Improve Your Tactics and Calculation

Today’s post is reserved for two very special topics for every player: Tactics and Calculation. How do we calculate long variations with certain accuracy, so that we can commit to brave sacrifices and complicated exchanges and sometimes accept horrible weaknesses for the sake of a winning plan?

We all know that carrying on with one’s plan is very important for every game. That is why we need to know how to sense critical positions and most importantly, how to precisely calculate and evaluate the arising positions on the board. Today, I spent some time elaborating on how to improve your calculation technique. There are some tricks that many players don’t know about and thus go the long way when doing calculations over the board. Average players lose a lot of time to calculate moves they don’t need to look at. Furthermore, they calculate way too long and ‘get lost’ in the position way too often. For this video, I have selected a very instructive game between two great masters. One of them is especially famous for his sharp attacking style of play. I believe this blog post and lecture I have attached at the end will help you improve your calculation ability. Certainly, you will need to practice on calculating variations in different types of positions, but the basic ideas and principles would remain the same. They are all presented in the following video: