Review: Thinking inside the box by Aagaard

Title: Grandmaster Preparation: Thinking inside the box.
Author: Jacob Aagaard.
Publisher: Quality Chess.
Year: 2017.
Pages: 408.
Price: 29.99€ (hardcover).

This book is the sixth and last one on the Grandmaster Preparation series from the acclaimed author Jacob Aagaard.

I have reviewed two previous instances of this series: Positional Play and Attack and Defense. I reviewed both highly if my memory serves me correctly. Both are workbooks with exercises to train your positional play and your attack and defense skills. The other ones in the series are also workbooks into calculation, endgame play and strategic play. This book I'm reviewing, on the other hand, it is not an exercise book.

If I understood it correctly, this is the first book you are supposed to read in the series and will lay down the foundations of the work with the other books. It is like a synopsis plus a book on self-improvement. Aagaard tries hard to explain his approach to how do you improve on chess: making better decisions at the board. He classifies the decisions you make into four categories and tries to give you some tips for each of this decisions. Moreover you will get acquainted with the material of the other books on the series before you can try to solve puzzles (except for endgame play which is totally ignored here).

To paint it with a very broad stroke each chapters deal with a subject (that may or may not be portrayed in the workbooks). The subject is explained using words (lots of them, I'm happy with that), and games mainly from the author.  I advice you to read  John Hartmann's review on this very same book to get another viewpoint on what the book is about.

Come on, I'll wait. He is a great reviewer and I always read his reviews eagerly.

So now that you more or less know what the book is about I want to highlight a nice thing in the structure of the book. Each chapter has a Test yourself section were you will find up to eight diagrams asking you to answer a question (generally which is the best move). Those positions will be found later in the chapter (unfortunately not always in diagram form, something I find is kind of a blunder). It is a great addition as you get the chance to think about the content of the chapter beforehand. Every book should have this!

The edition of the hardcover version of the book is great as it usually is with this publisher and the length is more than enough rivaling even opening books (which are usually thicker).


The book is quite interesting. You won't get bored reading it, that's for sure. Aagaard's style really shines in this format better than in the other ones in the series (as there he has no room to expand, being exercise books). It reminds me of his work for Everyman or his Attacking manual. If you've read any of those you know what you are getting here.


The analysis of the games is great. At least I do not think I find a mistake anywhere. I'm sure there will be, but very subtle and hidden ones. I feel the depth of the analysis is adequate (which for me is very deep analysis) and normally I would not get lost in it.

So all in all, it seems the book has a lot of great things going on for it. But you will know by now there will be a but. Two buts indeed.

The first problem with the book is its purpose. When first I learn about the book, judging by its tittle I though Aagaard was making a treatise of the current knowledge in chess (like good/bad bishops), open files, weakened king, etc) and provide examples for us to solve. But it is nothing like this. The purpose of the book is to explain us how to improve our chess.

This objective is really ambitious and Aagaard himself admitted (I'm not sure if it was in the introduction of the book itself or in his blog) that it would be normal if we would read the book and felt we have not learned anything from it as he was going to state the obvious to try to make us conscious about it.

In my case, he hit the nail. I finished the book thinking I have learned very very little. There is the occasional thing to pick up here and there, do not get me wrong, but mainly everything is obvious (as Aagaard himself intended).

Obviously the chapters that are developed further in the other books of the series are kind of redundant to me as the books already feature their own introduction to each theme, but maybe someone reading the material in the order intended by Aagaard will not share this view.

Let me instead get deep into one instance that I feel showcases the book at its worst and that luckily Hartmann has also focused on: the division of chess decisions into four categories, which seems to be the core of the book. According to Aagaard there are four types of decisions:

• Automatic decisions: Those where your choice is obvious, you recapture, avoid a check, etc. In this kind of decision the only reasonable thing to do is make sure the decision is indeed automatic and then make the move.
• Simple decisions: Those were you just improve your position following the steps presented in Positional Play. You should not spend more than a couple of minutes on this because this decisions are by no means game-changing. You need to save time for tough decisions.
• Critical decisions: Here you have to calculate all the way to a definite conclusion. This is what the book Calculation and Endgame Play are all about.
• Strategic decisions: Here you have to make a decision were you cannot reach a definite conclusion and you therefore should guess somewhat. This is what Strategic Play and Attack and defense are all about (and I'm not quite sure the second book qualifies to be here).

 I find this division very interesting and kind of useful. I do spend a lot of time with simple decisions while I should spend less time on them. I will bring that home after reading the book and this is a success for Aagaard.

Nevertheless, I do not get the difference between critical and strategic decision.

