How to Reassess Your Chess: Mr. Silman, could you answer these questions?

Did you know he is a member here and you can send him a message directly?    https://www.chess.com/member/silman

/ He may ignore it but at least there is a chance he may respond.

I think you're absolutely right there: the thinking process isn't that conscious, or only that conscious on rare occasions. I tend to apply Silman's thinking technique of imbalances, or Kotov's technique of candidate moves whenever I feel I'm stuck - it helps you to look at the position with fresh eyes and unearth new ideas and concepts. This is also another reason why I'm a little bit critical towards Silman as a pedagogue (while still considering HTRYC 4th ed is a great book). I can't help feeling that he regularly loses his intended target audience (1400 to 2000 USCF rating or 1200 to 1800 Elo rating, if I remember correctly).

One advice that you always hear from strong players is to play over old, well-annotated, master games - the more the better. Even if they're not well-annotated or you don't understand everything (unlikely for anyone who isn't highly proficient), you'll quickly get a much better instinctive feel for where your pieces should go even you don't specifically know the specific opening or variation. I remember doing exactly this when I was a junior. In my first Swedish championships, I failed miserably, scoring a miserable 2/8 (+1, =2, -5) in one of the junior qualifying pools. It probably corresponded perfectly to my actual playing strength at the time, but this hadn't stopped me from expecting a much better performance, perhaps as much as 50% (I especially remembering smarting very badly at two defeats against opponents of roughly my own rating, victims ripe for the picking in my eyes). Totally unrealistic in hindsight, because I hadn't done any real, structured work on my chess up to that point. That summer I started playing over master games regularly. In fact it became my main form of chess training (another error with hindsight: I should have paid specific attention to strategy and tactics, too). It had an immediate effect. By that autumn, I probably was about 70 points stronger, and by the next summer I was 300 points higher than I had been exactly one year earlier, and scored an undefeated 5½/9 in a senior section at the Swedish Championships. From then on I basically jumped 100 to 150 points per year until I was about 19.

I mean, clear guidelines how to approach the positions in JS's sense - I have to do this, as I am studying the book. By the way, piece placement or pawn structure is part of the imbalances.

You said piece placement is the most important, but I think that we can not assume this for every position. For example, in some positions is queen safety much more important - even with horrible piece coordination, if you have nevertheless mate in two this is the only important aspect in the position, right?  And I didn't write the book, I am only studying it. The book is trying to give a kind of guidelines how to evaluate positions.

In general, you should calculate only forced moves/variations, then stop calculating until there are no more forced moves, then evaluate the position. In the diagram you posted, there are three candidate moves you should consider first: Qd7, Qc6, Rh5 and Qxc2+ (yes, I know this loses the knight, but this is a capture and a forcing move so it's one of the first move to evaluate).

Just seeing this thread now, the reason why Silman could be favouring black is that the white targets for black to attack are more accessible than the black targets for white to attack.

Besides imbalances, Silman also emphasizes the concept of targets. For example, normally bishops like wide open positions while knights prefer closed positions with outposts. If the knights have no targets however, then for practical chances, a player is often better ripping open the position to get targets for the knights even though it may favour the bishops more.

Did you send him a message Torri?

Amazing, I will follow your advice!

I know this, but I was not consequent in this kind of training. I have a lot of books suited to this training. Kortschnoi's "Meine Beste Kämpfe", Paul Keres' "Ausgewählte Partien", Karpov's Des échecs a l'infini"(written together with Guik), or Alekhine's "Deux cents parties d'échecs". Probably I will take one of the French books, so I will not only learn chess but also improve my French!

Very good! I can specifically recommend Keres and Alekhine, they're fabulous annotators. Karpov - which incidentally was the second master games collection I studied that summer many moons ago (the first being a small booklet from a tournament in Stockholm with Keres and Bent Larsen among the participants) - is unfortunately quite lazy as an author, and doesn't really share many of his secrets with reader. If you've got Edmar Mednis' 'Why Karpov wins', I would recommend reading that instead. Edmar Mednis was an excellent author. Nearly all his books are worth reading. If you're looking for a great strategist and endgame player, Rubinstein is a great choice: Hans Kmoch has written a very nice book about him ('Rubinstein Gewinnt' or 'Rubinstein's Chess Masterpieces'). The best one on Rubinstein is probably by Yuri Razuvaev, but it's very hard to get hold of, and to my knowledge only available in Italian, apart from Russian.

I still have to learn to see "targets" in my game. I mean, sometimes I am just trying to improve my position, and doing so I am missing the opportunity to scare my opponent, making the position more difficult to play for him. Like for example advance my h-pawn after my opponent castled kingside, even if I am advancing my pawn-shelter.  Of course this will depend from the position, but my point is: the biggest target is the king, and I have to keep this in mind when playing.

My understanding is that imbalances are used to try to create targets if they don't exist