Secrets to Improve Your Chess Calculation

In this series of articles I will present several techniques to improve the calculation of variants.

First of all I would like to answer the question that many students ask me: When is the time to calculate? In general there is no exact answer to this question, however I will try to answer it: the necessity to calculate appears mainly when there are forced variants, when our move give a limited number of options to opponent and vice versa, the best example of this is the check, if on the contrary our move isn’t a check, nor a threat, nor a capture, surely the opponent will have a wide variety of possible answers, then calculate in this situation is inefficient, will lead to fatigue and will not lead us to any important conclusion,

Here I will present 2 examples of when to calculate and when not to calculate.

The first technique I want to teach you about calculation is: before you calculate in depth, "review the first moves"

Many times we lose a lot of time and energy calculating variants in depth and we do not realize an unexpected resource (own or to the rival) in the very first moves that makes the rest of the calculation unnecessary, that is why it is very important to have the habit to review the first move and verify if there’s nothing that we have forget before continuing to calculate, the following position is a continuation of the previous example and is a good example of this

Another important aspect directly related to reviewing the first moves, is based on expanding the moves and candidate moves, subject that we will analyze in depth in the next post.