Think Like a Super-GM

The publisher's foreword describes this as "Puzzle book meets The Master Game meets Science" — a reference to the 1970s BBC television series where grandmasters narrated their thought processes out loud as games were replayed. That comparison is accurate.

Philip Hurtado, a researcher with no prior chess book to his name, contacted Michael Adams via his website with an idea: present the same 40 positions to chess players ranging from complete beginners to Super-GM, record not just the moves they chose but their full reasoning as they worked through each problem, and use the resulting data to analyse scientifically what actually separates strong players from everyone else.

Adams — who left school at sixteen to pursue professional chess and became one of the world's top ten players — signed on, and his involvement grew considerably as the project developed. The format is straightforward: solve the puzzle yourself, then read the recorded thought processes of each solver, from club level up to Adams himself. What emerges is not a theoretical framework but observed reality: you see exactly where a 1500-rated player and a Super-GM diverge, in their own words.

The book ends with data-driven conclusions: candidate move selection, the art of falsification, and — the question Adams says he'd been asked a thousand times with no good answer — how many moves ahead a grandmaster actually calculates. An Eyetracker experiment, tracking where players of different strengths actually look on the board, adds a final dimension that no conventional chess book has attempted.

464 pages. Suitable for intermediate players and above.