Chess Professional Players | How To Learn From Them

Today, thanks to technology, we can have access to almost any game chess professionals played anywhere in the world in real time, an advantage that many players did not have a few years ago, an advantage that we can use to improve our own chess.

We can have access to databases, to broadcasts, explanatory videos, interviews, etc. All this thanks to the Internet, not only of what is being played in the current professional chess tournaments, but also of the past, such as the most recent World Chess Championships and the legendary tournaments that were played a little less than half a century ago (Zurich 1953).

Often we watch these videos or broadcasts for show or entertainment (which they certainly are), but if we want to improve our level, while enjoying the highest level of professional chess, there are ways to make the most of these fantastic opportunities we have.

Putting Ourselves in the Shoes of the Chess Professional Player

Broadcasts and Videos

When we were kids, we liked to play Spiderman, Superman or whatever superhero we liked best. In this case it is the same thing, whenever we watch a broadcast or video about a player we like (better if our style is similar to that of the chess professional player), we will try to put ourselves in his situation, where we will think the moves as if it were our own game, much better if we transfer the moves to a physical board to give it a touch of more realism.

We will write down all the analysis of the moves that we would consider and what would be the move that we would make in this position (being a video or a broadcast, we have the opportunity to pause to do our analysis more comfortably) and so we would continue move by move until the end of the game (it does not have to be all at once, we can always take a break to rest if the game is very complex, the advantage of the Internet).

At the end we will see that in some cases the chess professional player made the move that we analyzed and in other cases he made another one, the idea with these moves is to find out if what we analyzed is a mistake or if it was simply another option that was also possible to play.

For this task we can rely on the interviews that the players usually give at the end of the game, ask in the broadcast or video itself, the sports commentators answer questions from people, another option is to ask our coach or a player with a higher level than us.

Another way to get feedback is to share our analysis in forums or blog on sites such as Chess.com or Lichess.org, where titled players usually participate, or finally we can resort to the chess module.

The intention of doing this is to do an active learning, our brain assimilates and internalizes the information better if we set it in motion, if we think for ourselves without neglecting the feedback to correct our mistakes and keep improving our chess.

For examaple

Books

In the case of the professionals of the past, there are not many videos or interviews where they themselves give us their impressions, we only have videos where other masters explain the moves, this also serves us, but it is not optimal because no one will explain what he/she was thinking better than the player himself/herself.

As an alternative, we have the books in which these legendary chess player have printed their teachings, extracted from their own games.

To get the most out of the books we have to follow the same process as with the videos, it is always important that we think for ourselves, first we will review the game ourselves without seeing the author's comments, write down the ideas, the moves we think are very good and the mistakes. Then we will compare our analysis with that of the author of the book, and another step we can take is to compare everything with the module; being books from before the era of chess modules, they may contain errors.

In the database we have only the module as feedback, so it is advisable to start with the broadcasts and videos where we have someone to help us with our analysis, in these cases it would be the sports commentators or the authors of the videos and the books where the player himself/herself explains to us what he/she thought in each important position.

When we do our analysis of the games in the database, the work is very similar to that of the videos and books, only this time all our efforts will be concentrated on the analysis we do and the corrections we can make with the module.

ChessBase is the program for this training, take a look at our article here.

What style of professional players do you like the most?

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