The very concept of critical decisions has been debated over in the quality chess blog and Aagaard found many voices arguing against it. I do not want to enter that discussion as I might side with Aagaard here. I do think it is useful to know there are decisions that are critical and should be calculated accurately on a game, even if you miss them. Next time maybe you are aware of the concept and make a special effort to not miss such situations.

But when I start calculating I may be facing a critical or a strategic decision. The only difference from a practical point of view (as far as I can see it) is that in one you will have finished your calculations while in the other you will not because you lack the time and you will have to guess. Anyway you will have to move one way or the other.

So even in the most important point of the book I feel something is missing. Either my understanding of the classification is flawed (in which case the book is at fault as it did not get the job done) or the classification is flawed from a practical point of view, which defeats the purpose of having two different categories for the same basic decision: go deep and calculate.

Another example would be the classification of the players into four categories: intuitive vs logical, technical vs dynamic. I know I'm a technical player, but I have no idea if I'm logical or intuitive. The exposition of the chapter gave me no clue as this division was underdeveloped. Moreover this division seemed only accessory with no practical advice behind it.

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the idea with which I finished the book is that there were many interesting ideas but nothing special. The book failed to get a better player out of me.

The second problem is that the games are chosen primarily from Aagaard practice. As he is mainly an attacking player, this is what you are getting, tons of attacking games. Games that would fare better in an Attacking Manual than in a book about improving your chess. After all, not everyone plays this kind of chess (I do not, for instance), and those feel a bit left aside.

So my conclusion is that you have to think about this book as a best game's book. The advice on improvement is interesting and the prose is great, so you are not losing on that front, it may not be useful, but think of it as an extra. The games are quite interesting and well analyzed. So forget it is a Grandmaster Preparation book. It is not. When you are in this state of mind you can judge the book fairly. My personal feeling is that is a good book worth having. I like it a lot more than Gelfand's books which everybody seems to love.

So I recommend this book with some reserves.

A final addition is that you may enjoy this book whatever your elo is, as a  best games' book you will pick what you can.

Review: Chess software

I have been wanting to make a review on the software I use when I study chess but never got around it.

As I reviewed John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book I realized that being able to talk about this chess software is quite useful for the reviews, so I decided to set aside laziness and go for it!

In this review I will single out what I do in chess and which software best suits my needs. However I would like to highlight two things before we begin:

1. I have a open source operating system in my desktop (so, not windows, not apple). Many software won't work on it even if I were willing to use it.
2. Given the  choice, I try to go for the open-source solutions. I am kind of stubborn and follow that principle quite a lot.

Playing on-line:

I play on-line in a server called Free Internet Chess Server. As the name states it is free and it is enough for me. It is like an ICC from ten years ago (maybe ICC still has the same interface, I wouldn't know) and it does not take me long to find games there. My rating fluctuates between 1900 and 2000 generally (I am fide 2200).

I'm sure there are better sites there, but this is the one I know and I'm able to use given my software requirements.

To play on it I use Xboard (Winboard for Windows users). On my current Operating System (Linux Mint) I only had to download Xboard from the repositories and issue the following command on a terminal:

xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org

Xboard may not be the best software ever, but to play on-line you do not need much. A board and a way to seek opponents. Xboard gives me that and makes it easy for me to play. Windows users may not be able to relate, but being able to set things easy is a big plus.

Database handling:

My main reason to handle game databases is to manage my opening repertoire. I like to put the lines in the books on a database so it is easier to maintain and improve. There are two applications there that do what I need:

• SCID: This application is for the desktop computer and you may think of it as the open source version of Chessbase. Maybe it is uglier but I can do whatever I need to do with my files: I can create variations, comment on the game, etc. It also has a mode that I love called 'Opening Training' where it will make the moves for one side randomly from the opening file you have chosen and wait until you insert the move of the other side. This is a great way to study openings. It is very similar to what you can do in https://openings.chessbase.com/ but it will use your files!
• Scid on the go: This application is for android and is a derivative version of SCID. This android version is able to read databases, search positions and names and create games. I use it to introduce the moves from the book while on the bed before I go to sleep. Afterwards I put them in the computer through dropbox. It has the option to hide the notation of the game so you can train the openings there too (but it won't pick the move at random this time, but the main move of the game you are at). It is not as great as in SCID but it does the trick when you are studying in the subway. There are two things I do not like about this app: (1) it does not allow you to introduce comments on the notation and (2) when the game has a lot of variations and comments it turns slow and somewhat unresponsive when 'clicking' on a move. Furthermore, it won't allow you to change the settings of the engine.

Analyze games:

This is a different section because in the normal world there are both Chessbase and Fritz. As I do not play against the computer the only reason for me to use Fritz (or Houdini or whatever) would be to analyze a game. My engine of preference is of course Stockfish which fits the bill perfectly as it is not only free but open source, and it it the best engine overall (including commercial engines) by elo (or very close to it that you would not see the difference anyway), and I use it in the following apps.

