What makes a chessplayer Is it inherited

[Arshad Ali]

After reading think like a grandmaster by alexander kotov I finally realised what people were on about when they said I never had a plan (I always thought it was just a snide comment that most strong players use to demean their weaker opponents before that) and how the position can be worked on one bit at a time to examine each element present at that moment and then build up some sort of coordinated approach to winning - this certainly had an impact back then, and moved me from the realms of 120 quite quickly up to 150 - not that I think I am a 'natrual' player whatsoever, hence the reason I will never go all that far in the grand scheme of things, but I do believe that the process of calculating can be taught by somebody who really understands it to a lesser player.

I think Kotov's Think like a GM appeared in English in 1971, published by Batsford. It was probably responsible for the spurt in strength among British chess players in the '70s as common players began to understand how to calculate by first making a list of candidate moves and trying to analyse more systematically by making at least a rudimentary tree of analysis (even if not even GMs do quite as Kotov enjoins). In the subsequent Play like a GM, Kotov explained the different kinds of planning possible -- contingent of course on the situation on the board. He explained that in complex positions we're lucky if we can make a short-range plan of a few moves -- that too subject to move-by-move fluctuation. Till then we'd been led astray by the bogus annotations of masters who explained how they came up with their grand plan that controlled the subsequent course of the whole game on move 11. Bill Hartson explained it best when he said -- in Better Chess -- that a plan is just a device for choosing the next move. Danny King, Andy Soltis and John Nunn also explained, in books of their own, the short-term and provisional character of typical plans. All of these writers have had an impact on the strength of club players -- or at least of those who read.