Chess forum by Grandmasters

Think like a Grandmaster

Hey, champions! 
We're going to have a webinar with one of the best coaches - GM Avrukh Boris, on the topic “How Grandmasters think.” 
It's gonna be an interactive event. 
You can post the questions here, and I'll try to ask him during the event. 

For more info and for taking a seat, click the link below. 
https://chessmood.com/event/think-like-gm-boris-avrukh

 

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Keeping it on the subject, the main question I have would be is how to train to be able to think that [whatever he's demonstrating]. Often when you look back on something you've mastered you think well if only I'd tried that and done that first, then I'd have got there a lot quicker and sometimes these insights are not always forthcoming in lectures unless you ask. The suggestion might need to be considered from different viewpoints: for those who have an hour a day, and those who are putting lots more time in.

1.What is the best training method to improve calculation for 2150+ elo players up to FM level? - solving random tactics, workbooks on deep calculation (Volokitin, Ramesh), where's the secret? 2.What's your favourite thing or course from chessmood that gives most benefit for an improving player? 3. Tips on breaking plateau (stuck on the same 2100 level for many years)? 4. Tips on winning against lower rated opponents? Thank you.

A couple of questions for Grandmaster Avrukh: 1) Do Grandmasters always consciously make a list of candidate moves before starting to analyse? 2) How much variation is there between grandmasters in terms of their thinking process? Thanks!

Friends, later we'll also invite him for a general Masterclass. 
This one is about Grandmaster thinking. What're the differences? Etc… 
Would be good if your questions are related to it. 

Excellent discussion Avetik, it was really cool to listen to. Among other things it makes me realize how far I have yet to go with my chess progression...I am just grateful I have ChessMood to help me along the way!

Improving calculation / visualisation

Hi everybody, I believe I have found the perfect website for training calculation skills. Continue reading to find out more... I am rated ELO 2060 currently and preparing for my next tournament that starts on Monday. Before the tournament I have set up a goal to improve my calculation skills. I imagined one needs to practice a lot. But how to practice, that is not so easy to figure it out. There are many books, websites tools, etc. After some research I realized that solving tactics is the way to go, but they should be at the right level (just a bit above my level) so I can push myself to improve. If they are too easy I will not improve if they are too hard I will get discouraged. I tried the popular chess websites (lichess, chessdotcom and chessbase) but somehow the tactics there are a bit too random for me, even though I like chessbase tactics the most. I am also a chess teacher using the famous Dutch chess curriculum called "The Steps Method". I went to their website looking for updates on the programme and stumbled upon a free feature they call puzzles. Every week on Monday they upload 48 puzzles. (6x8 Mon-Sat). Each day starts with the puzzle at level 1 and ends with a puzzle at level 8. For those who do not know the Steps Method the levels correspond to: Level 1: ELO 0 - 800 Level 2: ELO 801 - 1400 Level 3: ELO 1401 - 1600 Level 4: ELO 1601 - 1750 Level 5: ELO 1751 - 1900 Level 6: ELO 1901 - 2100 Level 7: ELO 2100 - ???? Level 8: ELO ???? - ???? So everybody can participate. My experience so far: - It's good to start from level 1 not matter your strength as a warm up and get a good feeling to solve some tactics before it gets harder - There is a real difficulty increase from one level to another - Puzzles are well chosen and from real OTB games with instructive content - So far I have never solved all levels on the same day without an error. Today maybe will be the first time. I have solved 1-7 correctly and I am readying for level 8. - Levels 1-4 I solve on the screen, levels 5-8 I setup on the board - It usually starts to get difficult for me at level 6, sometimes at level 5, but for sure at level 7 and 8. - So you can see that it quite corresponds to my ELO strength. Give it a try: https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/puzzle-monday.php Enjoy!

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Interesting set of exercises thanks. Based on these eight, I agree they are the sort of positions that occur in games quite frequently. Nice range of difficulties too. I wish the board could be made larger, and I would prefer if the board was flipped when it is black to move, but neither issue was a huge deal. I managed to solve all eight, but I will freely admit that I got a little lucky on the last one. I saw the overall idea well enough, and calculated some sensible variations, but overlooked one defensive idea. Somehow I had chosen the correct square for the rook to defend against that idea. Could have been the magic of intuition, or more likely just dumb luck :-) For calculation training, I try to focus on: - Seeing the full solution right through to the end. - Seeing all the defensive tries. I think that was advice from RB Ramesh, and probably others too. I also find my level of confidence my solution is a useful thing to monitor. How to train this stuff, including the different types of training material and what they are good for, is an interesting topic.

