

Many people think their results depend only on how much time they had invested in studying chess. They can learn openings, solve tactics, analyze masters’ games, and all of that is, of course, extremely useful and necessary for improvement. But many players still perform in real games worse than they should have. Quite often the reason lies in non-chess skills.