How to become a top-notch chess player

(Bolding mine) You clearly don't realise how blatantly wrong and completely offensive you're being.

As for your method, it's simply poor because of how much time it takes. Sure, if somebody had infinite time, it might be ok, but the big thing that you're missing is that for a TOTAL beginner, the elimination of any moves as blunders requires some of the more normal methods anyway - they have to understand not to give up mate, then not to hang pieces, not to hang pawns, what trades are equal material (the rough 9/5/3/3/1 thing), basic endgame principles, how to force a mate with way more material, place rooks on open files, basic pawn structure information, on and on and on. It's much much better for someone to first learn some of these basic principles and then to play practice games, then analyse these games, with the help of other, stronger players (in analysis) if possible. In your system, by the time white and black have each made two moves (from the start position) there are tens upon tens of thousands of possibilities. Even if there were only 10,800 possibilities, assuming that someone could type one of these possibilities per second (which is way faster than they actually could - copu/pasting only works for black's first move of the game), it would take three full hours just to list all these out. And when you're done, you haven't actually done squat; listing all posibilities only two moves in the future tells you very very little - you learn not to get fool's mated, and, say, not to drop a knight one of the very few ways you can that quickly. And it would take you several hours to do that! You can go much quicker by traditional methods, and you really aren't losing anything. Also, looking at the first few moves, you're liable to learn some WRONG lessons, like not to gambit pawns in a lot of lines where it's actually good to do so; for instance, you'd never play the QG as white, you'd always accept as black. Furthermore, using your method, you aren't going to learn endgames, and even if you did, do you realise how long it's going to take to learn something like how to mate with Q+K vs. K? I'm pretty confident that starting from scratch, after twenty years on your method I might, at best, be catching up to the first week of learning by normal methods. You will NEVER grow to be a good player the way youpropose to do it, if you are human. You can't process that fast, and you'll die too quickly

Sir. 

I take my hat off to you.

Oh yesh.  

Complete nutter!

It was meant light-heartedly as I think is clear.

Anyway, please leave me be.

I'm on Black's 4th move options using the above method & seem to have generated a 40Mb word document.

I must surely be doing something wrong...

So you're saying everybody is wrong because they haven't tried this that would take forever? Don't ask someone to do 50 hours of homework  just to see if it helps. It's obvious it would be a waste of time.

Ok - I'll rise to the bait although seriously, if a 2100 got to that standard from beginner stage by attempting the folly of typing hundreds of thousands of lines move-by-move in word pad then I'm Santa Claus.

To be constructive, the advice I'd give a beginner would be based around sound principles of play, such as:

Don't hang material!

Examine your opponents options before looking at your own at every single move.

and:

in the opening

don't make too many pawn moves, develop with threats, don't move the same piece twice, castle early and to the kingside if possible, try to gain control of the center.  Don't bring your queen out early and not beyond the 3rd rank.

in the middlegame

if you get ahead in material exchange pieces if possible, try to avoid backward, doubled or isolated pawns, place rooks on open or half-open files, and pieces in general on active squares where options aren't too limited.  All combinations are based essentially on a double attack - always look for and analyse checks, captures and threats for both you and your opponent.  Try to discover your opponents plan and find ways to negate it.

in the endgame

activate your king, push passed pawns with support.  Blockade enemy passed pawns with your king.  If your a pawn up, trade pieces but not pawns because the easiest endings to win are those with only pawns.  A bishop is more valuable than a knight in all but closed endgames.  Don't put pawns on the same colour squares as your bishop.

I may not be a 2100 (I'm actually just 1700 or so OTB) like the OP, but I bet the above advice is of far more value than the nonsense at the start of this thread.

As it's supposed to be a method for beginners if I were to try it there would be no way of telling whether it's any good or not.

In any case at any stage of my chess career I would want to be using my study time as efficiently as possible so I'd need good reasons as to why your method is going to work before trying it out. And it seems to me that your idea has clearly been refuted.

Also you're confusing me a bit: First you say that the beginner will get to cut down the number of lines they have to calculate as they improve but then you say it's supposed to be a method for people who can't afford books or a coach. Simply put these are the best tried and tested methods and if one can't afford either of them then they won't improve very much! For people who can't afford any learning resources your method is surely simply a way to waste a whole lot of time..

Well for your information, everyone is critisizing for logical reasons. We are saying why this method is bad even for beginners but you won't accept. As a matter of fact the people critisizing are helping because it would slow the beginners growth by using this an nobody wants that. Why it stunts the beginners growth I, as many others, already explained. For people that can't afford resources, the truth is that there isn't really a way to improve much and this method would be just as useless. It's just a fact.

