How It All Began

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Welcome to my Chess Visualization blog!

One day I was looking at some positions in the Encyclopedia of Chess Middlegames by the Chess Informant publishers and, after struggling with one of the positions for a while, gave up and looked at the solution in the back of the book. After struggling some more with the solution given, I suddenly came to the 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, but there weren't any good materials out there to help me develop these skills. So I started thinking about how to put some materials together that would focus specifically on visualization.

The result is my Chess Visualization Course!

This book (soon to be published) contains 800 exercises designed to help the average chess player (1200-1800 USCF; 500-150 BCF) practice his visualization skills using games played by masters and grandmasters in tournaments and matches throughout the world.

The book is just about finished now, so I thought I'd post some of the exercises here to let you know what it's about.

The difference between my book and most other books on tactics is that I give you the moves -- you just have to visualize them! This lets you focus on developing your visualization muscles. It's not unlike weight training which isolates a particular muscle group in order to maximize its development. By focusing on visualization, we can maximize its development.

We're not concerned with finding candidate moves or evaluating positions here. There are other books for that. This one focuses specifically on visualization and gives 800 exercises for practice.

So it's a new type of book, one that has been very valuable for my own development.

Paul Whitehead, a FIDE Master and USCF Life Master, states in the foreword that the Chess Visualization Course is "an important contribution to chess literature." In this blog I'll describe the book and show you some of the exercises so that you can judge for yourself.
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