Do you use Kotov’s Chess Tree?

I’m trying to come up with a good way to lay out the best possible moves and counter moves but it gets too big, too fast with regular paper and Microsoft word starts to get unruly too?

do you use a flow diagram? If so which do you prefer because the ones I’ve seen  won’t let you zoom out indefinitely?

PS. I am aware of Tisdall’s Improve your chess now book that refutes the chess tree.  But since I’m still an amateur to this game I’m discovering what works and what doesn’t for myself.

Thanks!

I don't think that any real chess player rigorously follows Kotov's whole tree of variations. But that doesn't mean that his method doesn't have a lot to offer. Just the simple act of identifying all the plausible candidate moves will help cure us of the very typical fault of stopping at the first promising looking move. Just by looking at more candidates, and giving them a quick once-over, we will discover possibilities that might have gone unnoticed. But I don't think anyone actually calculates every branch only once and never repeats. That doesn't sound human

Thanks for the insight.

I agree with the above post. Not even the strongest grandmasters can think so rigidly, but Kotov was a very big self critic in a way that I believe he would try to force himself to think in a way that's more robotic than human. Still it's very useful especially when trying to stamp out bad habits like thinking in circles or avoiding analysis altogether.

I do, but it's kind of a bonsai.

I also use a sort of "shrub of variations"