I would wager its similar to how you formulate a strategy with a positional style, but instead of looking for something like "Im gonna end up with a passed pawn" its more so in "im gonna have this tactical threat".

Usually my best wins are when Im able to sort of combine the two, which is something that took me a long time to figure out, where I use a specific tactical threat to get my pieces into strong squares. The key is that I'm trying to sort of build a "crescendo" where I move a piece and try to threaten two things at once and eventually my opponent can't defend anymore.

So basically even when there is no tactics, there are likely to be threats in a positions. So even if objectively a position is equal, there is value in trying to imagine how a winning attack will come and if the threat is worth playing, even though you are aware your opponent is gonna defend it. And if they dont (because they miss it or dont know what youre trying to do), well now you "created" a tactic.

If you've got a strong positional style, then you probably already recognize that importance and can sort of see where your pieces are more active. Trying to solve more puzzles and get familiar with more patterns, in turn allows you to spot more of such type of threats.

Hope this helps, cheers!

I try to play the most active move. Control more squares, create a threat, do something so that my opponent doesn't have time to breathe and consolidate, he has to react.

I often find myself thinking in an almost computer like fashion. Just calculating raw lines.

I've been trying to force myself to make more positional observations and more human judgment.

“Hehe me push pawn”

Create weakness, exploit weaknesses. How do you do that? Tactics and good piece coordination.

Going for the king isn't always the right plan — if it's not clear to me how to attack it, I'd look for other ways to get an advantage or improve my position.

The types of books you're looking for are middlegame books and pactical endgame books.

Middlegame books:

Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide

- More specific book that teaches you middlegame plans in specific positions. E.g. has an entire section dedicated to the Benoni, Queen Pawn openings, etc.

- You can read the whole book (which I highly recommend), or you can break it down into whatever sections you're interested in!.

Pump Up Your Rating

- This book is more general about assessing your strength and plans in a middlegame. The main focus is on pawn breaks (the plan) and piece trades (assessing strengths and weaknesses).

- Also has a great advice on general chess improvement.

These two books go well hand in hand. Pump up your rating is general and teaches you good middlegame concepts. Chess Structures takes these and applies it to specific situations. These books both provide lots of examples so you can drill in the way you suggest.

​

Endgame books:

Amateur to IM

- Despite the title, this books is largely on the study of endgames. Practice makes perfect, doing lots of deep analysis of endgames will improve your overall gameplay.

- This book is also about improving your thinking process from "drilling" which is more rote memorisation to "analysing" which is a more active form of using your brain.

100 Endgames you must know

- This book breaks down to the most important theoretical endgames you should know. These are the things that lead you to know instantly certain endings are won/drawn/lost and save brain power in games/time scrambles.

Think like a super GM, by Mickey Adams and Puharto.

It's a book of puzzles that you are presented to you. But the puzzles are then also done by a lot of players from 900 rating up to a super GM. They all explain their reasoning (even timestamped!), and after the super GM figures out the best line , the lines of everyone are compared.

It really helped me move up in thinking about the game, gone from one or two-movers to "I want to prepare this pawnbreak in 6 moves, so I have to overdefend this knight to make that happen first".

Because you see how better players think, you start to adapt and use that logic yourself at some point.

I can recommend the book 'Think like a super gm' featuring michael adams, it's a series of puzzle positions you spend like 10-15 minutes on , then you get to see the thoughts of players of different rating ranges and how they evaluated the position and what they were thinking. You will pick up a lot of principles from it.

You learn advanced stuff basically by looking at advanced stuff. The medium for which this works best is entirely personal. It seems you learn stuff very well by dissecting amateur game analysis, in contrast to just analysing GMs playing very well against each others. Ben Finegold analyses kids games a lot, so I might start there. He's a kind-hearted weirdo, just see if you vibe with his humor.

