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White to play Black to play Black to play Black to play White to play

An interesting article in Chesscafe that caught my eye. Requirements for Training Exercises:  by   Mark Dvoretsky Now let's talk about the requirements that examples used in training should meet. It is essential that the exercises should be interesting, that the solutions that are found (or even not found!) should give pleasure, and that they should be remembered for a long time, provoking a desire to keep studying. Difficulty of solving. You should not choose problems that are either too easy or extremely difficult – here it is important to use moderation. Sometimes it makes sense to use exercises of increased complexity, but the difficulties should not be purely analytical ones. Only the pleasure received from examining a subtle and beautiful solution can compensate for annoyance at not finding the solution. Necessity and uniqueness of the solution. Here are some examples, taken from various collections of exercises, that did not seem very successful to me. St

  After long and sometimes hard experience, I've come to the conclusion that the most effective pre-tournament preparation consists of sharpening and focusing what you are (or should be) doing for your longer-term training efforts.  This contrasts with the more common pre-tournament routine in which over the space of a week or two (at best) or a couple days (more often) players mostly spend time on openings and doing tactical drills, then put everything aside until the next tournament. This type of staccato and rushed approach resulted in little success for me as an adult player.  During the scholastic phase of my career, I played in tournaments quite often, so without really trying I had constant exposure to new chess concepts and practical lessons, even though my (self-taught) training was not systematic.  There's a lot to be said for simply playing a lot of longer time control games, which looking back on it now was probably my best chess improvement practice. Now wit

THE OPENING 1.) Use a Stylistic Bias Sheet to determine which openings will suit you best as you form your repertoire. 2.) Have a definite opening repertoire. 3.) Stick with it - don't "hop around". 4.) Otherwise, you will not understand the typical middlegame pawn-structures that arise from standard openings. 5.) Study the opening repertoire that you do have very thoroughly. 6.) In casual, postal, e-mail, I.C.C., computer and blitz play, it is fine to look at other openings in order to avoid getting stale and "in a rut", but for your serious games it is essential to specialize, specialize, SPECIALIZE! 7.) Remember: if you have 100 hours to spend in study, it is far better to spend 25 hours each on 4 different lines than 4 hours each on 25 different lines. 8.) Specialization also facilitates analogous thinking which helps you to orient yourself in unfamiliar opening / early middlegame situations. 9.) There are vastly more books written on chess

Hello readers ,  Here is the link to the FREE courses of Chess.com, made by renowned coaches mostly by IM Danny Rensch and IM Bryan Smith. The system is via what they call “Chess mentor” which is a tool comparable to reading an annotated PGN in any reader (i.e. CB) but in here you need to solve question by question by moving, so you train, and the server keeps track of all the lessons done, the percentage of correctness, the progress and so on, assigning you a rating for this matter. One needs to register and setup an account with them first, which is also FREE, in  https://www.chess.com/register , so the course with all the exercises is activated. I would recommend this for anybody from beginner to below 2000, but if u are that or above, maybe you can learn something too, who knows, otherwise you just skip all you know and forward to the next theme as I did. The topics are as follow, sorted by level Beginner: Checkmate Beginner: Tactics Beginner: Openings Beginner: Endgames In