• SCID: On the desktop computer I use SCID for analyzing too. It allows me to do whatever I want as noted earlier. 
• Droidfish: On the cellphone I use Droidfish. I just recently found out about its hidden potential (previously I only thought of it as an interface to play the computer). It allows you to add comments (which is very important for me as i not only introduce the lines from opening books but also create tactical and positional problems from them) and you can change the engine settings. I use that to check the positional exercises I create from an opening. An exercise is good if the first line of the engine is at least +0.2 better than the second one, so when I find a position which seems interesting (generally the ones in diagrams or before a ! move) I load the engine showing two lines and there I know if the position is a good exercise. Sadly Droidfish does not seem to be able to manage databases, so once I have finished analyzing the game/exercise and I have added all the comments, I share the game with Scid on the go where I am able to store it in the correct database. Being able to do it swiftly is one of the great discoveries I had recently.

Train tactics:

I train tactics in Chess Tempo. The site is free to train but some functionality is only available for paying members.  I do not pay so I have no idea if the paying section is worth it, but the free version is great. You can solve tactics slowly or in a mode called blitz (which takes into account the time you use to solve it). There are like 100,000 exercises to solve with a wide variety of different levels. The exercises you are presented with depend on your rating so you won't get something out of your league (too easy or too difficult).

I have been using the site for two month now and I have slowly climbed to 2130 elo in the standard mode. At this level I have to spend like 20 minutes per exercise to get them right. That means that those exercises I'm solving are harder on average than John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book. 

There are other sites available (chess.com, chess24.com) and I guess they would be good as well. I'm trying to spend 30 minutes each day solving tactics on-line (which sadly now is like two exercises, as I take sooo long to solve them) and my hypothesis is that it should raise my tactical awareness, specially when done without time taking into account. The blitz mode may be more fun but you do not invest as much in those problems and the improvement comes from the energy invested.

In particular ChessTempo (I cannot say for other sites) will show you exercises where only one move wins (a computer evaluation bigger than 1.75). The exercises are different from normal tactical books as they are not chosen to fulfill any criteria on beauty but just to have one good move available. It takes time to get used to it but all the positions are from real games, so you will be very close to real game scenarios (except for the fact that you know there is only one good move and that good move is winning).

To me this site has make puzzle books more or less obsolete . Note that this does not mean I won't be reading puzzle books in the future or I'm giving away the ones I own. I will continue to use puzzle books and I will buy more, but that's because I like the feel of studying with a book, writing in pencil what you have thought so you  can come back a year later and see if you have improved, and specially that if the author is good he gives you something special in the solution or in the selection of exercises.

But when you are studying tactics for tactics' sake, then you may as well go to one of this sites, you do not need anything else, as those are places for the day to day training. The site will bring you puzzles at your level and your rating will be updated after each puzzle, so you will see if you are improving or not.

Chess diags is a little app for android for solving mates. It starts with mates in 1 and goes all the way to mates in 10. There are like 2,000 mates and the potential for anyone to create their own set.

The difficulty is varied, there are a lot of trivial mates, but others really forced me to set the position in an engine.

As far as I can see, the only problem with this app are: (1) It is a data dump of a lot of mates, so some are good, some are bad, it really does not care if you are a queen up, you just have to mate; (2) it does not have an engine that might help you when you are stuck.

SCID on the go as training tactic is feasible if you have a database of tactical problems as you use the training mode in the same way as you did for your openings. You make a move and if it is the correct one SCID will answer it with the main line of the variation until there are no more moves.


Reading books:

To read books I use Forward Chess. It is an app for android and iOS that a lot of publishers use to sell their electronic books.

The application is not bad (although there are tons of things I would it to do that it does not but SCID on the Go does) and you do not really have a choice there, if you want an electronic book from one of its publishers you have to have this app (which is free).

I like it mainly for opening books so I can study them in the subway but I have bought normal books there too (Chess Structures for example) and it is useful to have the engine running at your fingertips.


Importing a diagram to your phone:

The problems with physical puzzle books is that often you are left wondering why your move did not work. Recently I found an app called ChessOcr which will let you read the diagram with the camera of the phone and send it to the app of your choice for studying that diagram (I send them to Droidfish).

The app is great and has saved me tons of time by not forcing me to set-up the board on Droidfish, but you will have to pay for it :( But if you are like me and wonder why your intended move is bad and find yourself setting up the position by hand in an engine a lot, maybe you could consider buying it!

Review: John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book Enlarged Edition

Title: John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book Enlarged Edition.
Author: John Nunn.
Publisher: Gambit Publications.
Year: 2009.
Pages: 336.
Price: 20.25€.

