Stoyko Exercises

I came across the idea of Stoyko exercises recently in Dan Heisman's website, and I found them to be really useful.

In a nutshell, what you do is take a very complicated position (preferably an open, messy position with unbalanced material and lots of potential tactics). Set it up on a board and take a pen and piece of paper. Now you have to analyse the position as deeply as you can, without moving the pieces, and write down your analysis in the paper together with an evaluation of the final position (e.g. Black is slightly better, White is winning). You have to include all variations, but you have to specify which is the best line for both sides. This exercise should take 1 or 2 hours (if it doesn't, either you are not analysing deeply enough or your chosen position is not complicated enough). At the end of the exercise, you can check with your analysis with a strong player or your computer.

This is a really great exercise to work on, because not only are you practising your analysis and visualization skills, you are also practising how to evaluate positions. Crucially, the exercise also helps you become better at handling sharp, open positions. Why is this important given that most positions that arise in games are comparatively balanced and 'normal'? This is because normal positions are a lot easier to handle in general, whearas in sharp positions even very good players can make big errors. So sharp positions are in effect the key positions in the games, the ones whose outcome can have a decisive effect on the game result. I have noticed that a lot of players may purposefully shrink away from playing a sharp variation in a game and stick with a 'safer' line (even though the sharp line may be the objectibely better continuation), and while this is good for you short-term results and probably good for your heart as well, it is detrimental to your long-term improvement in chess. Stoyko exercises, by forcing you to calculate a lot of variations very deeply, will naturally make you more adept than your average opponent in handling sharp positions that arise in your games. In fact, with your new-found skills, you might even deliberately steer your games into unbalanced positions (remember Tal?).

For more about Stoyko exercises, check out Heisman's website (http://mywebpages.comcast.net/danheisman/Articles/Articles.html); and do give them a try and let me know whether you like the idea. Good luck!