This week we have a special guest review from Bob Wilder. Bob helps to run the Bear Chess Club and maintains their website (http://bear.delawarechess.org/) Given the great job he has done here we certainly hope Bob continues to write reviews/columns for us in the future!
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One internet site that should be on nearly everyone’s list of frequently checked sites is www.chesscafe.com. Founded by Hanon Russell, they’ve been in the news lately because they now run USCF’s sales department. But that is not what they are famous for!
ChessCafe has almost twenty monthly columnists for just about everyone’s skill level and interest. When you first approach the site, you’ll find 4 articles at the top (above the horizontal line). The regular monthly columns are below the line – currently 17 of them! Check it out this week a compile your own list of favorites! The schedules are staggered so every Wednesday or Thursday or so there are four or five new columns.
One of my favorites is the Novice Nook column. Written by local master, organizer and full time chess instructor Dan Heisman, this column can provide instruction all the way up to an A-player (me!). This month’s topic is on how to review chess games. It begins this way:
“Quote of the Month: Every good chessplayer has played over lots of annotated and unannotated master games, including the most famous games.
“One of the most common questions I am asked is, “What is the best way to play over a chess game to get the most out of it?”
And what follows is a discussion of that topic, including the benefits of playing over lots of games quickly, or of reviewing fewer games more slowly.
There are three things that an improving chess player needs:
1) an ever-increasing pool of chess knowledge.
2) practice and instruction in how to apply that knowledge
3) guidance in how to ‘train’ to provide the most efficient path to mastery.
When I was growing up (yawn!) the only instruction that was available was in (1). One basically bought books of annotated games collected along some theme and you played through them. This provided varying rewards depending on your diligence and skill at learning from a book. Only a lucky few ever received advice on (2) and (3) and so the path to a rating of 1600 was often a long and arduous one.
This no longer needs to be! What I like about Dan’s NoviceNook articles is the mix. He has some formal instruction (for example, a recent article was on when to play P-R3. Yes he speaks algebraic notation fluently, but this was a much better title than “When to play a3 or h3 or a6 or h6”) but an incredible amount of instruction in (2) and (3). The instruction you would receive and practice in his list of archived articles is probably the easiest way to get your rating to 1200+ that I’ve ever seen.
And you see I’ve also let you in on the secret of the ChessCafe archives. Dan has written about 50 articles for them so far, and you can access all of them. In fact he makes frequent reference to them which makes digging them out even easier. In this month’s article, for example, he refers to five other NoviceNook articles, plus one other article from the archives, so there is almost a month’s worth of instruction just in this one place. And incredible collection of material!
Also recommended is Dan’s personal web site: www.danheisman.com. There you can view Dan’s favorite articles, information on the books he’s written, and find information about tournaments in the southeastern Pennsylvania area (which included New Castle DE). Highly recommended!
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Thank you Bob!
Until next time…..
Tom Fleetwood