proustiskeen wrote on 04/17/12 at 20:16:50:


Thanks for that link, but the readers need to know that many of those exercises weren't created by Dan Heisman. In one case, "I" is a 1600 rated player. 

The quality of the exercises vary quite a bit, not just in terms of difficulty, but in terms of usefulness too.

Some other exercises that I use to work on my visualization in particular:

1) When I read through a book and see a variation, I first read out the variation, which generally involves glancing back and forth between the book and the board on which I have the variation-start position set up. Then I make myself go through the whole variation in my head (still while looking at the start position on the board) without looking at the book. If I've forgotten any of it, I consult the book and then try again.

This makes you look at variations the same way you would in a game, and helps prevent just "reading and nodding".

2) If you are having trouble visualizing the end position of a line, do the best you can to really fix it in your mind. Then execute the moves on the board and try to compare what you see to what was in your head before. Stare at the end position on the board and try to fix that in your head. Then rewind to the original position and try again to execute the moves of the line in your head, and see if you can visualize the end position better.

Calculation has generally been a weak spot for me. I have read a lot of material on chess calculation, including The Inner Game of Chess, and didn't really get much out of any of it. There are some standard techniques like "if your line doesn't work, try reversing the order of moves", but you probably know them already.

These are the activities that I believe actually have increased my calculation ability:

1) I have entered hundreds of simple chess puzzles (I used the Manual of Chess Combinations aka Chess School) into a spaced repetition program (I used mnemosyne to pump up my pattern recognition.

2) A while ago I spent some time doing dual n-back practice. I cannot say how much of the effect I felt from it was just a placebo effect, but I do feel like it qualitatively increased my ability to concentrate in short bursts, in particular to spend the extra ten seconds at the end of the calculation of a line to really "look" at that position and ask myself if it was really quiescent before going ahead with it.

Try any book on pawn endings. Pawn endings are excellent for training yourself to consider every variation precisely. And, pawn endings are essential knowledge, to boot!

As for books that discuss how to pick candidate moves in more complex positions, there are many, many excellent tomes to choose from. 

Some of my favorites include Secrets of Modern Chess, and Chess Strategy in Action by John Watson; The Art of Analysis by Jan Timman, Secrets of Grandmaster Play by John Nunn; and any of a number of Dvoretsky's books. I'm not sure which titles are in print and correlate to my old ones so I'll just leave it at that.

I´m looking for a book that is especially helpful for the process of calculating variations. It should be more than a puzzle book, since it should help with calculation of the "everyday decisions", not only the classcial puzzle themes like mating attack or winning a piece, endgame tactics etc.

I´m pretty weak at calculating simple variations and visualisizing the positions three or more moves ahead. It would be helpful if the book contains examples for this and is not to high-level: If there is a Dvoretsky - book on this, I guess it would be too much for me...

I know Aagaard wrote a book on the subject, but it was not to well reviewed.

Any better ideas?
Thanks in advance