Secrets of Practical Chess

What Hacker News says

1. snitsMar 2014
   Very horribly probably. Though it is a great book, and everyone serious about chess should read it, I think this quote of Anatoly Lein by Jonathan Tisdall in Improve Your Chess Now explains the problem with Kotov best.

   "I don't think like a tree - do you think like a tree?"

   I believe John Nunn touched on the problems with Kotov's method as well in Secrets of Practical Chess.

   The biggest thing to take away from him is the need for a thought process, not necessarily the actual method he describes.

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2. waterhouseSep 2011
   The flip side of this is that if you are down by a little bit, you should not allow your opponent to slowly and confidently increase his advantage (unless you think he'll make little mistakes and lose the advantage; that would probably mean you're better than him, and we're probably not talking about that situation). Instead, you should force a big risky fight in which your opponent has a substantial chance of losing, if that's possible.

   Along similar lines, chess grandmaster John Nunn wrote, in Secrets of Practical Chess, that when you are down, you have two basic strategies: "grim defense" and "create confusion". If you are, say, a pawn down, it may still be possible to draw if you make no mistakes; your opponent will have to work hard to force a win, and he may even get impatient and try to win quickly with a risky strategy; this is "grim defense". If that strategy is unappealing (if his advantage is simple to consolidate and exploit, or if you don't feel like slow and careful defense), then you may opt to do risky things to create complicated, high-stakes positions and hope your opponent makes a mistake; this is "create confusion".

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