Dvoretskys Analytical Manual

DVORETSKY’S ANALYTICAL MANUAL
Author: Mark Dvoretsky
Russell Enterprises, Inc. (2008)
419 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by John Donaldson

DVORETSKY’S ANALYTICAL MANUAL by the noted trainer and writer IM Mark Dvoretsky is likely to be one of the most useful works ever published for the player who wants to improve. Yes, this might sound like a bold claim, but consider the following excerpt from an article published at ChessBase (CLICK TO READ CHESSBASE ARTICLE) by the Norwegian chess pedagogue Rune Vik-Hansen:

“Chess players are often encouraged to read chess books and watch DVDs to improve their playing strength. However, most books and DVDs might inspire, motivate and fascinate, but crucially suffer from didactical lopsidedness as they will not genuinely help players improve due to only filling up the players’ RAM i.e. short term memory or consciousness at the time of reading or watching. In other words, most chess books and DVDs might capture players’ attention and imagination by presenting chess as an easily and readily accessible conscious activity but do not seriously improve the ability to generate or produce high quality moves as this is governed by subconscious processes.

“There is, however, a foolproof method for increasing playing strength, improving chess judgment and combat, if not completely eradicate, blunder tendencies and, as rendered in Alexander Kotov’s THINK LIKE A GRANDMASTER, it goes as follows:

No matter what position you choose to analyze, opening, middle game or end game complex or simple; find annotated games from tournament books or magazines and play through them till you to come to the point with the greatest number of variations.

Cover up the annotations with a sheet of paper and, without moving the pieces, just like a tournament game, analyze the position from 30 minutes to an hour. If the variations are extremely complex, you might write down your analyzes while analyzing.

When time is out, stop analyzing and uncover the annotations in the book or magazine, and compare your notes with the annotator’s.

“When starting out, there might be a great discrepancy between your analyzes and the annotators’ but with time, one learns to delineate relevant moves and variations as this training and final comparison will exercise and target the mind’s ability to perceive ch ess positions and produce high quality moves.

“Strictly speaking, this, and not his highly criticized graphic presentation of tree-analyzes, is the Kotov-method.”

Where do you find well-chosen and deeply annotated games with insightful commentary to employ the Kotov-method? Try DVORETSKY’S ANALYTICAL MANUAL where most of the games (35 in all plus about a dozen studies) average approximately ten over sized (10 by 7 inches) pages. Dvoretsky has chosen examples from many sources – books, magazines, his own games, those he has observed first hand and those brought to him by his students. The strength of the players ranges from World Champions down to National Masters. Dvoretsky’s only criteria for inclusion is that the games or positions be rich enough to well illustrate the point he wishes to make. Readers of previous works by Dvoretsky will recognize some of the games from his earlier books but without exception the notes have been greatly expanded.

Having determined that DVORETSKY’S ANALYTICAL MANUAL is a most useful book, the only question is who is it useful for? In general this book is primarily aimed at players 2200 who are willing to work hard on their chess. That said the level might go down to 2000 for those who are really willing to stretch and work hard. This is not a book for your average club paper.

Highly Recommended

Click to buy (or get more information about) DVORETSKY'S ANALYTICAL MANUAL

Other books by Mark Dvoretsky:

DVORETSKY'S ENDGAME MANUAL (2nd Edition)

SCHOOL OF FUTURE CHAMPIONS 1

SCHOOL OF FUTURE CHAMPIONS 2

SCHOOL OF FUTURE CHAMPIONS 3