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CALCULATE TILL MATE

Lesson1: Deepest And Most FUNDAMENTAL Tactical Knowledge

Hi! It’s my great pleasure to welcome you into this BRAND new chess training course “Calculate Till Mate”.

I am GM and chess coach Igor Smirnov, and in this training course, I’ll show and explain to you ALL you need to know about chess tactics (and more
importantly, how you can spot them), how to calculate the RIGHT way, visualization, and everything in between.

In our first lesson I’ll show you the general idea behind chess tactics. We will analyze why most amateurs and improving chess players suffer and have a
VERY HARD time in applying their knowledge of tactics, and of course, how you can remedy this situation.

I’ll explain the “WHY” part of the chess rules (allowing you to understand them better), and moreover, we will implement all of these rules together in a real-
time mode!

This will SIGNIFICANTLY improve your chess tactics as well as your overall understanding of a chess game.

This knowledge is very fundamental and essential to your progress, and I strongly advice that you study it very seriously. Armed with a firm background,
you’ll TRULY UNDERSTAND all of the rules and ideas in this course… making them EASIER to digest and apply in your games.

Let me bring up one more note. Perhaps, you have studied some of my previous courses already. Moreover, I hope that you studied one of my base courses
like “The Grandmaster's Secrets” or “The Grandmaster's Positional Understanding”.

These courses expound on the FUNDAMENTAL principles of chess that you NEED to have a solid understanding, which is necessary before you move on to any
other topics.

While I will give you a brief crash-course on these principles, it is HIGHLY recommended that you check out my mentioned courses for a DEEPER and MORE
comprehensive explanation of these principles.

Going back to the contents of this course, I’ll reveal to you the ADVANCED techniques of calculation that are used on the Grandmaster Level. I’m sure you
have your own calculation techniques, and we will also improve them and bring it to a DEEPER level.

OK, let’s move on and talk about chess tactics.

I’m sure you have read some books about it and solved thousands of tactical exercises. HOWEVER,that knowledge of standard tactical devices and patterns is
not too much helpful in your results.

If you are thinking otherwise, ask yourself a simple question “How often do you really use combinations in your games?”

And if you haven’t implemented them often, what is a real value of your knowledge, if you can’t put them to practice and win games with them?

Here’s an example: I’m sure you are familiar with tactical motifs like “decoy” and “deflection”. How many times did you use these motifs in your whole chess
career? I guess not too often.

So How Come, After Training Your Tactical Skills (Through Exercises And Drills) Day-In And Day-Out, You Still Cannot Put Them Into Practice?

To answer this question, let’s take a look at what chess books, tutorials, and other training materials offer you. Usually they provide tons of rules, and after
that you are reminded to “Go and train them regularly”.

Most of them assume that you will carve it into your long-term memory and use it whenever the opportunity arises.

Sounds good, however, this simply does NOT work. Nobody can really keep in mind 100 rules and follow them REGULARLY. On the contrary, this rather
confuses you.

My system is different and let me outline it quickly.

You can’t remember tons of unconnected rules. BUT, you can adopt a SYSTEM.

We are not computers, and we can’t remember things mechanically. BUT we have one advantage: We can understand the LOGICAL flow of a process.

With that in mind, instead of trying to remember rules, it is INFINITELY better to have a LOGICAL system and understanding of how a chess game flows.

All of the elements of such a system are inter-connected. All of the other rules are only logical consequences of the MOST fundamental ones. Thus you do
NOT need to keep in mind everything, but only the PRIMARY principles and rules. Using those base principles, you can easily recognize all the specific
(secondary) rules when necessary.

In general your system of knowledge will look like this:

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Such a system is natural for a human’s brain. Having studied psychology, I can tell you that this is how the brain NATURALLY works. And if your chess
knowledge and thinking complement that NATURAL process, you’ll really be able to put it into practice with greater ease!

As a review, this is the 1st thing you need to have: a LOGICAL system of understanding of chess.

Moving forward, the second thing you should focus on is to put it into practice. You need to ask yourself: “Just EXACTLY HOW I will put it to practice (in an
actual chess game)?” By doing so, you will have an EFFICIENT system of thinking during a chess game.