Whatever. And I'm not a beginner anyways. But I think I have some pretty great reasons to think it won't work which I already said. Maybe there is a 1% chance it works on beginners. I'll give another analogy about this: It's like saying that getting hit by a car will make you smarter. No matter what people think, they are not accpeted because "You haven't tried it so how should you know?" and if one of them is dumb enough to do it which I hope not they get 4 broken bones for nothing just so they could say "I told you it doesn't make you smarter". Obviously you can't expect people to try something if it's that crazy and that's what I think of it no offense. There are like 15 reasons not to use this.

And it must be pretty inflexible if you can only use it in correspondence! True strength lies in OTB play where there is pressure on you. Correspondence helps your deep analysis, but you want to translate that into OTB and how on earth could you do that with a method like this?

What the OP is recommending is something that I typically do when I'm serious about the game, and when the position warrants it. The type of position I'm talking about is where I have several (3-5) candidate moves, and 2 or 3 of my candidate moves each have several candidate responses from my opponent.

I don't make the entire tree - I'm not entirely sure that this is a good strategy, seems more like a lot of busywork with no gain. Also note that this strategy, of actually writing down the moves and lines, has it's pros and cons. I think everybody should try it on at least a couple of games. Don't use the "oh it's going to ruin my board vision, I don't want to develop a crutch!" -- nothing bad like that will happen if you do this for just a couple of games. But the general message is that you don't want to get good exclusively from writing down your moves in the notes section of the game.

Use it wisely. Use it sparingly. It will help you organize the tree of variations during OTB play, it will give your thoughts clarity.

Here is an example game of mine where I used this technique. The game link is http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=13199253. The (unedited) notes section follows. A note on format: It's reverse chronological, because the top of the notes section is always what displays. When I want to "wipe the slate clean" I write --------. There are no move numbers, just because during the game it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to do that, right? So I leave it up to someone else to decipher what I wrote, but if you take the game in a separate window, I'm sure someone can do it. :-)  Part of the deciphering process will include what move in the game applies to each comment.

Here is the notes section:

Rg5 Rf2 Bxc7 Kxc7

1: Kc4 Rf3 Kb5

1.1: Rxc3 Rg7+ Kd6 Kxb6 Rxh3 Kxa5 =

1.2: Rxh3 Rg7+ Kd6 Kxb6 Rxc3 Kxa5 =

2: Re5 Rf3+ Re3 Rxe3+ Kxe3 = Kc6 Kd4 b5 axb5+ Kxb5 c4+ Kc6 = (Kd5? a4 c4+ Ka6 c5 a3 c6 a2 c7 Kb7)

--------

2: Rg5 Rf2

2.1: Rg8+ Kb7F Bxc7 Kxc7

2.1.1: Kc4 =

2.1.2: Re8 Rf3+ Re3 Rg3 (Rxe3+ =) c4 Rxe3+ Kxe3 Kc6 Kd4 Kd6 Kd3 =

2.2: Bxc7 Kxc7

2.2.1: Kc4 Rf3 Kb5 =

2.2.2: Re5 Rf3+ Re3 Rxe3+ Kxe3 = Kc6 Kd4 b5 axb5+ Kxb5 c4+ Kc6 = (Kd5? a4 c4+ Ka6 c5 a3 c6 a2 c7 Kb7)

2.3: Be5

2.3.1: Bd8 Rg8 Kd7 Ke3

2.3.2: Bxe5 Rxe5 Rf3+ Re3 Rg3 c4 Rg2 Re4 Ra2 Rxh4 Rxa4 Rh7 = probably

--------

1: Be5? Rg5! Kd4 Bxe5+ Rxe5 Rxe5 Kxe5 b5! Kd4 bxa4 Kd3 Kc7 Kc2 Kc6 Kb2 Kc5! -+

2: Rg5 Rf2

2.1: Rg8+ Kb7F Bxc7 Kxc7

2.1.1: Kc4

2.1.2: Re8

2.2: Bxc7 Kxc7

2.2.1: Kc4 Rf3 Kb5 

2.2.2: Re5 Rf3+ Re3 Rxe3+ Kxe3 Kc6 Kd4 b5 axb5+ Kxb5 c4+ Kc6 = (Kd5? a4 c4+ Ka6 c5 a3 c6 a2 c7 Kb7)

2.3: Be5

2.3.1: Bd8 Rg8 Kd7 Ke3

2.3.2: Bxe5 Rxe5 Rf3+ Re3 Rg3 c4 Rg2 Re4 Ra2 Rxh4 Rxa4 Rh7 = probably

3: Bxc7 Kxc7 Kc4

Rg5 Rf2 (Rg8+ Kb7 *) Bxc7 Kxc7 Kc4

--------

exf5 gxf5 d5

exf5 exf5 Rd5 Bf6

--------

Ra1 Ke8 exf5 exf5 Rd5 (threat Re1+)

