Maximize Your Chess Potential

by Dan Heisman

Dan Heisman has been teaching chess for over 50 years and has been doing so full-time since 1996. He therefore knows very well what kind of advice actually helps players improve. This book is a distillation of that advice. The book is based around his X (twitter) column "Chess tip of the day" which has been running since 2009 and features over 4,000 tips. The most useful advice has been distilled into 200 tips that contain additional helpful material, including illustrative stories and many diagrams with instructive play. These tips represent ways to highlight and address the most common problems experienced by chess enthusiasts of all levels. They also suggest ways to mitigate or even avoid these these problems entirely and by doing so improve their chess play and learn to study more effectively. The tips lean towards general improvement rather than focusing on specific positions. The topics addressed include: general improvement, thought processes, psychology, tactics, safety, positional concepts, strategy, openings and endgames.

Genres: Chess

304 pages, ebook

Published July 17, 2025

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

1 General Improvement - page 12
2 Thought Process - page 73
3 Psychology - page 126
4 Tactics/Safety - page 160
5 Positional Concepts and Strategy - page 201
6 Opernings page 247
7 Endgames - page 283

Epilogue - page 304

.........

In 2021, the Chess Journalists of America voted my Chess Tip of the Day the ‘Best Twitter Feed’ award. As I write this, I am awaiting to see if my Twitter tips win another award.

What is a chess ‘tip’? It is a suggestion; something I think might help a person play chess better, think more efficiently, refer to a website or media for some recommendation, draw attention to something interesting, publicize events, or just enjoy the world of chess better.

In that sense my tips – and thus the contents of this book – differ from similar works such as Alburt and Lawrence’s Chess Rules of Thumb, which contains primarily principles/rules or Soltis’s The Wisest Things Ever Said About Chess, which are ‘wise’, but not necessarily all suggestions.

There is some overlap, of course, between this book and those predecessors. I can (and will!) offer some principles as suggestions to improve play, or suggest that a wise statement might contain good advice to follow.

As readers might know, Twitter was originally limited to 140 characters, but a few years ago, expanded to 280 per tweet. However, publishers were not interested in a book of ‘The Best of Chess Tip of the Day’ that were just hundreds if not thousands of copied and pasted short tips from my Twitter page – especially since they were available online for free!

For this reason, I have expanded each tip to 1-4 pages of additional material not found on Twitter.

Therefore, this book is much more than just some of my best tips. I have selected tips that were not just the most helpful, but also ones that could be expanded with additional text and/or examples.

I have been teaching chess for over 50(!) years and full-time since 1996, so many of these tips represent ways to highlight and address the most common problems I have found in students of all levels, offering suggested ways they can help mitigate or maybe even avoid these problems and/or improve their play and study.

While many players at the same level may have similar problems in a skill-like analysis, they can also differ greatly in other areas, such as playing too fast or slow, or in their knowledge of openings, exact endgames, or principles.

When expanding the included tips into a page or more, I was able to turn this manuscript into much more than just suggestions; the expanded tips contain additional helpful material, including illustrative stories and many diagrams with instructive play.

Much of this expanded material is either typical of, or verbatim, what I would use as part of a lesson, so in that sense many of the tips can be considered ‘Best Mini-Lessons of an Old Coach’!

On that note, the first book I wrote for Everyman was A Guide to Chess Improvement: the Best of Novice Nook. I think in every sense a reader will find this book to be a great companion to that one, and consistent in my messaging to players wishing to improve.

Occasionally I hear someone say they initially judge a chess book by flipping through it and glancing at the diagrams to get a feel for the book; I am not sure this is the optimum way to evaluate a new book, but I hope this one at least meets the minimum requirements!

As with all books of this nature, most readers will find some tips more helpful than others. This is only natural, based on each player’s playing strength, perceived and actual weaknesses, and areas of interest.

In that sense, the book does not have to be read from start to finish, as one might read a novel or, for that matter, many of my other chess books. Instead, you can peruse the book at your leisure, looking for tips that you find interesting or helpful.

And it is likely that a tip you find unappealing today might be the key tip in a year or two that will get you out of a rut or slump! In that sense this book can be used either as a reference book or a straight read.

With this many tips, there will naturally be some overlap between tips that address the same subject like good time management, careful analysis, creating active pieces, or trying your best on every move. I have tried to provide adequate cross-references between tips, but there is going to be some purposeful synergism even between tips without a cross-reference which address similar topics.

It is important to note that the text is written so that the great majority of the cross-references are there to be helpful to correlate or augment the suggestions, but it is not necessary to follow those cross-references in order to understand the referencing tip.

Occasionally one tip would lead directly or as a corollary to another tip. If there was sufficient material for the additional tip, I would make this a separate tip but, if not, I sometimes included additional related tips, usually with the note *Tip Alert!*.

Unlike my The Improving Chess Thinker or Silman’s Endgame Course, the material in this book is not meant to be arranged in any ascending order of difficulty.

That is mostly due to the nature or tips and suggestions – they are not normally ‘you need to know this tip before you can read the next one.’ There are, however, a few tips that do flow naturally from a previous tip; in those few cases I tried to put the tips in consecutive order or at least reference the other tip.

Similarly, many of the tips are general or involve overall improvement, so I decided to assign each tip, as best possible, to one of the following chapters:

General Improvement
Thought Process
Psychology
Tactics/Safety
Positional Concepts and Strategy
Opernings
Endgames

Middlegame issues are addressed primarily though Chapters Four (Tactics/Safety) and Five (Positional Concepts/Strategy).

