THE WORK WE KEEP AVOIDING There is usually one part of our chess that we know needs work, but we just cannot find it in ourselves to do it. For me, it was calculation. By 2012 I had my 3 GMs norm for 5 (!) years already, but I still had not crossed 2500. I knew what the core of the problem was, but I was lazy to admit it to myself, because I knew the amount of hard work it would require. It was simple, really: my calculation was not good enough. I was not seeing variations with the clarity required at GM level. After a good, hard look at myself, I realised that if I don’t do the work I needed to do, I may as well never become a Grandmaster, a recurring nightmare in those 5 years after my final norm. I resolved to do something about it and I started solving endgame studies for one hour every day. I used Kasparian’s Domination in 2,545 Endgame Studies, which I carried on a Kindle so I could work wherever I was. I did it during tournaments, as part of my pre-game preparation, on bad days, on tired days, even on days when I was hungover after partying all night. I always liked the theme of domination, so the material mattered, but the standard to which I decided to hold myself, mattered more. To speed up my progress, I resolved to solve the studies blindfold. In the beginning, the work was miserable. I couldn’t visualise the positions and was frustrated to the maximum. The mind hates to calculate when it has become used to something easier. And I was taking it easy in my games, if I am being honest. In my work, after a while, concentration would fade away. The position would get blurred. I would become overwhelmingly sleepy. It was truly awful. Often I would spend the full hour without solving a single study. However, I discovered that it did not make the work useless. I discovered that the effort was doing something. I noticed small incremental improvements. The next week, the position was a bit clearer. The variations became slightly more precise. Gradually (very gradually!), calculation became faster, visualisation improved and I started feeling better. Less than a year and a half later of this work, I became a Grandmaster. The main lesson is not that everybody should solve Kasparian studies. They worked for me, but any material can work. The important part is the start - the moment you stop avoiding the truth of your main shortcoming. It may be calculation. In fact, very often it is. It may also be analysing games without immediately switching on the engine. It may be theoretical or practical endgames, addictive online play or discipline of one’s thinking. The next important part is what we do after acknowledging it. If you really want to be tough with yourself, try writing it down. One sentence is enough. “My calculation is vague after 2 moves,” or “I cannot see the position clearly in my head,” are examples. And then the third important thing, do something about it. You can do one hour of proper calculation as I did. You can do something else that works for you. What matters is that discipline removes the “negotiation” you do with yourself. You no longer need to decide whether you feel like doing the work. You just do it. (They recommend this for people who have hard time going to the gym. This is the same.) This is the idea behind The Method (alexcolovic.com/TheMethod). It came into existence from three problems I had to solve in my own chess: stagnation in my chess understanding, weakness in my calculation and loss of control in online play. The common thread was learning to work honestly. Yes, it is hard, but it's the only way to do it.

I understand development advantage etc. but that this is more than +6 is really baffling. It just shows how deeply the engines see and how they "solve" middlegame positions that is hard to grasp for humans.

Steinitz would have loved these modern Giuoco Piano lines.

Paraphrasing Carlsen from an interview to Spanish media, I can say the same for myself: I like the idea of playing classical chess every once in a while, but as a professional activity all the time, that life is over for me.

Drawing (pun intended) comparisons to the real world, perhaps a solution for our chess world is to stop AI (read Stockfish) development, ban it and go back to Rybka 3. Those days were fun.

Interesting to note how Caruana plays something totally unexpected against players who tend to end up in zeitnot, like the Tromp against Robson and now the Scandi against Xiong.

Nobody can abuse the French Defence.

On elite level, surely this is an easy draw for Black, right?

Will Wesley pass the memory test set by Fabiano? Black is fine, as long as he remembers how.

It's so hard to analyse with modern engines. In so many positions they spit out extremely complicated forcing "solutions" that lead to 0.00, good luck remembering all that stuff.

It seems to me that (almost) every single opening line has a name nowadays and it's all too random, both the name and who gets to give it.

It seems that a common recipe for getting game with Black vs 1.d4 is to go for QID and then push ...d5, recapture on d5 with a pawn and play those positions. They used to be considered better for White, but apparently that's not really a problem nowadays. Plus it applies to both the fianchetto and Petrosian's variations.

Every chess player has faced a variation that is annoying. Exchange KIDs or Slavs, "boring" lines that kill the game. What to do? I write about this in my latest post: gmalexcolovic.substack.com/p…

When I spoke about this, I meant (lack of) chess culture rather than chess knowledge. They will have all the chess knowledge they need, but will they know what Rona Petrosian told Garry Kasparov when he won the title, or what happened between Benko and Fischer in Curacao, or which game of Botvinnik Fischer thought was typical of his style and many more examples of this chess lore? This knowledge makes a chess champion complete, truly belonging to the chess world, otherwise they are just hollow move-making machines.

Many chess players (I am a prime example of those!) lose years searching for the right way to improve. They try different books, coaches (I skipped those) and training plans without ever establishing what the actual problem was. The Method gives your study a direction. If you want to shorten the trial and error, the guide is for you.

Your brain needs to work to produce a move and looking at how easily the engine does it gives you the wrong impression that coming up with (good) moves is easy.

Very curious evaluation by Giri and Blohberger in this position, which was all the rage before they were born. They just stop the analysis with +/- here which the engine also shows in the beginning. But the position is so complex that you are not really helped by +/- if you don't know how to play it. A lot of theory is cut off today just because the engine doesn't approve and there is a lot of danger hidden here for the inexperienced.

The boring life is the best life. But you can only appreciate that if you've had an interesting life before.