Improve Your Chess Calculation

This book carries a foreword by Viswanathan Anand — a fitting endorsement, since its author, Ramesh RB, is one of the most successful coaches in the world and has guided a generation of India’s grandmasters from their first steps to the elite. The subject is the skill that most directly decides games: calculation.

Ramesh’s premise is honest. Calculation is hard work; you cannot fall back on feeling or intuition, and improving at it means training deliberately. His method is to set up a position and solve it without moving the pieces, and the book supplies exactly the right exercises to build that muscle.

What sets it apart is the coach’s eye for why players go wrong. Across chapters on dynamic versus static positions, the analytical process, forcing moves, and — unusually — the common mistakes players actually make while calculating, Ramesh targets the specific misconceptions that cause good players to miss the best move, even when it is the opposite of what intuition suggests. A chapter on improving through studies and one of broader coaching advice round out the book.

GM Daniel Naroditsky describes sensing “a seismic shift” in his calculation after a month of training with Ramesh. The hundreds of exercises here are demanding and span every level, from club player to aspiring master.