As a full-time chess coach for many years, one of my specialties is finding and correcting thought process errors. It is important to note that a thought process error is different than a thought content error; in the latter, the process is correc...
My Youtube Channel - Instructive Videos for all levels. Originally I was making videos for the Internet Chess Club (ICC). I made about 400 but the access was restricted. Similarly, my award winning "Novice Nook" columns, originally free at Chess...
Two Man, Five Board, Five Minute is an aerobic chess variant that I played many times in college and quite a few times as an adult. It's tremendously fun and challenging. The rules are: 1) Five boards are set up with alternating colors (e.g. if ...
Getting Better at Chess for Everyone May 2016 There are basically three ways a tactic can occur, both for and against you: The opponent makes a threat for a tactic (or a check or capture) which either can't be met, or can be, but is missed...
Get Better at Chess for Everyone #3 June 2016 "When you see a good move, don't play it. Look for a better one." This is the Number 1 principle in chess. Over the years I have added for my students: "...You are trying to find the b...
Get Better at Chess for Everyone Aug 2016 Occasionally I run into players who think that Bobby Fischer "did it all by himself", i.e. locked himself in his room, studied chess until he was world class, and then burst onto the tournament scene. ...
Get Better at Chess for Everyone July 2016: How to Play When You're Winning Easily In all sports, you play much differently when you are winning easily: In baseball, if you are leading 8-0 in the 8th inning, you would not pull your fresh r...
Several years ago I played a series of 20 0 (20 minutes per game with no increment) games against an expert-level opponent. Being the better player, I often found myself in superior positions as time ran lower. For the sake of argument, let's say ...
[Scene: Courtroom hearing on Chess Coaching. Dan on witness stand, a few hundred inquisitive spectators watching the proceedings...] Bard: You are aware of the accusation that chess coaches can't really help people play chess better - that they ...
I've noticed a trend of inexperienced players to believe that being a good tactician is primarily a matter of having a ton of tactical patterns of which you are familiar, somewhat as they think being a good opening player means memorizing a lot of...
Sometimes I hear intermediate level players protest that any problem that does not follow the normal "needs" of a chess game can't be helpful to your game. These "normal" concerns would include: White (Black) to play and win (if you are not 10...
I frequently get asked "When reading a book of annotated games, wouldn't you learn more if you studied the games slowly than read them quickly?" Of course that is true, but it skirts the real issue. And its clearly true in absurdum: you could stud...
When I first started playing, it eventually dawned on me that there were only two gears to play chess: Try your best or resign. For one critical part of how I reached that conclusion, please refer to The Train Story. In today's blog I would like...
I like to tell the following story to students because it gives them some insight into time management and criticality assessment. After he became World Champion, Kramnik was playing a match vs an engine for $1,000,000 to the winner. I believe i...
I am pleased to present another helpful article on chess improvement by one of my students who had some recent success. Hope you find this interesting and helpful (- Dan H) How I won more games by improving my chess thought process By Jason Mu...
My first wife, Susan Hollis (Holly) Bloom Heisman, passed away of breast cancer in Oct 1994. Among her social work jobs had been working with battered wives and runaway teens. She also did extensive volunteering for the American Cancer Society (I ...
One of my former students, Trevor Harley, is a professional psychologist. I told him about my concern about students who play too slow and consistently get into unnecessary time pressure, which costs them game after game. These students know they ...
"Move every piece once before you move any piece twice, unless there is a tactic" is the most important principle (not goal!) in the opening. This principle is ancient. I found an almost identical one in Emanuel Lasker's book Common Sense i...
Bobby Fischer was born in 1943 and brought up in Brooklyn, about 90 miles from where I grew up north of Philadelphia. Garry Kasparov was born in 1963 in Azerbaijan, about 6,000 miles away. I was born in 1950, so I am closer in age to Fischer than ...
Several years ago I played a series of 20 0 (20 minutes per game with no increment) games against an expert-level opponent. Being the better player, I often found myself in superior positions as time ran lower. For the sake of argument, let's say ...
Ken Boehm played the Scotch Gambit for White and against 1.d4 he preferred the Lasker Defense in the Queen's Gambit Declined. But when an opponent opened with 1.e4 and Ken was Black, he loved to play the rare Sicilian Four Knights Variation (1.e4 ...
Several years ago, in response to inquiries, I wrote a blog, "Whatever Happened to Everyone's Second Chess Book" (E2CB) about the legal problems encountered when trying to update the book. As I noted in the update, the problems were finally resolv...
Most amateur (U2200) tactical mistakes occur when the player makes an unsafe move. This occurs much more often then when a player "misses" an easy offensive tactic that could win material (which, in turn, must have been allowed by an opponen...
I was saddened to see the recent passing of "The Dean of American Chess", GM Arthur Bisguier. My mind immediately went back to the first time I met GM Bisguier. I will never forget it, as it was the first time a GM ever approached me! I had ju...
My 12th chess book, "Is Your Move Safe?" is now available both from the publisher Mongoose Press and from Amazon. The idea for this book is simple and can be contrasted to other books: In almost all tactic books, you are told that the opponent's...