Awesome recommendation! Thank you

king's Indian

How to win in for black strategies

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Hi, could you be more specific please?

I think you should try to break open whites center with pawn breaks.

Live with NM Robert Ramirez on his YouTube channel

GM Avetik, Thank you for the invitation to listen to your interview this morning. It was enjoyable to listen to but mostly it made me feel very grateful to have found Chessmood! For both the amazing content as well as the fantastic community to be a part of. I really hope your outreach efforts are able to be heard and felt across the chess world. More people need Chessmood! Thank you for putting together such a great resource. Leslie

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Thank you Leslie!! 

You are always supporting us, not only with good words but with your presence in the streams too. It is very much appreciated. 

By the way, Hovhannes said that you played very good against him last day. Very nice! Keep the good mood and the good work!!

Thanks a lot, Leslie brother! 

Why some opening courses disappears

I have noticed some opening courses disappeared. For example, Alapin variation disappeared in "Sicilian' sidelines" courses although it is acceptable due to a new alapin course. Nevertheless, the new course deal with some different set-ups from the older course in some variation so that we cannot re-watch these older variation in the older course. In addition, in the accelerated dragon course, "craziest variation" section (I don't remember exact name) disappeared in the advanced section, which, I believe, deal with 7. Be2 d5. I think these disappearances are for some modification of the courses and it's very welcoming. But it's confusing for me because some of the variations I use disappears in the course without notice (as far as I know). Let us know which sections are changed or modified and why if your work does not become too much hard. I really appreciate your hard work on ChessMood!!

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Hello Enju-san,

Regarding the Dragon course, I believe that you are confused with the “Scotch course”, there we have the “craziest variation” section in the advanced course, but we never had any advanced section for the Be2 variation. It is a line that happens a lot in the streams but we never had an advanced section. The course was published in 2019 and remains unchanged.

As for the Alapin, yes, there are basically 3 lines that changed a bit and since Gabuzyan recorded the course on the Alapin again we did not want to confuse our members. If we keep 2 different repertoires it would be confusing. If you watch the Alapin course you will see very fast what is the minimal difference if you have the old lines. I know that it may be troublesome for you and we apologize for it, but it will be much easier to adapt to the new setup, you will not see much change, I promise. ?

By the way, are you going to Chennai too?

Course request: Color Complexes

Hey ChessMood Genius GMs, I remember watching a course on ChessMood about weak squares, and I think it touched on color complexes. Then the other day I noticed a 9-hour video course elsewhere that is entirely about color complexes. A sample video showed a position in which a pair of rooks shouldn't be traded because White loses the ability to control the light squares after that. I found it very instructional! Is there any chance such a course is on the horizon at ChessMood? This is a topic that players usually don't fully understand until they are at least class A players. Thanks! Richard

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Have you started going thru the Classical Masterpieces? There's a good amount of comments about this subject in there.

Appreciation

I have joined within 3 months and the massive improvement in my approach and the opportunity to have a fighting position out of the opening is a tremendous gift you have given us. Forever grateful chessmood family!

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This is indeed very nice to hear!! ?We are very happy for you!!☺️
Keep learning, keep growing!!!?

Classical Attacking/Endgame Courses

I have a question about how to approach these courses. Would you recommend that we view the courses one game per day? For the 100 classical masterpieces course, there's a note before the course recommending that we only watch one game per day, so I'm wondering if you would recommend the same approach for the other two classical courses.

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Hi Alex,

Well, that depends a bit on the time available for chess study that you have, but yes, as a general rule Avetik always recommends one per day. It is the same for the other 2 courses. Chessmood started in 2018 and the most seasoned members have already watched the first courses and continue with the other ones. 

White plays 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 is it covered

Hi have given a cursory look at the summary of the opening courses. I have always wished to play the Benko but never did so because my knowledge was that White can avoid it by playing 2.Nf3. Is this line covered in the course? By looking at the summary it doesn't seem so.

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I don't think it is covered in the opening courses, but you can see in the streams that g6 is the move that fits with the repertoire there. See some games in the "Rock 'n' Rolling with Black" course where 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 is played: https://chessmood.com/course/rock-n-rolling-with-black/episode/4349 https://chessmood.com/course/rock-n-rolling-with-black/episode/4350 https://chessmood.com/course/rock-n-rolling-with-black/episode/4353 This last one transposed back to a Benko: https://chessmood.com/course/rock-n-rolling-with-black/episode/4313

Hi Luca, you can also look at this thread where I replied showing the transpositions to the openings offered by us. After 2.Nf3 g6 and then White has many possibilities that will take us to different openings but they are all commented individually. Check it out:

https://chessmood.com/forum/threads/question-regarding-the-black-repertoire?reply_id=15553&page=1

Game Continuation

Hello All, I was playing White against a FIDE Master in an Exchange Caro-Kann in a recent OTB tournament. I played the opening well, but after exchanging the queens on move 21, I was unable to find a plan and messed up. I am not sure if trading the queens was right either. Any suggestions for how to continue the game and areas of improvement?

