NM Dan Heisman - 30 Years of Chess Coaching Wisdom

It's amazing.

Chess being such a cruel game that the best game in your life can be ruined with a single blunder, right? So the value of fixing that process, it's much more important than learning move 13 in the Karokhan opening, right? As you put it already in your books, basically.

So that should be the main target of our training.

How do we raise our floor? How do we consistently not play hop chess? That will really have a huge impact in one's game.

And this actually brings me to my blunder check process.

And your book is your move safe because now I'm working on a chessable course on the blunder check process.

Because to me that's so puzzling then.

Given blunder check is arguably the most important chess skill that we must master and raise our floor, how come there are so little resources in the chess literature about this process? I'm not talking about your book because besides your book I don't even find so many resources elsewhere in Chessable or elsewhere about this particular process.

I will make a move and I will need to make sure the opponent doesn't defeat me by a check capture threat.

I

think part of the problem is, you know, we've only been in the golden age of chess books for the last 30 or 40 years.

Most people who teach amateurs, like I had trouble getting my first book published.

I wrote my first chess book, which was The Improving Chess Thinker, I guess.

I'm trying to remember.

Yeah.

I wrote it in 1974 when I was just becoming master level.

And you wrote it on a typewriter, right? I wrote it on a

typewriter, and I sent it to two publishers, and they wouldn't publish it because I was a nobody.

So I waited until the more modern age, 1990, and there was a small publisher in western Pennsylvania that agreed to publish one of my books.

And my book sat in my bookshelf for 16 years after I wrote it.

And this is part of the problem was there wasn't that many big book publishers like Batsford was for England.

And all the people who write for them are international masters and grandmasters.

And you didn't have a lot of people who were working with average people.

to teach them and to get them to be better and listen to them think out loud like DeGroote did.

Because DeGroote did it mostly for IMs and GMs in his book.