Calculation - Boost Your Decision Making 

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Calculation - Boost Your Decision Making

We are delighted to present an exceptional course by the renowned Austrian player and trainer, IM Siegfried Baumegger - "Calculation: Boost Your Decision Making."

In this course, IM Baumegger shares his refined approach to calculation, developed over many years of experience as both a player and a trainer. The primary objective of this course is to help you structure and enhance your calculation process.

This course is highly interactive, allowing you to solve most of the positions using the interactive test format developed by Modern Chess.

We strongly recommend beginning with the videos to build a solid theoretical foundation. Afterward, you can proceed to the interactive test section at the end of the course. Additionally, all examples are available in the PGN version of the course.

INTRODUCTION BY IM SIEGFRIED BAUMEGGER

Hello chess friends, welcome to my first course for modern-chess.com! The ability to calculate variations in a systematic and efficient way represents one cornerstone on which the progress of a chess player is built. In this course, we will focus on structuring and optimizing our decision-making process.

To make your calculations run fluently, do your daily tactics, but also study the classic textbook games (preferably annotated by the players themselves) to develop your positional understanding. This is equally important as calculation: in order to produce meaningful analysis, every variation must be concluded with an evaluation – and this very evaluation is based on our general understanding of chess!

In Chapter One, we go from repeating the basics of calculating moves – the concept of candidate moves plays an important role – to an advanced thinking model of structured calculation. Every strong player follows a kind of “algorithm” which they developed based on their training and experience.

Chapters Two to Six deal with special methods designed to accelerate our decision-making process: Calculation in Winning Positions, Implementing Improvements, Elimination, Comparison, and Safety Net. These can be applied in certain situations, the characteristics of which we will try to identify by looking at various textbook examples.

Each chapter (except for Chapter Six – Safety Net – where descriptive examples are given) contains training exercises of various difficulty levels:

• Easy...........................*
• Straightforward...
• Medium...................*
• Hard...........................**
• Very hard.............***

To achieve the best possible learning effect, try to solve the exercises from the given position. Give yourself some time, since very few of them are easy. Even if you don't succeed in solving an exercise, the effort put in is never in vain, because it will help you to automate certain thought processes!

In creating this course, I drew heavily from the excellent books of Mark Dvoretsky and Artur Jussupow. I had the privilege to organize several training camps with Artur on behalf of the Austrian Chess Federation. Our young talents (and also I myself!) greatly benefitted from his methodical way of working and the training concepts he presented.

Time to get to work – see you in Chapter One!

SAMPLE EXERCISE

Black to move

SOLUTION

SAMPLE VIDEO