Further, because the tips are in subject order and not in order of priority, I have put the label *Top-10 Tip* after the ten tips I think might be most helpful to the average reader.

However, each reader is invited to pick out their own ‘most helpful’ set, which will likely differ greatly from mine! Drop me an email via my website www.danheisman.com to let me know your ‘top ten’.

It almost goes without saying in modern chess books that, when I use a term like ‘best move’, it is not my opinion, but the result of engine analysis.

For almost all instances where the quality of a move is mentioned, the engine was Stockfish.

This is my 13th chess book, so I am trying not to be superstitious and am hoping 13 will turn out to be a lucky number! At my age, I am not sure I will be writing additional books representing a luckier number, so I wanted this book to be instructive, entertaining, and of high quality. I hope the reader agrees!

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Chapter Two
Thought Process

This chapter deals primarily with the process – more than content – of chess thinking. Process involves which steps are being taken, their order, and priority. Thought process tips deal with areas like analysis, evaluation, and the important but commonly overlooked topic of time management. It also includes tips involving questions to ask during the thought process.#

Tip 40

There is not one single correct thought process that would cover all types of positions...


...unless you want it to include a ‘meta-thought process’ decision of what type of thought process would apply to the current position!

In his interesting book Move First, Think Later: Sense and Nonsense in Improving Your Chess, Willy Hendriks suggests that teaching someone to think by giving them instructions like “Do A first then do B” is not the way good players think, and by telling someone that you are likely doing more harm than good.

Hendriks’s opinion is comparable to what I am suggesting with this tip. For example, you certainly do not approach highly analytical and completely non-analytical positions the same. A good example of a non-analytical position might occur for Black’s move if White opens the game 1 a4.

[diagram]

Black to play after 1 a4 – What is his thought process?

In this and similar non-analytical (‘judgmental’) positions Black should not necessarily be thinking analytical ideas like ‘If I make move x, what will White do to me on the next move and how will I be able to meet that?’ Instead, he should be thinking in general terms like ‘What openings would make sense reversed with a pawn on a4 since I am effectively playing White?’ or ‘White is leaving the first thrust in the center up to me; how can I best take advantage of that?’

This latter type of thought process is ‘hand-waving’ (moving on principles and general observation, but not via detailed analysis), but in a very acceptable way. It is quite different to an analytical situation, for example, a complex position with many checks, captures, and threats for both sides. Then hand-waving is a serious mistake; you must be more analytical.

I agree with Hendriks that no strong player has a strict process they use every move and telling a student that they should have one can be counterproductive. But I will make a general observation from my experience:

The more advanced a player is, the more he can use intuition, judgment, and jump all around searching for what he wants to play; all the ingredients are there. The more a player is towards beginner, the more he needs at least some ingredients that get him off step one and systematically help him find moves that are at least safe.

For example, no one would tell an advanced reader to sound out ‘t’, ‘h’ and ‘e’ when reading the word ‘the’, but it is almost impossible to teach someone how to read English without first helping them recognize letters, their sounds, and how to combine those sounds into words before they can read for meaning, as all advanced readers do.

So, while it is true that teaching inexperienced players rigorous, structured thought processes can not only be unhelpful, but even counter-productive, the opposite extreme of telling them to just ‘go with the flow’ isn’t going to provide any basis for going forward if they don’t have the board vision and tactical vision to spot meaningful patterns to use in the game.

Instead, a practical middle-ground is possible where you can teach someone many of the basic precepts and principles of what needs, as a minimum, to be done at some point in their thought process. For example, you can teach someone to ask first about their opponent’s move ‘What are all the important things that move does?’ and ‘Is that move safe?’ and to ask about each of their own candidate moves, ‘Is it safe?’

It is true that if you are required to think about the process of what you should be thinking that can detract from what your thinking should be. But the other extreme (which I don’t think Hendriks is fully espousing) of giving an inexperienced player no guidance for fear of stifling their creativity or causing them to think too mechanically is probably also not optimum. As usual, the best solution probably lies somewhere in the middle.

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Tip 41
There’s not always a clearly best move or idea, and assuming there is (outside of puzzles, which state a clear goal) might be counterproductive.

Tip 42
More than anything, your ability to analyze and evaluate positions determines your playing strength. Therefore, strengthening those does more than anything else to help you improve.

Tip 43 - Top-10 Tip
There is more than one way to play better moves.

Tip 44
One of the most common causes of thought process errors among amateurs rated under 1800 is quiescent errors.

Tip 91 - Top-10 Tip

The purpose of doing basic tactics is not to just to win material/mate, but also to reject candidates which lose material/allow mate. Moreover, a principal goal of studying basic
tactics is to recognize common tactical patterns, not just be able to solve them.

[Playing safe moves requires the ability to recognize and analyze dangerous moves that the opponent can do in reply, and to make sure all of the opponent’s dangerous moves can be safely met next turn. The foundation for the ability to play safe moves is the study and recognition of basic safety patterns. Many new students think that repetitious study of basic problems is not helpful because they can solve them so easily. But the goal should be quick and accurate recognition, not just solving. Take the analogy of learning 6x7.]

Tip 92
Tactics and safety dominate positional and strategic aspects.

Tip 93
The forcing moves are checks, captures, and threats. So almost all tactics (except possibly zugzwang) involve checks, captures, and/or threats.

Tip 94
AWL (Attacking With a Lesser valued piece) is an important chess concept, and often a constructive threat.