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Playing through the game, I thought 28.h4 would be a natural move. The idea is just to play h5 activating your rook and potentially gaining entry into the black position. That's the optimistic outlook. From a pessimistic viewpoint h4 also has merit as it makes the g5 break harder for black, and playing h5 could allow you to liquidate your weak h-pawn. Also, if black responds to h4 with h5 then they have a weakness on g6 that needs constant defending. (I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm sure you realise all this stuff.) Stockfish likes 28.h4 with a score of 1.6 at depth 43.

Looked at it without engine and agree with Peter M that h4 had to be played at move 28 or 29. Also I felt 14 Ne5 premature. I would have played 14 Qc2 as not doing anything on the queenside making Ne5 more of a threat and meeting Rac8 with the calm 15 Qb1 and maybe aiming to play 16 Re3 as this is flexible and in the esteemed words of our coach , Avetik is not revealing our hand. Only thoughts.

Concern in the Dutch

Hello All, This was yet another game against a strong player in the same OTB tournament as my previous post, "Game Continuation". Here I was playing Black and lost without a fight after my opponent played the strange move d5 against the b6 setup. Attached is the position. What is the correct way to counter this move?

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I'm interested in this, too. According to Stockfish 15, Black should go ahead and fiachetto the Bishop, and then in the next couple of moves Black should exchange pawns in the center. This makes sense since Bishops thrive in open positions. But that's just the engine's perspective.

Minor Success Story

For a long time (2 years?), I had been stuck on the Chess.com tactics trainer at about 1920 or so. Going through more puzzles didn't seem to help, as I had already solved or attempted to solve thousands of them (yes, seriously). I put that tactics quizzer on the back burner and decided to go through some courses at ChessMood. I went all the way through the tactics course, partially through the mating patterns course, and I completed some middlegame courses, too. A few days ago, I decided to go back to Chess.com and try a tactics puzzle. Not sure why I did this, but I guess I was just hoping that something had changed. Well, now my tactics rating has shot up to 2101, and I'm occasionally solving puzzles rated at master level. The only significant change to my chess study has been ChessMood, so I just wanted to thank all the GMs who work here! Hope my fellow adult improvers are seeing similar success.

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Richard, with ChessMood instruction the progress and growth is real! Congratulations on your success!

awesome!!! congrats! keep up the good work!

Nice one! It's always nice to have measurable progress. For learning/enforcing tactical patterns I think it's fairly well accepted that doing puzzles grouped by theme is the way to go. So if you want to supplement your ChessMood tactics study with say a puzzle book, then make sure it is organised that way. It also helps to have human curated puzzles where the theme is clear and, well, thematic :-). Doing Chess.com puzzles is still useful, but more for exercising your calculation and visualisation skills as well as benchmarking your progress.

Tactic ninja quizz#27

Hi all, At the end of this puzzle, what if black goes Kg6 forking Rh5 and Bf6

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Well, nice question, ?this is exactly the move that Lasker played in the game against Mexican GM Carlos Torre… This is maybe the most famous example of windmill.. Check out the game and see for yourself what happened… I also added a video of the game explained that may help you too to remember this pattern…

?

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1100063

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1DTrrrf6Cs

Closed positions vs open positions

Hello everyone, I have a question about chess styles in the opening and I would be interested in your opinions (and the opinions of GM Gabuzyan and/or GM Avetik ; also Kevin D if you are still active here :) ) I'm rated around 2300 online (my rating varies from 2250 to 2400 sometimes) and I have a preference for closed positions because I think it's easier to plan in the middle game. Until now, I almost never play open positions (at least not vs much stronger opopnents because I don't feel comfortable), and for this reason, I'm weak in this kind of positions. So my question is: Should I continue to work on my strength (reaching closed positions in the openings and continue to work mainly on middlegame & endgame) or should I voluntarily adopt openings leading to open positions to improve different skills from there (calculation, seizing the initiative, attacking, etc). Thank you :)

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Hello! Can you be a boxing fighter, but never use one of your hands in the battle? Let's say you have a strong left hook but the right side is your weakness? Probably not... Opponents will identify and exploit your weakness and as well sometimes you can't avoid situations when you need to use the right hand! Same in chess. You can have strengths and try to build the games over them, but completely not being able to play open positions will have a lot of downsides. You can watch some games in our commented games section, watch the streams and improve your understanding of open-style positions. Good luck!

