Chess Visualization Course - training exercises for tactics and attack on the King to improve your chess!

One day I was looking at some combinations in the Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames by the Chess Informant publishers and, after struggling with one of the positions for a fairly long time, finally gave up and looked up the solution in the back of the book. After struggling some more with the solution, I suddenly came to realization that even if I knew the answer I wouldn't be able to visualize the final position!

This realization showed me that my visualization skills needed some work.

I looked around for books and magazine articles to help me address the problem, but there just weren't any good materials out there to help me develop my visualization skills. So I started thinking about how to create some training materials to fill this void. It took some trial and error finding the right format and the right type of training exercises, but everything soon fell right into place. The result is the Chess Visualization Course!

The first volume, Chess Visualization Course, Book 1: General Tactics contains 800 training exercises designed to help the average tournament player improve his visualization skills. The length of the variations you are asked to visualize runs from 4 to 39 half-moves. All of the training exercises are taken from games played by masters and grandmasters in tournaments located throughout the world.

One of the differences between my book and most other books on tactics is that this one focuses exclusively on visualization. We're not concerned here with finding candidate moves or evaluating positions. There are other books for that. This one focuses specifically on visualization and gives 800 exercises covering 26 themes to work with.

In addition, most of the positions are very dynamic and entail various exchanges of pieces at nearly every turn. The idea here is that if you can visualize twelve moves in such dynamic positions, you should have no difficulty visualizing twelve moves in a quiet position.

Using the exercises in the book is not unlike a weight trainer who exercises and isolates a particular muscle group in order to maximize its development. By providing exercises that focus exclusively on visualization, we maximize the development of the chess player's visualization muscles.

I must add that this book has been very valuable for my own development. I find that the ideas contained in Book 1: General Tactics shows up very often in the games that I play. I find that I can visualize variations quicker, deeper, and more confidently than ever before. People at the club say I'm a stronger player than I used to be.

In the foreword to Book 1, Paul Whitehead, a FIDE Master and USCF Life Master, calls the Chess Visualization Course "an important contribution to chess literature." By focusing on visualization and using graduated exercises to provide extensive coverage of each thematic chapter in the book, we have to agree with him.

Ian Anderson