My journey of learning Chess
- 3 minsWhat?
What have I learned? What have I been learning? What will I be learning? How will I be learning? So much to do, so little time!
As you read in my previous blog, picked up Chess(again!)
Blah blah, i’ll update this with more details later.
Lorem ipsum…
I love solving tactics on lichess. Themed as well as the mixbag. But I’m gonna try to solve tactics from books now. I had a thought about it, and I divided the types of tactics solving into two - exploitation vs exploration. “Huh? What?!” More on that soon. As we all know, Tactics solving is all about building up that pattern recognition and improving your calculation. Lichess has over a million puzzles that it creates out of the millions of games played on lichess. That’s amazing! That’s a huge collection of really good puzzles, and I love solving them. I’ve definitely seen an improvement in my calculation (and my coach thinks so too. Especially when I found a mate in 1 in this 1 game quickly against my opponent)
But yes, that’s good and all. I’ll keep doing those. But I also want to start solving puzzle books. Why? They’re created by humans, common positions/themes, repeated patterns, well curated. With the online puzzles - there’s also the thing that when I’m solving online puzzles, the opponent moves are always the best move selected by the engine. My opponent might sometime play a move that’s not the most optimal, what then? I usually end up using analysis board to analyze such puzzles. Books on the other hand, would cover those lines as well? I guess? The most natural human moves are sometimes missed in online puzzles and I’d like to calculate those too and build up my pattern recognition.
So borrowing my favourite concept from reinforcement learning - exploration vs exploitation. Solving well known chess tactics from books is ‘exploitation’ for me and solving lichess puzzles is ‘exploration’ for me. lol, the chess elites are probably gonna laugh seeing this, but I’m sure you wouldn’t disagree that one should also solve chess puzzles from books.
Oh there’s also the thing where the online puzzles don’t give the full line and when I end up calculating multiple lines, after straining for 20 minutes, the puzzle ends at just the first move. That’s too frustrating lol, just doesn’t satisfy me. Here’s 1 example:
https://lichess.org/training/qMaf6/
I don’t have a physical chess set, so I sometimes use the Lichess Board editor or Scid vs PC to set up some positions that I need to analyze. I found that was a good way to understand some positions.
Anyway, I dabbled with a few chess tactics books but then I decided to stick with 1 instead of jumping around, and move on to a different book once I’m done with positions in this one.
I’ve picked up Lev Alburt - Chess Training Pocket Book: 300 Most Important Positions and Ideas
I created a lichess study (interactive) based on this book! 
Some other chess books that I have in mind: Laszlo Polgar - Chess_ 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games Sir John Thursby - Seventy Five Chess Problems …okay I admit I was lazy and just randomly picked up some books without any research lol …need more book suggestions here …
I might just end up making a separate blog on all the book recommendations I find online DONE! Here are some book recommendations I found online - Chess book recommendations for improvement. I’ll add a section about books I’m reading/finished and add my reviews for those
Aman Goyal
A Man who never has enough time