Hi Akiba, Imo in modern chess, it's very important to have more universal approach, as positions tend to change couple of times during the game from closed to open, from calm to tactical, so specializing only on closed positions/opening might be weakness as GM Gabuzyan mentioned. Anyway, concrete calculation/tactics beat any kind of strategic/positional concept so that's what I'm trying to improve in my play. Best of luck!

where I can download pGn files?

where I can download pGn files?

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Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. 
To download the pgns of the courses, you just need to go to the end of the section of the video course. There you will find that the last section is the pgn for downloading. 

Check out the picture attached for easy reference. Every course is the same, at the end you find the pgn and sometimes even pdfs.

 (Look at the bottom of the picture).

Blindfold Chess

Hi ChessMood Family,

Interesting topic that I would like to discuss is Blindfold Chess. Do you find it interesting? May it be useful for chess in general? How many moves will you be able to make in a blindfold game?

Please also mention your elo , and if you already have experience in blindfold chess.

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Hi

This is a very interesting subject! I have tried blindfold and am so bad at it! It is a fine chess skill to hold a game only in your head (mind) and play well! I have much admiration for those players that can do this and would like to do it myself, but first I feel I must fix my normal bad chess, with normal sight/vision first!

Many top players can do this (eg IM L Rozman, GM Timur Gareyev, GM Magnus Carlsen & GM Nakamura and almost all top 50 GM's I would think, could make a decent try at it!). There are even famous blindfold tournamets (eg the Amber rapid blindfold blitz). Chess.com & lichess have the facility to choose blindfold play mode, so you can play it yourself (& there are YouTube videos showing games played blindfold or you can observe these  games on the chess servers or at Twitch chess channels etc).

Have you ever tried it?

I replied to a different thread about Blindfold chess, but then I realised it wasn't a Pro Members thread so I deleted that post and am replying to this one instead. Hopefully it's OK to re-start a 2 year old thread. I think it's an interesting topic. I recently started playing blindfold on lichess. I played some blindfold many years ago, then gave up chess for 25+ years, so was curious if I could still manage. I was also inspired to try it when I heard Avinash Ramesh talk about playing blindfold simuls as part of his training (https://chessmood.com/blog/avinash-ramesh-story). No simuls for me yet though! I'm playing blindfold at 15+10 so I have plenty of time. Started with a few games vs the computer on easy levels, and then vs a few 1500 players. Doing OK so far and will be curious to see where my blindfold rating ends up. The lichess blindfold interface feels a tiny little bit like cheating, because having the empty board there helps as does having the move list. Got to start somewhere though, and when time starts to run down you don't have time to go back through the move list anyway. I do think it has some positive training value. To use a weight training analogy, it feels like it is isolating particular chess muscles. It also requires sustained concentration. Surprisingly it is also quite calming. Edit: I forgot to mention my Elo (2265 but from long ago) as requested in the original post.

Using Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro - ChessMood Racer

Hi Chess Mood Community, I wanted to share some recent experiences that I had to using Hiarcs to create and update my PGN for Black/White Mood openings. I know many use ChessBase but hopefully this will help MacOS users. If you download the All ChessMood Racer Games PGN from the forum and open it in Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro and then load your game that you want to analyze then you are able to open the tree explorer window and switch the database to the Racer games (see attached photo). By doing this, you are able to go through each move of your game and compare it to the moves that were streamed. It's a really quick and easy way to see where you went out of book. You can also do this method with the PGNs from the actual opening courses. This may be already known to the community but I didn't see it in the forum and I wanted to share. Thanks and good luck working on your PGNs.? https://chessmood.com/forum/pro-channel/summary-of-racing-from-1200-to-2200 https://chessmood.com/forum/pro-channel/summary-of-racing-from-2200-2800

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I use Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro as well, and I love it. I do own ChessBase 16, which I run in a VM on my iMac, but Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro has drastically fewer bugs and much faster searches if you convert your database to the HCE format. You can also run searches on previous search results. It's very powerful.

Idea for chess book recommendations

Hi chess friends, So I've seen dozens of chess book lists wherein chess masters recommend classics like the Life and Games of Mikhail Tal or My Great Predecessors. And then I heard about another chess video site whose GM coaches assign the same books to everyone in a given rating category. So all players in the 1600-1800 group are told to read through 2 or 3 specific game collections, while players in the 1800-2000 range have different books assigned to them. Could the GMs at ChessMood perhaps simply offer a list of recommended books broken down by elo range? I googled this before asking, and I noticed that there was a ChessMood page entitled "we recommend" or something like that. However, the link for that page is now dead. Thanks for your help!