If you speak german, there is a fantastic book I'm working through called "Lehrreiche Kinder- und Jugendpartien" by Gert Schnider (IM, Austrian youth team coach). The book is a game collection ordered by opening, and in each chapter he shows the same opening being treated by people below 1000, through the amateur ranks into the 2300s in some cases, pointing out the typical mistakes along the way and how to avoid them. Sadly there is no english version to this book (yet?), but you could google-translate an e-book version and hope it's readable. Because the whole book only covers openings after 1. e4 e5 ine might hope on a continuation, and with that maybe a translation.

In terms of popular intermetiate-ish resources that I can recommend -

*Silman's Complete Endgame Course - Jeremy Silman*

This one is nice because lessons go by rating. You only have to read as far as your strength.

*How to Reassess Your Chess - Jeremy Silman*

A pretty standard and contemporary book on strategy.

*The Chess Principles Reloaded **series (**Development, King Safety, and Centre) - Andras Toth (on Chessable)*

I have consumed a completely unreasonable amount of chess content - including watching what feels like all of the chess content on YouTube. Andras is the one person who consistently says insightful things that I've never heard anywhere before. Major eye opener. If you think all there is to development, king safety, and the centre is getting your pieces out, castling, and having a pawn in the centre, then this will blow your mind.

Beyond these three, there are lots of other great books and courses, but you have to start somewhere. I think this is a good place to start.

By strategy reversal, this variant appears to have already been solved in 2016 if you follow the main variant. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing\_chess.

Now, there's only one variant left, which I'd like to take this opportunity to name "Achess". It involves getting your king, and only your king, captured, and I believe would suck ass.

I don't know if I qualify as a stronger player...

But what i look at / for is

0. Candidate moves (the moves i will evaluate)
1. all forcing lines as far as they are forcing (even if they seem dumb). Often I try to go one move past the point that is natural.
2. is the current position (or one from the distance) compatible with one i "know" ? Is it better or worse? Can I use a similar plan?
3. what would I do if it was the other sides move and how do I stop it?

I think op is sort of asking what arecthe set of ideas in 2 but that is kind of hard to list.

pawn weaknesses or ways to create them

weak squares / outposts

space

prophylaxis

stuff like that

Moves that give a positional advantage.

My games at 2000 FIDE level are usually decided by strategical outplay. For instance: pawn play and pawn structures, endgame grind, evaluating initiative vs material, evaluating good minor pieces against bad minor pieces and so on.

Elaborate tactical sequences are still quite important though. Players mostly dont drop material to tactics directly, but might overlook tactical shots that put them in a strategical disadvantage.

Have you checked out "Imagination in Chess: How to Think Creatively and Avoid Foolish Mistakes"? It's a tome on a simple process for finding brilliant moves, whether tactical or strategic.

There's a book that might fit the bill by Jacob Aagard - I think it's called Excelling at Chess Calculation. It goes into detail about his process of selecting candidate moves and calculating.

He wrote a blog post a while back that recommended that you skip the exercises in that book and instead use the ones in the Grandmaster Preparation calculation book (which I think he also wrote), if you can get that one too.

Kotov's Think like a Grandmaster also fits the description. It has been heavily criticised for being over prescriptive and unrealistic, and it is more of a model than an account of how strong players really think, but although I agree with a lot of the criticisms I still found it helpful.

What is the problem you are trying to solve, namely why do you think you must improve the tactics? Do you miss the tactics because of short time controls/sloppy calculations/no attention on defensive moves or why else?

Notice that after a certain point doing more puzzles != improving tactics. You just need to be "exposed" to different patterns (which you will be by playing different positions/different openings).

Hi, I think this is the best article about this topic so far...
https://chessmood.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-tactical-vision

Check out the Yusupov books

I agree with most of these, but I dont really agree that openings are not about principle or memorization because they absolutely are. Also I think doing some calculation excercises can be good for your chess

What about thou shall have fun and play type game you like and not pay to much attention to improving if that doesn't make you happy?