--------

Rab3 Bd8 e4 dxe4 fxe4 Rc4

Rab3 Rc4 Rxb6

--------

http://www.chess.com/explorer/index.html?id=1135470&ply=23&black=0

1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 g6 5.e3 Bg7 6.Be2 O-O 7.O-O a6 8.a4 a5 9.Qb3 Na6 10.cxd5 cxd5 11.Bd2 Nb4 12.Ne5

DSarkar, perhaps you are the right person to try to see your technique in action, and to make some sense of my jumbled in-game notes. :-)

I actually think a modification of this method can be good under certain circumstances, and probably not for absolute beginners, but more for middling players. The biggest thing is that it's impractical to list out every variation. On the other hand, listing out the top 5 moves (by no means is this a hard and fast number, how many moves it is will be determined by the position) for each player maybe 8 moves deep (again, not hard and fast number, must be determined by the position). Okay so even this is far too much (5 to the 16th is an incredibly large number), but you'll hopefully be able to find the most critical 20 or so lines. There probably won't be more lines than this, as either there will be threats which must be met (forcing lines), move order won't matter so much, or the differences between moves won't be all that significant, at least tactically. So you evaluate these lines and come up with what's best for you. Tihs is, in a way, what computers do. The difference is that computers can do what the OP suggests and just check everything, whereas people can't compute that fast. Therefore, an important skill for human players is figuring out what lines are the most critical. The best way to do this, once again, is to play games and analyse them afterwords, hopefully with some help on the analysis end for the positions where you're most confused.

I'm not sure why that's relevant, but yes, the analysis on this site leaves quite a bit lacking

Thank you for trying to help us beginners. But I must be one of the those lazy beginners. I don't really understand it~

But this isn't listing out every single variation, is it? it's a deep think but it's not every possible move. There are times for deep analysis but that doesn't make dsarkars method make sense because those are rare situations. It is completely unnecessary in such a vast majority of positions to do this every move in every game, correct?

Elubas: exactly. I think that using candidate moves is much more effective than using all moves.

But I think that most players don't even do this, even when they are putting in a lot of thought into a position. Am I wrong?

Brilliant moves, like the ones Kasparov or shirov make, still come from trying to find the needs of the position. They just find a very unique way to do just that but they do not need to nor do a method like this. It's just too time consuming. The better you are, the better you can make brilliant moves but they're hard to find even for GM's and an opportunity is few and far between. It's pretty hard to teach (!) because to find a brilliant move requires a very strong chess mind. You said this was for beginners right? Well it's not going to help a beginner to find a brilliant move because they don't even know what one is. So there could be some justifications for your method, but it needs to be modified quite a bit as Wandering Winder said. Then it could help you to search in deep positions but in ones that aren't deep it still doesn't seem necessary.

Well they should learn how to find the candidate moves which should happen by study. That's what that person needs to do. It's all about thinking about what achieves your goal tactically, positionally, or both. Then, if you can't find an obvious one, look for indirect ways to achieve the goal (which again requires study to find no matter what) and you may just make Kasparov proud. That should cover every move. You may think that you should look for a better move, but is it totally necessary to look for that !! move when you have an easy ! move that leads to a clear plus? Then it's no big deal if you missed the big move. I think I need to find an example of this.

Elubas, no offense, but it sounds like you're trying to make an excuse ahead of time to avoid work. The recommendation is to just try it a couple of games, and it's a good one. As dsarkar noted, most players here do not have a disciplined thought process, and this is one way of making it better. Some of the Dvoretsky/Yusupov books I have talk in passing about the tree of variations, and this addresses exactly that issue.

I don't even think that you're actually disagreeing. It's not that you can just start writing things down and stop thinking. Of course, coming up with candidate moves is a skill and must be developed. But organizing your thoughts around searching the tree of variations, and making sure you don't duplicate effort, is also a skill that must be devloped.

I've heard of this tree variation stuff before, and I think dsarkar has a good concept, but this is a very exaggerated version. I think it's better as a way to figure out what to do in sharp positions. In other words, when you think a deep think is called for but you should not be unnecessarily clogged by pointless variations and I think that's what will happen. There are so many positions when calcualtion isn't even called for, like when it's much better to create a plan and follow it. In that situation, trying to slowly eliminate moves without a clear goal in mind as opposed to tryng to follow a plan will in fact be a complete waste of time. The thinking process needs to be made more efficient but slowly cutting back on moves in critical and sharp positions would be more logical. Strong players tell you not to look for combinations every move but only when there are certain tactical chances like pins or for example if you had a lead in development to mate the king quickly perhaps with a sacrifice before he can catch up.