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Yes, you are right. We had one page where we recommended some books, but since the update on the website, we removed it. Now we're working on a similar page, where people will be able to find our recommendations. Based on level and based on the topic. Stay tuned! ?
 

By the way, since you started this topic, what is your elo range right now, maybe I can give you some recommendation… ?

If you're looking for a book, then I can highly recommend Simple Chess by GM Michael Stean. It's written as a strategy book, but can also be enjoyed as a game collection. Stean is an excellent writer and annotates instructive games by the likes of Fischer, Botvinnik, Karpov, Petrosian etc. Although the book is sometimes viewed as a beginner book, it contains lots of profound wisdom that is applicable at much higher levels. If you manage to fully absorb everything in this book then you will for sure become a stronger player. And amazingly it is only $10 on Amazon. Probably the best value chess book out there. A gem.

buffering

why today courses are buffering a lot when my internet is good

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The issue is a result of the most recent Chrome update. Some of the users fail to load some videos.
We've contacted the support center of the video hosting service provider, and it turned out that the issue is on their side. So now they're working to resolve it. 

Thanks to all for your patience and understanding, we hope that it will be solved very ?soon.
By the way if you try with another browser for the time being it will problably solve the issue. I always use Firefox.

OTB classical tournament in Lithuania - my games

Hi chessmooders, For a week I'm participating in the OTB tournament in my country. Trying to improve as a player and use the gained chessmood knowledge. Here I'll post the games I played: Round 1 vs GM - chessmood caro line with Avetik's maneuver Na3-c2-e1-d3 Need opinion of how to improve that variation the way this game went https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/5DZYYrEA4E

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I let Stockfish search fairly deeply (depth 48) on the position after black's move 19. I can post some lines, but will wait in case people want to post their own analysis.

Had 2 double round days so now I'm back with my game recaps. So far tournament didnt go so well, but I'm keeping the mood, fighting and sharing the games either way with you guys. Here's the game of the round 2 - interesting concept how to use compensation with 2 bishops, which I didnt manage to do unfortunately ? https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/2ZYuxJ7X1Y

Round 4 was an endgame knightmare for me (literally ?) but very instructive moment how not to play https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/3Sk9Nroezz

Finally bounced back in round 5 and scored in the dutch my first tournament win https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/2WENzGAXB4

From the round 1 game, Stockfish likes 20.g4 with a 0.68 score at depth 48. 20.f3 gets a zero score at the same depth. g4 looks a bit risky but makes some sense because their active bishop is driven back and our bishop gets a nice square on g2. 20.g4 Bc8 21.Rc1 (21.Bg2 exd4 22.cxd4 Bh6 is a bit annoying) b5 22.Bg2 is the main line. At least white has all pieces in play there. A sample line that shows white's resources is 20.g4 Bc8 21.Rc1 Qb6 (looks kind of tempting) 22.Bg2 exd4 23.cxd4 Qxd4 (Btw, I love how the d3 knight defends f2 here.) 24.Bc7 Rd7 25.Qb3 and black is in trouble with Bb6 threatened. 25...f5 is forced and engine shows +2.

In round 6 I won with caro exchange chessmood Bd3 line, though instructive moment with g5 push which I didnt make (for some reason ?) https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/2pgeDmyCkn the photo is from round 8 :D game coming up

Game 7 was a crazy one in the rare dutch setup for white, instructive mistakes were made by both sides, unfortunately I made the last bad decision which cost the game. Still I learned much how not to play these types of positions (I hope ?) https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/2LC69qCLTp

Round 8, used chessmood Grand Prix to good effect to score a cool win https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/515f7B3iw8

And the final round 9 game, which I'm not proud of, but there are instructive moments how even Latvian champion GM can go wrong in the opening and how to seize those critical moments https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/3dxpmfh3aN That was the end of this tough master tournament, scored 4/9 dropped 4 elo points, despite my intense training it didnt go well. I'm sure will do better in the next classical OTB in Riga in August Gained insight what I need to work on: - calculation, candidate move selection (calculation workbooks) - bishop pair in the middlegame/endgame utilization and play for compensation (game 2) - B vs N endgame - when the N is better, when B dominates refresh the knowledge (game 4) - openings I think I'm doing ok, just maybe analyse some lines from the games for the future Please friends, advise what you think my weaknesses are from these games and what I should work on. I'll continue playing and improving with chessmood, COGRO! ?