I don't agree with 8. Doing difficult calculation exercises are really helpful, and doing puzzles that you can solve almost instantly dont really help you improve

There are some needed caveats, clarifications, and exceptions. In that sense it's like the "other" 10 commandments!

nah

This is the topic of middle game plan. Generally you try to win some pawns and promote.

1. checkmate attack. You move all your pieces to opponents king and go for an attack. It does not have to result in checkmate. In most cases you hope to win material during the attack, if the attack is very strong the defensive side may need to give up a pawn or two maybe even a piece.

2. create weakness. Chess is an equal game so if you want to win a pawn you need to make 'weak pawn'. A typical example will be a minority attack.

We have a study group in an hour here : https://discord.gg/ausnvKgs?event=1260549637513809920 we can have a detailed discussion if you are interested.

At any level chess is about making less (or not as bad) mistakes as your opponent. Magnus wins so much because he rarely blunders and most importantly he capitalizes on his opponents' mistakes. Ofc mistakes look different at different levels.

Below a thousand, you just randomly lose a piece. Below two thousand, you blunder a couple of pawns and that's enough in the end. At IM level, you maybe lose a single pawn with a 3 move combination. At GM level maybe it's a 6 or 7 move combination, or you moved your pawms and pieces in such a way that now your position is unplayable. But it's all mistakes of one player that lead you there, and the other player realising this mistake and punishing it.

Chess played perfectly it's a draw

Well youre always just capitalizing on mistakes except, for grandmasters, these mistakes are very hard to notice and other grandmasters might only have a sneaking suspicion that theyre opponent has made a mistake they can punish.

“Below a thousand, you just randomly lose a piece”

God I wish it was only for players below a thousand.

You can only win if your opponent makes an error. That's true for Magnus, that's true for me, that's true for you. This is why there are so many draws in elite chess. They don't make errors. (At least at longer time controls.)

In beginner chess, players constantly make errors. The problem is their opponent does not take advantage. This is why you study tactics and simply learn to take advantage of the errors.

This leads me to ask, "What is chess?" As I beginner (not you), I thought chess was all about forcing a win and long calculations. But you cannot force a win. All you can do is present your opponent with problems. And if you're the one presenting your opponent with problems, rather than the other way around, you are said to have the initiative. If your opponent does not solve the problem correctly, then you take advantage, and win the game. AFAIK, that's it.

Magnus in the long endgame against Nepomniachtchi -- it was a draw, but Magnus said, "prove it." And Nepomniachtchi failed. Of course, Magnus could have failed too -- what if he had blundered? That's why Carlsen is the GOAT -- his willingness to play on.

I believe main lines are just those considered to be the strongest moves for each side (ie I don't think it will include any traps that would be avoided with strong play, or risky gambits.)

There's any number of ways to learn openings and study them, books, videos, software like chessable, and all of these can be free or not.

Tactics also come from the same types resources, and puzzles. And simply experience analyzing your games, other games, and playing out the situation a bit after puzzles if it's not obvious how to maintain the advantage (which isn't something I often see discussed but seems useful and natural so I find myself doing it.)

I just want to say, you are still a beginner (and so am I), not an advanced beginner. You should probably solve tactics to improve

my level is a little better and I would recommend you to keep going with the puzzles, to play many games and to be patient with your mistakes, you learn with them. what I do also is to study endgames, it's there where chess shows up really and you should start thinking more deeply by them. oh, and stop playing for the day if you get tired, haha.

In my country people who are not as good lose more games. Maybe your country defies logic.

Awesome puzzle OP. Wouldn't figure it out on my own, and after 15 + min of frustration put it in the engine and saw the magic.

Any tips on recognizing patterns similar as this mate?

Does Rh6 work? Followed by Rg7 and Rh8 with Ne5 available if the black king goes to f7.

I didn’t find it all that difficult (I’m USCF 1700) as the main motif was basically an ladder mate and there werent a lot other things to try. But still it’s a nice little construction. Thanks. Keep at it!

This is awesome

To me, this is only doable when it is a puzzle. I would never see this in a game