8 APRIL VERWACHT
Aft er writing my exercise book “The Chess Manual of Avoidable Mistakes – Volume 2”, I wanted to continue in the same spirit by launching another series of books: “Chess Calculation Training”. This fi rst volume will focus on middlegames. I have always found that existing puzzle books, however good they are, only provide a rather mechanical form of mental training. In this new collection, you will fi nd exercises to help you improve in specifi c areas of thinking, such as you may encounter in your own games. To help this, all the problems are taken from real games, with most of them having taken place in the last year. The book begins with a warm-up. Aft er that, you will fi nd several types of exercises. Some of these fall into the same categories as those in my previous book, as they were readers’ favourites. Other categories are completely new, for instance: “Find the killer positional move!” or “Find the stunning winning move!”. The problems in the book are accessible to players with a level from modest to confi dent. The most diffi cult ones are marked with an asterisk, while the most challenging chapter comes with a help page, that you may check when necessary. I hope you enjoy solving these 496 puzzles
