Novelthinking

 Chess is an excellent “Mind” game. It is a battle of wits and everytime you play, you learn something new from it. It improves concentration power, sharpens the mind, improves analytical skills, decision making and also organising things in a perfect way. But above all it needs lot of determination and patience to be a winner. Every move we make in chess is influences the game sometime or the other. Hence there must be a certain motive behind every move we make. Sometimes even though the opponent has lot of material, and is appearing to be apparantly winning, a small clever move can completely turn tables and end up losing the game! There are moves like “discovered attacks” that may sometimes stun the player. Hence an in depth study of chess makes one understand numerous underlying concepts in the same way as one studies a certain subject. The more deeper we study the more are we going to learn.

Using software for learning chess is a good option. There are number of chess softwares available online some of them free and they are powered by softwares called Chess Engines. The standard of the chess game is determined by the Chess engine. One of the chess engines is “crafty” which is considered to be very powerful and difficult to win. The front end for this engine is winboard which is a freeware (also called GNU chess) and it is coded using C and the source can also be downloaded for free. In my opinion the best software for learning chess (rather than playing) is Chessmaster.It has number of tutorials by Josh Waitzkin an Internation Grandmaster which are very unseful for learning various strategies involved in the game.Also there are ranked games in which the user can play against the computer according to his/her levels too.

Chess shouldn’t be played to only defeat the opponent. One must not play the game only with the intention of capturing the king. Instead the player must try to exploit the weakness of the opponents pieces. Always the centre must be defended well by making a good opening. Also one must try to avoid mechanical thinking and should try to recognise patterns during the game which can be applied in later games if similiar situations arise (which may not necessarily work everytime). Always one must try to learn from mistakes. Whenever we make a wrong move we must try not to repeat the same in the next game.