Book on Calculation

Hi guys,

My coach and I were doing a lesson and he pointed out that I have a tendency to be lazy with my calculation. If I want to break through to the next level, I need to stop being so lazy with that calculation. I just played some move and got a small advantage, but I could have gotten something even better.

Here is the example from what we were talking about:

So does anyone have a recommendation for a book about calculation? Not just tactics, but more practical calculation

The books I've read have mainly been strategic, like My System and Reassess Your Chess. I've read some tactics books, like The Complete Chess Workout and Chess Tactics from Scratch, but are Chess Tactics the best way to improve calculation? 

I looked at this a bit, would anyone recommend Aagaard's Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation or Dvoretsky and Yusupov's Secrets of Creative Thinking

I might be way off but calculation seems mainly the ability to visualize potential positions and memory as to how the future position has progressed and the results of past like positions.

I'm not sure there's a book that helps more than brute force training and experience. For training, I basically played out GM games and then tried to play them back from memory. After some success, play out the game without a board and look for other variations from the text with a judgement on the new position.

Then put the new position on the board and see if the visualization is basically correct. The idea being that it hopefully becomes easier to see a position in the mind and play it out a number of moves into the future, have a clear picture of the resulting position and make an accurate assessment.

If this can be accomplished fairly well, then it can be a matter of extending the number of moves.

Maybe it's not best but works OK for me. But if you do find a good book, passing it along would be appreciated.

Imagination in Chess by Paata Gaprindashvili

My son in recent months has gotten a little lazy when calculating, so his coaches recommended the following:

1.  After deciding on a move, say the move slowly to yourself, and then check the move.

2.  Do endgame puzzles that call for precise calculation to the very end.  A coach recommended Jan Timman's _Art of the Endgame_ and Dvoretsky's _Studies for Practical Players_ in this context.

3.  Do the positions in Aagard's _Practical Chess Defense_.

There are a lot of books on calculation.  I found Jonathan Tisdall's Improve Your Chess Now to be the most thoughtful account.  Andrew Soltis' How To Choose A Chess Move is a more basic primer.  John Nunn's Secrets of Practical Chess touches on calculation.  Alexander Kotov's Think Like a Grandmaster was perhaps the first book to talk about his tree approach.

The problem with Kotov's book is that the vast majority of GMs don't really think like that.  Kotov is rationalizing a process that is in reality much more chaotic but also, paradoxically, easier and more efficient than using a tree.  In computer lingo, you could say good chessplayers use hashes (via pattern recognition) rather than logical tree search.

Wow, thanks for all the advice. I would agree with yyoochess about Think Like A Grandmaster. There is good practical advice in the book, and the positional elements of the book can be very good. The good part of the book is it starts you thinking about structuring your own thinking, and stopping yourself from going over the same lines a thousand times. However, it is impractical, and I've never taken it into much account over the board. Improve Your Chess Now, How to Choose a Chess Move, and Imagination in Chess all sound very interesting. I'm going to check those out. Endgame puzzles that require precise calculation does sound like a great way to improve calculation though, so I think I'll try that

One of Kotov's big insights was that analysis/calculating is an activity and not just the endproduct.  Before Kotov, everyone just published finished analysis, without talking about how to go about creating it. His emphasis on integrating evaluation and calculation also seems to be something you've adopted.

My problem with Kotov is that he doesn't really tell you how to decide which moves to examine first, and perhaps he does go a bit overboard in insisting that you only ever examine each line once.  Tisdall takes a more liberal approach, suggesting a couple of rules of thumb for selecting which moves to consider first, and also allowing that your thoughts may take you back to a line that you already looked at.

Endgames are a simplified case as you can often tell who is going to win in the resulting positions.  Learning to calculate in the middlegame is different in that your evaluation is going to be more subjective.

There are books where GMs try to explain their thoughts on various positions: Larsen's Good Move Guide, Vlastimil Hort and Jansa's The Best Move, and more recently Volokitin's Perfect Your Chess.  These books might provide some study material for middle game calculation.  Many of Dvoretsky's books are like this too.

Tisdall also offers an insightful perspective on Kotov.

"grand master preparation: calculation" by aagaard ...advanced with clear concepts....

Good book.

i calculate by always using a numerical approach.so i look for candiddate moves,weaknesses,open files,propyllactic moves,enemy plans.then i start my 1 2 3 4 which puts me 2 moves ahead or 4 ply deep.also forced lines and checks should be looked at deeply ,then evaluated by what you think.did i create weaknesses for my opponent or myself,was tension released,increased,but i can go to 12 moves deep using the 123  method ,so its worth a try.good luck.

What is the 123 Method of Chess Calculation?  I've never heard of it.

just my own thing i do .a easy way to do it would be to put pawns on h2 and a7 and calculate ,using the counting method to figure how many moves to get a QUEEN.so 10 ply is 5 moves deep

I have Aagaard's Grandmaster Preparation: Calculation but it is a very tough book. Expect to spend hours on a single puzzle. While for advanced players, I still find it very useful, it helps train your brain to look for all the possibilities and actually calculate, even if you don't find the entire sequence of the solution.

you might want to check out....another forum thread on the topic...

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/is-aagards-grandmaster-preparation-calculation-good

Working on tactics specifically will most definitely help you become more disciplined and diligent in your calculation. I would recommend Maxim Blokh's 'Combinational Art' and 'Combinational Motifs'. In my view, they are the best books on pure tactics training around, because it's divided into motifs/themes, and nearly all positions are solvable for both black  and white. And each page go from fairly easy to really difficult (12-15 moves deep).

In Kotov's model, combinational vision is different from calculation.  Combinational vision is about recognizing a pattern, so sometimes you don't need to calculate at all.