This DVD emphasizes the importance of training your calculation skills. Dutch IM Robert Ris made a selection of training material which he uses in lessons with students ranging from 1400 to 2400.
There are many options for training your tactical abilities using the ChessBase ecosystem. Whether you're looking for aggressively honing concentration, or prefer to kick back with a video and let the knowledge flow in like osmosis, you can find a training mode to suit your mood.
The ChessBase Training Web App invites you to keep a sharp eye for tactics. The database contains tens of thousands of tactical tasks for players of all levels.
You can also use the Tactics Training App to challenge other players to a duel: who solves the tactic tasks first? This is a great way to train with a friend with a fun competitive aspect adding an extra motivation.
Tactics match
Everyone uses ChessBase, from the World Champion to the amateur next door. Start your personal success story with ChessBase 14 and enjoy your chess even more!
Along with the ChessBase 14 program you can access the Live Database of 8 million games, and receive three months of free ChesssBase Account Premium membership and all of our online apps! Have a look today!
Via your Playchess account on Windows, you can also access "Tactics Training". Playchess gives you tasks and asks you to solve them — as many as you can in five minutes. After you start the training, a position appears on the board in which you have to find and enter the right move. Then either the next position appears on the screen, or the server replies with a move and you have to continue the combination. The amount of time you do have for each position depends on your tactics rating. The more positions you solve and the quicker you solve them the better your rating.
You do get a special rating for the tactics training
The clock on the left shows the time spent on the current task, and the clock on the right shows how much time you spent in all.
Go to Account → Tactics Positions (on Playchess) to open the database, in which the positions that you solved, or attempted to solve, are saved. If you did not solve a task correctly, this task is turned into a training question to allow you to have another look at the position.
The tasks are saved in your playchess.com account
The database with the tactical tasks saved on the server is continuously enlarged and updated.
The 100 best tactics solvers are listed under Community → Top List Tactics.
The ChessBase video archive offers many video tutorials about calculation training, tactics training, endgame training, and much more.
One regular weekly show is "Tune your tactics" which offers a lot of interesting videos about tactically oriented calculation training. The "Tune your tactics" shows are usually streamed live on Friday evening, and then available indefinitely on-demand (for ChessBase Premium Account holders). A good start to any weekend!
ChessBase Account Premium annual subscription
At the airport, in the hotel or at home on your couch: with the new ChessBase you always have access to the whole ChessBase world: the new ChessBase video library, tactics server, opening training App, the live database with eight million games, Let’s Check and web access to playchess.com
TYT in the ChessBase video archive
Every issue of the ChessBase Magazine contains a wealth of articles about tactics and endgames, often including videos with interactive feedback.
Getting better with the ChessBase Magazine
Of course, "Tactics" and "Endgame" are directly geared to calculation training — but the "Move by Move" column, which presents an interesting game and asks the reader to find the best continuation "move by move" also is good training.
The articles about current tournaments also offer a lot of interesting chess and a lot of training material. The same goes for the articles here on the main News page, which inform about current events, provide top-level games, and regular training columns.
The weekly Endgame column of Karsten Mueller
You play 20 moves of elegant positional chess - but throw the game away by miscalculating. To play a good game of chess you must know how to calculate. The ability to calculate is not something that chessplayers are born with. Calculation is a core skill that can be improved through practice. In this 10th Power Play DVD Grandmaster Daniel King will help you to assess how good you are at calculating, and gives you tips as to how you might sharpen your thought processes at the chessboard.
Karsten Mueller writes regularly about the endgame in the ChessBase Magazine. Oliver Reeh also has a regular tactics column both on the News page and in ChessBase Magazine.
In our News reports and columns, we regularly use "dynamic diagrams" (tutorial) that can help you to recognise typical (tactical) patterns.
The dynamic diagrams have Assisted Analysis built in. When you move a piece on the diagram, you can hold it briefly while an engine running in the background in your browser calculates the position, and after a few moments gives you a visual queue of the best moves available.
These interactive diagrams also simply allow you to try out your own moves whenever you like, making them far more useful than static diagrams you see on most chess websites. Of course, sometimes you may wish to practise your visualization by deliberately not moving the pieces when looking through a given variation in an article, but it's always good to have the option available to check your conclusions right there on the page.
