Rethinking Human Chess Calculation: Beyond Kotov's Tree

Fundamental Chess Calculation Skills Just Won the 2023 Best Tactics Course Award! https://www.chessable.com/blog/announ... https://www.chessable.com/fundamental... Think Like a Grandmaster by Kotov: https://amzn.to/3UQUORl 🔵 My Chessable Courses: https://chessable.com/drcan ♟️ Find me on Chess.com: DrCanChess ♟️ Find me on Lichess: cantosh 🏆 2022 Chessable Community Author of the Year! https://www.chessable.com/blog/announ... Connect on   / kabadayichess   https://chessable.com/drcanpro 00:00 Carlsen's Derived Move 04:10 Kotov's Ideas (Think Like a Grandmaster) 07:37 Kasparov's Derived Move 11:01 Svidler's Derived Move 13:32 Endgame Study Derived Move 17:11 Homework This video talks about the cognitive psychology behind human calculation and how it differs from engines. Alexander Kotov, in his influential book "Think Like a Grandmaster", proposed a model for calculation that resembles how computers calculate. Put simply, he said we should first identify all the candidate moves that look reasonable and then calculate them one by one, never revisiting our earlier analysis - as that would be a waste of time. But years of experience and verbal protocols from grandmasters paint a different picture when it comes to human calculations. Humans revisit old branches and engage in progressive deepening while calculating. It is a much less structured process than what Kotov proposed. Humans analyze one candidate move and discover something, and then they use that discovery in another branch, changing their move order in the process. This video shows several examples of such "derived moves" and how humans discover those moves. Surprisingly, most of these findings were already articulated by Adriaan de Groot in his Ph.D. thesis "Thought and Choice in Chess" in 1946. Those ideas stood the test of time, unlike Kotov's. Books mentioned: Thought and Choice in Chess by Adriaan de Groot Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov