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It's not as if top players sit down to memorize an old game. They don't spend time only memorizing, memorization is not a goal. But they study lots of games. Old games, new games, famous games, their …

Everybody needs training material, preferably specific to the skill to be trained. You and I can just buy improvement books with hundreds of positions and have plenty work to do, at a high enough lev …

Draw offers are useful for psychological reasons, provided of course that you don't particularly mind getting a draw as a result of your offer now and then. Let's say you have a more or less equal po …

One thing is that you may adjust your opening choice, knowing that any forced draws are wins for you. For instance as white against the Najdorf, 6.Bg5 has many lines that contain forced draws, and bla …

Chess is a zero sum game. There is 1 point available and it is divided over the players, what one gains the other loses. It is a simple concept with a simple answer. Tournament rules mention some very …

It would hardly help, because chess is not a game of knowledge. It's a game of skill. It wouldn't be much different from "downloading" video of all football games ever and expecting to play like Messi …

I feel that you should not look at win/draw/loss statistics for this sort of thing. There are many problems with them (some openings are employed more often by strong players against weaker players or …

You can still improve, 25 years is not old. At 40, I'm rated about 300 points higher than at 25, and I hope to improve further (although that isn't realistic as I'm not spending any time on the game.. …

The special feature of a 1.e4 repertoire is that transpositions are rare. You can have independent repertoires against each of black's replies. This is very different from 1.c4, 1.d4 and 1.Nf3 where m …

You hold yourself to a higher standard than your opponent, for politeness' sake. So you let him play an alternative move after you kindly point out that it was perhaps not the best available, but you …

I can think of three mistakes that a lot of class players who think they're working on their chess make: They read chess books. In particular they buy lots of them and then skim them, or study / t …