Like this doesn't make much sense. If a beginner doesn't know good from bad as you said, then why would calculating everything not knowing the evaluation of each(and I hope you know how long this would take) be good as opposed to learning about chess at least first? You need resources to play good chess period. if a beginner doesn't have a lot of money, well I guess it's just too bad. Maybe they will make it to 1000 or 1200 if they are lucky, but no further. I'm just taking the good and bad parts of the method and the only good part about it is when you have effectively infinite time it could do well in a complex position. But I just found a flaw in this as well. Would it help a beginner in a complex position?? No, they would probably make the wrong move no matter what at least at some point. Maybe a stronger player but I thought it was for beginners?

I suppose I'm in the minority, in that I agree with the main points of dsarkar.

• Actually writing down (not in your head) some sort of a variation tree helps your OTB play.
• This is especially true for lower rated players, because they can develop good habits early.

But it is a HUGE tree dsarkar is recomending. The tree HAS to be modified and since it's still big it's only good in cc in certain positions. It's better than nothing, but I would prefer to aquire more knowledge of chess and based on that just create candidates that you understand and calculate those and that is fairly efficient. Dsarkar, did you create this with the idea to help make someone a good correspondence player or OTB player? And what happened to the first pages in this thread? Basically this thinking technique would mostly replace all other ways of learning chess no? That's how long it would take each day. I may take some time analyzing positions in cc, but that's part of it and my process couldn't be any further than a full tree. I analyze a decent amount of variations sometimes and those alone can take awhile depending on position but how could you possibly use that method and only take "40 mins per move"? You do know that it's not really "per move" because it adds up over time. It seems to be the total amount of time you take on all of the moves combined. Even if that's incorrect my time/move will never go down here because it's impossible for it to go down.

Don't focus on the specifics.

I don't even support the idea of writing down every possible move. But I think it is a good idea, for one or two games, to write down the candidate move tree, and to do it for the whole game. Here's how it works:

In the opening, just use games explorer, or make simple looking move. No need to try to guess your opponent's strategy at this point, it's too difficult.

In the middlegame, you end up doing a sprinting strategy. At some more, you do the deep dive analysis, and it may end up covering anywhere from 2-5 moves, or even more in some key variations. It's sort of important to have all of the variations end at least with a statement like "this position is ok for me".

So then you make whatever move you want, and the opponent thinks and moves. If their response is in your responses, you can "quickly" check your analysis, but no need to create anything new. So you can respond pretty quickly. And so on, until you think that your old tree is becoming stale, and you should create a new one.

That might be doable, but in my opinion it's a little too much work for too little. But I might try that in correspondence at certain points of the game.