Chessable Course Review: Calculation: A Complete Guide for Tournament Players

Retrospective review. A club player special. This course will teach you *how* to calculate. Work hard... but work smart too.

Note: I originally a review on Chessable over 2 years ago. This will be an updated version of that review. You can purchase the course here.

CM Azel Chua’s Calculation: A Complete Guide for Tournament Players hit a very special niche when it was first released on Chessable’s platform two and a half years ago. When it first came out, I raved about it, because it unlocked something that was particularly opaque to me: What is the thought process behind calculation? How do you know what to look for? I gave it a 5/5, and ultimately I stand by that rating. But as someone who has progressed as a player since then, I wanted to look back, and give a retrospective review. My first review comes off almost as an advertisement but that wasn’t really by design. The course deserved my enthusiasm. Nearly 2.5 years later, the numbers show the longevity and popularity of the course. Calculation, a Complete Guide for Tournament Players has a combined average rating of 4.66 by 440 different users. Those are just review clicks, so the number of actual students is probably much higher.

This is a course I revisit often — I will reset all my progress just to start over and read through and do the exercises. I do this probably a couple times a year, or whenever I feel like my thought process for puzzles has fallen into disrepair.

The main core of the course is the “Burger Technique”. The metaphorical burger is stacked by looking systematically at certain aspects of the position, analyzing and drawing conclusions, then selecting candidate moves and calculating. Tactical motifs and other considerations are introduced progressively through the chapter, and hints are reduced the further along the student goes — forcing them to learn to recall what they are supposed to do when solving the puzzles.

After this, and probably just as conceptually important, Chua teaches a technique for “Reciprocal Thinking”. Basically, when you run into a snag in your calculations, don’t immediately reject it, but try to fix what’s wrong with your variation by looking a few ply deeper and try to make it work. The puzzles given are usually rather helpful at displaying how this can be done. In the end, you learn how to come up with moves that to the outside observer may appear surprising, but are internally consistent with the idea behind the correct variations. When you solve the puzzle correctly, it is extremely satisfying.

Then comes a short section on what he terms “Pattern Internalisation Essentials”. The idea is to think about typical tactics a bit deeper to help you to more accurately recognize a tactical pattern and when it works, and perhaps more importantly when it doesn’t work. This is more conceptual and harder to teach via the MoveTrainer technology behind Chessable, so the trainables here are scarce and the writing is the main portion of this chapter. It’s great advice, and shouldn’t be skipped, but for players who already understand pattern recognition it’s probably the least helpful and more likely to feel like a retread than genuinely new information.

Then comes a chapter I think may actually be underrated by some: Essential Theoretical Endgames. Basically, whatever theoretical endgames he thinks the club player needs to know is in here. If you’re a club player, eventually you need to know these things, so don’t skip it, even if you think you know it. Endgame study can be tedious, so it’s nice to have someone’s list of ideas they think are necessary for club players to know. Your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed this chapter a lot.

Next comes more stuff on endgames, this time entitled Endgame Ideas. This deals with the more heady aspects of endgames: Fortresses. Schematic Thinking, forcing stalemate, trapping pieces, Zugzwang; but also, applying the theoretical endgames you learned in the previous chapter.

After this is a short chapter on typical mistakes, then a Q&A section, followed by bonus puzzles which were added to the course (this is one great feature of chessable courses). Overall there is a lot to learn, and in every case it’s explained in straightforward and crystal-clear language, and that’s one reason why I continually revisit the course.

I don’t have a lot of criticisms when I consider the course as a whole, though I find that some of the puzzles in Reciprocal Thinking don’t really require it in order to solve. Because this is not a tactics course per se but a guide to calculation, it might feel a bit short, but Chua has another course all about applying the Burger Technique over the course of 12 weeks so that it becomes second nature. Also, because the course is trying to teach a calculation method, I don’t think that the spaced repetition that Chessable defaults to is the most helpful for most students (theoretical endgames being a major exception and being worthwhile to drill and memorize).

I concluded my first review of the course by saying that it wasn’t your grandpa’s chessable course. Overall, I still agree with this assessment. If you’re a club player rated 1200 or up, this is a great choice for learning how to calculate more accurately and deeply, and it’s one of the best courses on the site even after the last two years.

5/5