PART 1 • A chess engine is your trusty sherpa guide
And if your chess program of choice has a big honkin ' opening book containing millions of positions, but your analyzed games are often displaying the“ N”(“ Novelty”) notation at your fourth or fifth move, followed quickly by a big advantage for your opponent, that means you need to tune up your opening play( and, if it ' s happening that early in the game, you need to study general opening principles, not specific opening variations).
See how easy that is? None of this is remotely rocket science. You just need to have a chess engine analyze a whole bunch of your losses, then look at the evaluations, and find patterns in your play which will guide the way your spend your chess study time.
By the way, the process never ends. About the time you ' ve punched up your opening play, you ' ll find that you ' re getting the whole way to the endgame before you fumble the ball. So you set aside the DVD on opening theory and fire one up on how to play the endgame. Maybe you ' ll correct some tactical deficiencies so that your chess foes aren ' t winning material nearly as often, but now you ' re seeing that“ slow positional erosion” we talked about. Put that tactics training software aside and crack open a copy of Pachman ' s Modern Chess Strategy.
No matter how accomplished you become at chess, there ' s always more to learn. And the best part of having a strong chess engine at your beck and call is that no matter how good you get, your chess engine can still show you something new.
That reminds me of one last point before we move on, mentioned before but worth repeating. When you ' re shopping for a chess program, you ' re not buying a strong engine to play against( unless you ' re a titled player) – you want a really strong chess engine for the analysis it will provide for you.
103 chessking. com