Lessons with a Grandmaster: Volume I

The Amateur Approach vs. the Grandmaster Approach
to Decision Making in Chess

It’s no surprise that grandmasters think differently than the rest of us.

But how can an amateur shape their thought process so they can approach a position like a grandmaster would?

Former Soviet and American Chess Champion Boris Gulko shows you how with this classic course, now adapted to Chessable.

In Lessons with a Grandmaster, the former top-tier GM teams up with Dr. Joel Sneed - an accomplished psychologist and one of Gulko’s amateur students - to delve into the grandmaster decision-making process.

GM Gulko and Dr. Sneed analyze 25 grandmaster games together, from start to finish, stopping to ask questions and discuss plans and calculations all along the way.

By comparing Sneed’s approach with Gulko’s, reading their instructive Q&A, and quizzing yourself in ‘What would you do?” scenarios with puzzles and trainable lines, you’ll learn how to:

♜ Formulate the right plan for the circumstances by understanding the nature of your advantages and how to capitalize on them. Learn why a time advantage requires a target, why the two bishops advantage requires space, and other “plan primers”

♜ Improve your decision making by calculating the possible refutations of natural-looking alternative moves. Plus, learn when you should stop for defense or race to land your attack first

♜ Understand the logical progression of games. By understanding how the opening sets up the middlegame and the middlegame sets up the endgame, you’ll refine your process for deciding your game plan. The detailed annotations of 25 complete pro-level games shows how to compose the overall symphony

And much more. These thought processes not only won GM Gulko numerous titles and championships, it also helped Sneed increase his rating 200 points just in the course of writing the book. It also won him quite the tournament achievement: a 1st place finish in the famous Marshall Chess Club’s U2000 Championship!

Start thinking more like a grandmaster: get Lessons with a Grandmaster today.