"The Book Every Amateur Wishes They’d Read Sooner"
There is a clear division between professional players and amateur players in chess. Professional players can earn money, get conditions at tournaments and don't have to pay entry fees. Amateur players not only have to pay their hotel bills, pay for their travel and pay for their food, they also have to pay high entry fees to get into tournaments in the first place. This can often breed resentment from amateur players directed at those professional players who seem to have it all.
Where professional chess players and amateur players seem to meet in the middle is often through the world of chess coaching. Amateur players will sometimes pay professional players to help them improve at chess. This means that players like me who try to make a living from the game often have to think about what it is like to be an amateur player and whether we can really help you to improve. Lessons are often given out randomly, with no real thought to what the student needs. Some of these amateur and professional interactions are more targeted and professionally prepared, with websites like killer chess training targeting their students with training positions, as well as giving out weekly homework.
Still, it seems to me that it has never been quantified exactly what amateur players need and what they need to do to improve, in mathematical terms. Noone has ever put together a book on statistics to guide the amateur player, or at least to my knowledge. So, this is an attempt to get the book rolling on this score, even if in the process of writing this book I realized that a completely comprehensive survey would be beyond my abilities. It is telling how little regard the majority of chess players pay towards statistics, which suggests to me that the game of chess is still viewed as a predominately intuitive and creative endeavor by the chess masses, more than it is as a strictly mathematical and scientific one.
I believe in course of writing this book I have come to the understanding that if amateur chess players want to improve, they could do worse than focus on the
following categories:
- 1: Development
- 2.Trying to do too much.
- 3. Paralysis by analysis.
- 4. Captures and checks
- 5. Look for counterplay.
Excerpt
