A Daily Schedule – Using Your Time Wisely

From their very childhood, junior chessplayer live under the stress of chronic lack of time.
Many young players complain that they are almost always very busy, and haven’t got enough time for carrying out serious chess studying.
It is necessary to develop the skill of good time management, spend the time with maximum efficiency.
Such skill in a young [...]

TALENT + WORK

The Greatest World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik considered the success in chess as a combination of 4 factors.
* Special Chess Talent
* Good Physical conditions (Health).
* Strong Character
* High working skills
To achieve success in modern chess requires being a universal style chessplayer, playing all stages of a game confidently, and mastering typical positions in various openings.
 
Such a [...]

Your Tournament Activity

Only a player and his coach know how many hours they spend training. To preclude exhaustion of the young chessplayer’s nervous system, it is essential to plan carefully all the time spent by the chess player. An approximate guide is shown below.
Pure “chess preparation” can be divided into three parts:
1. Preparation for the competition;
2. Play during [...]

How To Annotate Your Own Games?

While everyone prefers to learn from the mistakes of others, this is not very realistic when it comes to chess – Annotate Your Games!
A chessplayer’s strength is measured by his or her successes in tournaments. Sport has a single criterion - the result. Should we disagree with it, or bring in some other criteria, the very [...]

The ‘Parents’ Role in Chess Development

It is clear that chess talent is a gift of God, but nevertheless the role of a young chess-player’s parents is rather significant.
First of all, it is most important to identify a child’s abilities as soon as possible and create the conditions for their realization. In fact, chess abilities become obvious right after a child [...]

The Essence of Talent

There are a lot of ways people get to know chess. I remember having seen my father’s sophisticated chess pieces and getting acquainted with an interesting game which looked like a war between two armies. Very soon I understood that the army led by the more experienced commander won the game, and it was not [...]

Developing Ambition And Objectivity.

Chess has also helped me to understand that without an objective evaluation of a position, it is impossible to achieve good results not only in chess but in your life as well. Undoubtedly chess has a very important pedagogic value. It develops memory, logic and fantasy. It improves our reactions, attention and capacity for work [...]

Playing The Classics

It seems to me that a chess-player should first of all learn to play the classical openings, rather than openings such as the English opening, the Reti opening, Pirc-Ufimtsev Defense – the so-called “anti-openings”. These openings imply that the real combat begins only after the 15th move. You can also regularly provoke some interesting positions [...]

No Short Cuts

Usually chessplayers want to get good results immediately (which frequently coincides with Chidden’s desires of their parents and coaches), cutting short the learning process of the chess basics and proceeding to a study of opening theory.
To my mind, it is a mistake of principle. The most significant study principle is violated: proceed from the simple [...]

Efficient Studying

Each coach works according to his own understanding of the training process, with due consideration (let us hope) of the student’s personality. Therefore I would like to draw your attention to the fact that everything laid out below is my subjective opinion.
The first manual on chess basics is of importance. Even now, the best manuals [...]