Last summer I bought Dvoretsky's Maneuvering: The art of piece play, Gabrinsky's Perfect your Chess and John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book. The main desire was to get Dvoretsky's book but I took the chance and went to get two puzzle books to go along with it. Perfect your Chess was meant to be there waiting for my level to go up, as it is allegedly hard while I hopped John Nunn's puzzle book would be an accessible book to give me a break from the difficult Aagaard books.

Nunn is an accomplished author and I was at a loss as of which book would be interesting (now I have some better ideas, when I get to review Dynamic Decision Making I'll share what Gelfand recommends you) so I thought his book would do the trick as it was computer-checked and I thought the fact that I had not seen much praise about it would mean that its level would be quite accessible. I do not want to spoil the review, but I can advance that it is not.

The book features 300 tactical exercises in 336 pages. if you look at other reviews I've done that ratio is not really high for a tactics book. The format is unlike anything I've seen so far. It has the puzzles at the beginning and the solutions at the end of the book, but there is a middle section with hints for 252 of the problems. It also features 48 problems in a test format (without hint) where you can rate yourself.

The hint section gives you some advice as to how to solve the problem and gives you the difficulty of it. The hints vary in usefulness. Some spoil the problem completely while a lot more are not useful at all. When solving I only gave myself half the marks if I had to look at the hint to get the solution right even if the hint was obscure.

The edition of the book is poor and is something that shocks me to this day. As far as I understand it Nunn is one of the owners of Gambit Publications so one would think that he would want his book in the best quality available, specially if they are committed to a second edition (it is called enlarged because it features some more exercises, but it is a second edition after all).

However the book is paperback (well, everyone except for QC goes for paperback, but I can still complain as this is my blog!) and the quality of the paper is the worst I've seen in years. This is the problem when you buy in amazon, you won't have the book on your hands and you may end up buying something you dislike.

It seems that this edition not only has new exercises (which is good), but also a diagram at the beginning of the solution for each exercise to help you follow the solution. I cannot judge the usefulness of it as I did not study the previous edition but given how hard it is to navigate the book my guess is that it is a good addition.

The length of the book is excessive for only 300 exercises but the hints and the extra diagram in the solution take space too. The book is about the adequate thickness (thanks in part to the bad quality of the paper on it) so while it would be able to fit a lot more exercises with a better structure you have to think about the cost of each exercise (less than 0.07€) and stop complaining.

The solutions are thoroughly commented (unlike QC puzzle book, for instance), the solution normally takes around half a page per exercise and the comments are good.

The analysis is also adequate. I think I found only one flawed exercise (where the intended solution did not win). The exercises, though, are difficult. The exercises are rated with stars (with one star for the easiest puzzles to 5+ to the deadliest ones) and the 2-star problems were difficult but manageable for me, the 3-star problems were very difficult but I could solve them about half of the time and the 4-star problems were hell and took me quite a lot of time and even then I had poor success.

The average difficulty of the book is between 2 and 3 stars. Unlike the QC titles the problems are not ordered by difficulty so there is no obvious point were you can go to the next chapter, you have to suffer all the way to the end. However I cheated and looked the difficulty before trying to solve the exercise. I do not know if it gave me a big advantage, but at least it gave me solace when I would get stuck solving. You may as well skip the hardest problems if you like, although I wouldn't do that myself.

As I said earlier at the end of the book there are some tests. I loved that. As Nunn's point out, the elo you will get from there is not reliable but I was surprised that I got around the same marks for each test. The final mark was 2132 which is surprisingly close to my rating (and I was never good at tactics so it makes sense that my elo in tactics is lower). That elo is just the one you will get for having a level between 2 and 3 stars exercises (which is what I got in the rest of the book).

So all in all I do not regret having bought the book. The quality of the edition is terrible and I did not like a bit its structure. I like QC style of having the solutions of the problems just in the next page. That way you only need one marker to know where you are. Here not only you need two markers for the exercise and the solution, but a third one for the hints!  That is a pain to move across the book and it is easy that you see other hints or other solutions by mistake.

But the exercises are challenging and well commented, the test is a lot of fun (at least for me) and overall the difficulty assigned to the problems make sense.

I think a guy at 2000 should be around the 2 star mark and the book features enough 1 and 2 star exercises to make the purchase worthwhile, but maybe at 1800 it makes no sense as you will be struggling too much. On the other hand I think a 2300 will have a run for his money with the book.

That said, I do not recommend the book (even if I do not regret buying it myself). There are a lot of puzzle books out there. This is interesting but not the best one by a long shot. I have reviewed better puzzle books in this page and I plan to share with you Gelfand's recommendation on the subject. This book is not there.