Studying Chess Made Easy by Andrew Soltis

Author:Andrew Soltis [Soltis, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-84994-135-8
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2010-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Improving your look-ahead

Calculation consists of two skills – looking ahead and accurately evaluating what you see. The first one is the easier to improve. Some methods involve strengthening your general powers of visualization. They begin with:

Bolstering your board feeling

Board feeling is a hard-to-explain sense of the chessboard that all good players acquire. You may already have board feeling and not know it.

You have it if, for example, someone mentions a square like e6 or a7 and you can tell, without looking at a diagram or a board, whether it is a dark or light square.

If you don’t have board feeling – and no one is born with it – you can develop it with practice. Here are typical exercises:

Close your eyes and visualize White’s queen rook at the start of a game. Try to think of what color that square, a1, is. (If you can’t, take a quick peek at the board and then close your eyes again.)

Then think of the long diagonal that leads from a1 to h8. Try to visualize each square on the diagonal and name it. Then try the same exercise with the other long diagonal, from a8 to h1.

Another exercise is similar. With eyes closed, try to see d1, the square that the White queen stands on at the beginning of the game. What color is it? What’s the color of the square of White’s queen bishop? Black’s kingside knight? White’s c-pawn? Black’s g-pawn? And so on.

Of course, your eyes will be wide open when you calculate. Yet board sense and overall playing strength seem to be closely related. All strong players appear to have excellent board sense, perhaps because it’s a component of “blindfold” play. That leads to another way to improve general visualization power:

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