Such a system should be UNIVERSAL. It should help you in ANY chess position.

Many players don’t fully understand it. For instance, they solve tactical puzzles and combinative drills. This creates an IMBALANCE and they forget about
strategy. After that they decide to catch up on strategic understanding… and forget about tactics.J

The cycle of IMBALANCE goes on and on, and this makes their results unstable and brings a lot of frustration.

Again, your system of thinking should be universal and simple. In a real game you only have a few minutes to make a decision. Thus you don’t really have a
time to think and try to remember all of the HUNDREDS rules you are trying to learn, you need to ACT, and that requires that your system of thinking to be
AUTOMATED!

You need to CONSISTENTLY train it in advance, so that when you sit down at the board, you don’t have to struggle and try to remember what you need to
do.

This brings us to the 3rdMOST important thing: you need to have AN EFFICIENT training system for your thought process.

To sum up things, you need to have:

· A LOGICAL system of understanding (of a chess game).
· A system of thinking (which will allow you to USE your understanding in your chess games).
· A system of training (which will AUTOMATE your thinking process).

The purpose of this course “Calculate Till Mate” is to provide you all these 3 elements for chess TACTICS. This will guarantee that you not only get a certain
set of knowledge, but you will be able to put them to practice. And of course, this will IMPROVE your results right after a study of this course!

Maybe you are eager to get your hands on these game-changing chess rules right away. Please, take it easy: little later we’ll delve deep into them. However,
all those rules will be useless, and will only confuse you, if you do not have a firm background.

Once again, I encourage you to take this 1st lesson very seriously. Now we come to the most important things about a chess game.

The 1st step on our plan is to get a LOGICAL system of understanding, which should also explain what chess tactics are ALL ABOUT.

Let’s start right from a beginning: How does one WIN in chess?

You need to destroy an opponent’s army: to capture his pawns, pieces, and to mate his King.

You may argue that it’s enough just to mate his king. Well, theoretically that is correct – the King is the MOST valuable piece in chess. However, in practice,
the opponent’s King is surrounded by his forces.Thus, anyway, your goal is to demolish his forces.

Next question is: “HOW to demolish opponent’s army?”

The answer is straight forward: We need to attack and to capture opponent’s pieces. Again, in reality, it’s not that simple to do it.Your opponent will oppose
his defenders to fend off our attackers.

For instance, let’s take a look at this simple position.

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(After the first moves 1.e4-e5 2.Nf3-Nc6)

White wants to capture the e5-pawn, but Black’s defender neutralizes White’s attacker. White can’t get any progress right now.

But if he plays 3.d4, then he has 2 attackers against 1 defender, and now white is really threatening the e5-pawn.

We may conclude that in order to achieve our goal, we need to have advantage in attackers, have GREATER activity.

How can we get such an advantage? This can easily happen if you have more pieces (ahead in material). BUT, in a starting position both players have same
army, so it’s not the case.

HOWEVER, we also can get such advantage by placing our forces on better positions, which will give us numeric superiority on a certain PART of the board
(where we want to attack).

An Imaginary Position

Now, this is just an imaginary position, but it illustrates my idea. Although both players have same quantity of forces, Black can’t prevent mate! Black’s
pieces are inactive and badly placed. White has a decisive advantage in activity and Black cannot stave off mate.

All in all, there are 2 factors that will give you a MORE active position:

· Material advantage (greater quantity of forces)

· Better position of your pieces.

To make things simple, let’s call the 1st factor “Material” and the 2nd one as “Activity”. This forms our OVERALL strategic goal in chess:

You need to get advantage in activity and then use it to capture opponent’s material, and mate his King.

There are several strategic principles which will help you to get that advantage in activity. I explained them in my previous courses and I hope that you know
them.

STRATEGY and understanding its core principles gives you a goal and a general direction to achieve it.
In practice there will be many different concrete ways to achieve this goal. You need to find the most direct, the most effective way. TACTICS bear
responsibility for that.

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TACTICS is about finding the best way to achieve your overall goal.

