The Two Most Important Books for Adult Improvers

Improving Chess Thinker / Pump Up Your Rating

There are many book recommendations thrown around in chess circles and on famous podcasts to the likes of Chess Journey’s and Perpetual Chess Podcast by various titled chess players and the like. So which ones do you read first? Where do I start? With so many options out there I can help narrow it down to two of them for you. If you have been around chess and played for a while and find yourself stuck in a rut or as some call it the “pits of despair” or “the dreaded plateau” you may be looking for some resources to help you break free. Look no further than my two recommendations of Improving Chess Thinker by Dan Heisman and Pump Up Your Rating by Axel Smith.

Some will not necessarily agree with me on these books but for me they were quite transformative with regard to how I think about chess and chess study in general. So these could certainly be something you might need if you find youself in the duldrums of ELO plateau.

Improving Chess Thinker

What is so good about this book? First, what is this book about? - Well this book dives into a famous study by Adrian de Groot, a master level chess player and Dutch physchologist, where he provided numerous chess positions, coined the de Groot Exercises, to a range of chess students of various levels from class F up to Expert. For those interested and otherwise uninitiated that would mean from 800-2000 ELO range. He would provide principled chess positions and ask the participant to dicuss their thoughts on how they go about the position outloud and record their thoughts and discussion. What is so interesting about this book is how in these six exercises within the book is how varied and extremely different the answers were from the respective rating levels. This book offers huge input as to what lower, intermediate and even advanced players are thinking about any given position. To which, will point out rather quite accurately, how perhaps you, yourself are thinking about positions and then offer corrections and examples of what players rated higher than you are thinking. A correction to your thinking if you will. Its a rather profound book which can really unravel the real issues you might be facing in your thought process while playing a game of chess.

While reading this book I had a number of ephiony’s occur. Those wonderful light bulb moments were you finally realize and understand how much your thinking was incorrect and how to resolve it. After reading this book I can tell a fair number of things came together in my though process when looking at chess positions. This book also helped with developing a proper thought process. How many of you heard of Checks, Captures, and Threats or some variation of? I expect many of you reading have. This book is where it came from and it not only discusses the idea of CCT but also the how and when to implement such a thinking pattern. How? Well you cannot use CCT on every single chess move of course but it talks about during the chess game when you reach critical positions is when best to implement this system. Now! with that being said there are some additional factors and not just using CCT but that is a fair part of the process. Many of you, if you read and gather nothing else than this, just using CCT with respect to what your could do if given another move will find massive benefit and blunder checking against your opponants moves.

My though process is as follows:

1. Scan - Look for tactical motiffs or key moves - NOTE - the whole board

2. Golden RULE - Checks Captures Threats or Quiet Moves (CCTQ) (check all opponants moved even if they seem dumb or useless) What can my opponant do to me? Forcing Moves First!

3. Candidates - Development - Improve a Piece - Attack - Defend - Pawn Lever/Break

   1. Tactical, Pawn Breaks, Exchanges or Captures, Motiffs,

   2. All Forcing Moves are candidates

4. Calculate - Look at each of your candidate moves - Evaluate the best outcome - Spend Extra time in critical positions - Any of the above.

5. Blunder Check (CCTQ) - Again! - Double check opponants CCTQ. Intermezzo - Can my opponant stop or refute my ideas with CCTQ? Again Forcing Moves First!

Additonal thoughts and notes from Dan Heisman which might be useful:

1. Analysis - of moves and candidates

2. Evaluation - What is your best outcome

3. Time Mangement - self explanitory - do you have enough time for the above?

4. Is this a safe move?

5. What are all the things that moves does?

6. Compare Candidates A, B, C compared to X, Y, Z

Progressive Deepening - Go a little down each candidate line - Then deepen each variation progressively to find best moves - I personally do not like this one. It does not work for me.

Pump Up Your Rating

The framing of this book is much different in contrast to the aformentioned above. This one is framed in more of a chess improvement and study plan mindset rather than a thought process orientation. It talks about the four pillars of chess improvement and study.

1. List of Mistakes - Analyzing your games and categorizing each

2. Woodpecker Method - Learning motiffs and solving fundamental and simple exercises to build pattern recognition

3. Openings - Study enough to reach middlegame plans and ideas to know where your pieces belong and the general ideas are.

4. Theoretical Endgames - Study them until you know them and move on

I think all of these are fairly self explanitory but the one that is move important is clearly number one. If you do this properly and objectively you can identify really where your weakness is (typically refered to as your floor) and then develop a study plan against it. For me I have done this a number of times but for those interested I made another post on what I did for this in my 2023 year in review found here.

Mainly the gist is to categorize those mistakes to see the patterns. I found that I lack tactical knowledge in a majority of my losses and also had two other issues at hand. One was my thought process which is how I came up with above with some assistance from a fellow chess writer Evan Seghers at the Ocean of Chess recommended here. Two, I had an issue with pawn breaks/levers in almost all my games.

So for me I developed a chess improvement and study plan covering mainly tactics, thought process and also Chess Structures by Rios. And that has been my study plan since. Its been extremely eye opening reading both of the above books. I think it rather beneficial for adult improvers to really get to the main root cause of their issues and why they are losing games. If you are not being honest with your losses improvement will be difficult. Each of these books help with a majority of what I beleive many of you might be facing. There are of course many other books I believe are very beneficial in terms or sheer knowledge about chess in general but I would be hard pressed to find two better books for any adult improver to have at the top of their stack to read.

What do you think? Have you read these books? What did you get from them? Good or critical I want to hear about it. Make sure to leave some comments below. Thanks for reading.