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The Complete Guide to Chess Calculation and Evaluation

Relevant Course with discount code link: The Complete Guide to Chess Calculation and Evaluation

In chess, calculation and evaluation are the twin engines that drive strong decision-making. This course, created by FIDE CM Kingscrusher, is designed to supercharge your thinking process—giving you the tools to calculate deeply, visualize accurately, and evaluate confidently. Whether you're a club player looking to push beyond plateaus or an advanced student aiming for consistency and clarity, this course will sharpen your mental blade and help you play with conviction.

Calculation is the ability to look ahead in concrete variations—testing possible sequences, refutations, and counter-refutations. Evaluation is the ability to judge the resulting position after a calculated line. Combined, these skills allow you to navigate the chaos of the middlegame, make critical endgame decisions, and avoid the traps of shallow thinking.

This course introduces a powerful model for training calculation using the SPICE framework: a mnemonic that helps identify Spicy forcing moves that often yield tactical and strategic rewards. You'll also master the essential principles: checking all checks, all captures, all threats, and understanding when a quiet move is actually the killer blow.

What You'll Learn

• How to calculate deeply with clear structure and direction
• How to evaluate the final position to guide your calculations
• How to avoid typical blunders and calculation traps
• How to manage your time and mental resources effectively
• How to recognize when to stop calculating and trust intuition
• How to identify "critical positions" that require extra care
• How to transition from calculation to evaluation with clarity

Section Breakdown

Section 1: Core Principles – Discover the psychological and technical foundations of calculation, including visualization, checkmate patterns, evaluating imbalances, and addressing the limits of human thought compared to chess engines.

Section 2: Puzzle Practice – Level 1 – Realistic puzzles from historical and modern games that test your calculation precision and expose you to rich tactical patterns, blunders, and beautiful combinations.

Section 3: Puzzle Practice – Level 3 – More advanced positions requiring deeper, multi-phase calculations and more subtle evaluations, teaching you to combine logic with intuition under pressure.

Unique Features of This Course

• Over 29 hours of focused video instruction
• Hundreds of hand-picked puzzles with real instructional value
• In-depth commentary and psychological insight from FIDE CM Kingscrusher
• Training for over-the-board and online chess formats
• Conceptual lectures followed by applied puzzle training

You'll also learn how to lower the stakes of calculation errors by securing your position, recognize and exploit the "Weakness of the Last Move", and combine multiple threats into single devastating moves.

Visualization will be developed through constant exposure to meaningful, engaging examples—from classics featuring players like Alekhine, Smyslov, and Karpov to modern puzzles involving Nakamura, Anand, and Ivanchuk. Every lecture builds your muscle memory and pattern recognition.

Join now and embark on a journey to master chess's most demanding yet rewarding skill set—calculation and evaluation.