Applying Logic in Chess by Erik Kislik (Read it!)

I was skimming through Erik Kislik's 'Applying Logic in Chess' and it really made an impression on me. I didn't work through any examples in the book, but I skimmed all the text to extract as many good ideas as I could.

I took away many ideas from that book but let me put down a few, and how I'm incorporating them into my training.

-I realize now that my logic was weak. I've done tactics trainers for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with diminishing returns. When I look at a position in a game, however, unless an easy tactic leaps out at me, I have a tough time handling tactical complexity or setting up tactics. One way I've been addressing this is to solve combinations from books rather than tactics, and this helps tremendously. But there is an added step I got from Kislik's book, and that is to verbalize to myself why the tactic works. Get down to the logic of why it works. Know why every one of those moves works and how I could derive the solution easily next time I look at the same position. I realize that it wasn't my calculation that was weak so much as my ability to assess, evaluate, get down to the physics of the position: how shit is held together. 

-I also got the idea from Kislik's book to go through annotated game collections to develop my logic. It's funny that I've spent two decades on Chess but never went through annotated games because of overwhelming reams of analysis in such books. Yet this is a crucial step in Chess development. Just today I went through one of the games from Anand's book and it opened up a whole other world of strategic nuances to inform an attack on the opponent's opposite-side castled king. For example, getting in g4 without the preparatory Rg1 gives you a valuable tempo, and how that tempo translates into white moving out the knights on b3 and c3, that means black can't hit them with his own queenside pawn storm. How e5 can dislodge black's d6 pawn clearing the c5 square for the knight. How you can play e5 to open the d3 bishop towards h7 and how such a tactical blow may come to land. Etc. etc. etc. Once you get such ideas, then you start to penetrate deeper into positions, knowing the kind of analysis that is possible to perform, and you can actually interpret engine lines in your own analyses going forward. 

-I realize the value of playing long games and analyzing them, incomparable in their contribution to a Chess player's development. The book awakened me to how one must identify defects in judgement, bad assumptions and lack of understanding when reviewing one's games and fix these over time as the process to getting better. It awakened me to how stereotypical my play has been, relying on wave-of-the-hand general principles that time and time again falter to grounded, accurate calculation from my opponents. 

-I love the idea of 'burden of proof' in the book. Just because you have equal positions out of the opening doesn't mean one side can't have an easier or harder go of it. So you can play a 0.00 position out of the opening, but have a good chance of outplaying your opponent because you have more improving moves available, those moves are easier to find, so on. 

Anyways, that's all for now. I highly recommend skimming Kislik's book. The way he ties in knowledge from other fields like psychology is refreshing and impressive to me, reminds me of myself but a 2.0 version. I think the guy is legit brilliant. His insanely fast rise to the IM title at a late age is inspiring to an older player like myself