Sometimes we can detect the best way by using a logical reasoning.

For example, in this position White has many ways to develop his forces. But we know that 2.Nf3 move is the best as it follows the Principle Of Attack and
Maximum Activity. For this simple example, our general understanding helped clearly.

However, let’s not forget about our opponent. He will try to stop our plans and get his own plans going. That said, we always need to consider our
OPPONENT’S ideas while pushing as hard as possible to realize our plan.

1.e4 e5 2.f4 d5

In this position White can capture one of the Black’s pawns and both moves (3.fe and 3.ed) are logical (since they follow the Principle Of Material). However,
3.fe is a tactical mistake, because after 3…Qh4 black is winning.

Let’s take a look at our general scheme again.

Strategy gives us a GENERAL GOAL:

To destroy opponent’s army by using our greater activity.

Tactics helps us to find the BEST WAY to achieve this goal

Finding the best way becomes much harder especially when we face an opponent who can and does try to stop us in getting our plan into motion.

As much as we would like to focus on our plans solely, we CANNOT and SHOULD NOT ignore the opponent and his own plans. Our opponent will do his best
to realize his plan as well, and will strive hard to increase his activity.

At some point our plans will collide and there will be a contact between our forces. Then we can’t just orient on our general plan anymore.

We have to consider opponent’s ideas, our ideas and to calculate variations.

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In Conclusion:

Tactics help us to find the BEST way to achieve our general goal.

This becomes especially important when there is a CONTACT between your opponent’s forces and ours.

Such a contact happens when one player attacks another one. Thus tactics becomes especially important in attack.

There is another similar rule also. It states that…

Positional Play Improves Our Position,

While Tactics Destroy Opponent’s Position

This is not 100 percent correct, but it’s still quite logical. Our general goal is to get an advantage in activity. Thus we should activate our forces and worsen
opponent’s ones.

In order to activate our forces, we need to place them on better positions. This is called a Positional Play.

Deactivating opponent’s forces is harder, because he, for sure, will RESIST your advances. Thus we should enforce an opponent to go back. We need to
attack him. An attack creates contact between the forces. When there is such a contact, tactics becomes highly important.

Thus we may agree to a rule that “positional play improves our position, while tactics – destroys opponent’s position.”

Let me make another important note also. Usually chess players think that tactics is about combinations (or sacrifices). This is incorrect. Tactics is about
finding the best way to achieve your goal.

An analysis of different ways is called “calculation” in chess. So tactics mainly implies a calculation.

When we calculate different forcing variations, and see a line which contains a sacrifice followed by an advantageous maneuver – we call it a combination.

Thus, combination is just A PART of calculation. There is nothing really special here. If you understand it, everything becomes much simpler for you.

Well, maybe you don’t see any practical benefits from these generalities right now. Nevertheless, I assure you that it’s an EXTREMELY important thing. In
the following lessons I’ll be showing the concrete and EVER-IMPORTANT chess rules. All those rules will only be a consequence of these generalities. So
you need to FULLY understand this 1st lesson, and then you will easily digest all future information.

Ok. Let’s make a conclusion.

In order to play chess well, you need to have 3 things:

· A LOGICAL system of understanding (of a chess game).

· A system of thinking (which will allow you to USE your understanding in your chess games).
· A system of training (which will AUTOMATE your thinking process).

In this 1st lesson we talked about understanding. Moreover, we were able to explain everything that a chess game revolves around, which is not that bad
for an introductory lesson.J

Now we know that STRATEGY gives you a general goal:

To Struggle For Activity,

And Then To Use Your Greater Activity To Destroy Opponent’s Forces

TACTICS Is About Finding The Best Way To Achieve This Goal

Sometimes you can find the best way through logical reasoning. But often it’s impossible since your opponent hampers this process. Thus TACTICS becomes
extremely important when there is a contact between the forces.
More specifically, such situation happens in attack, when you try to destroy opponent’s position.

TACTICS is primarily about CALCULATING variations.

In the 2nd lesson we will analyze calculation in great detail. I’ll be waiting for you there!

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