GM Preparation: Calculation is the first book in Jacob Aagaard’s series GM Preparation. My (very subjective) opinion is that this is the best chess book series ever written. It covers key thinking processes involved in decision making over the board, and everything the six books in the series teach is structured in a way that focuses on developing skills, instead of acquiring theoretical knowledge.
Calculation is a collection of exercises Jacob Aagaard had prepared while he was working with Boris Gelfand while he was preparing for the 2008 World Cup and Candidates cycle. It’s the best selling and most popular book in the GM Preparation series with 5 reeditions so far.
Training material for a world championship candidate as a basis of a chess book means that it’s going to be very difficult. The book is around 90% the exact training material Gelfand had solved while preparing. After that, he won the World Cup, won the 2009 Candidates, and almost became the world champion. The exercises are high level, but they are doable for mortals like me and you. My completion rate was 60% when I went over the book the first time.
The target audience according to Aagaard are players who are already strong who are aiming to become titled.
The concept behind the book, as Aagaard openly says, is Mark Dvoretsky’s system of improving calculation. They had worked together in several training camps and Dvoretsky said: “Someone should do a puzzle book not by themes but divided by how you should think.” That’s how the idea was born. Dvoretsky never wrote the book, so Jacob Aagaard asked his permission to write it himself. As he puts it; it’s Dvoretsky’s calculation system, and not how he would teach calculation himself. The textbook that accompanies GM Preparation: Calculation is Dvoretsky’s Excelling at Chess Calculation.
GM Preparation: Calculation is divided into 11 chapters, each on a separate technique you can use to calculate properly – how you should think in certain types of positions; candidate moves, comparison, elimination, imagination, and so on. Each chapter is accompanied by problems. They are the core of the book. You are meant to solve problems, not read. Each chapter progresses in difficulty. The problems chapters start with are usually simpler, whereas those at the end are Grandmaster level.
GM Preparation: Calculation is my favorite puzzle book. I found it very difficult and extremely rewarding. The only instance of seeing a leap in my rating and tournament performance based on one piece of material was after reading the book and solving every problem (more than 300 of them). My rating had gone up 70 FIDE points in the three months after that. I felt like I was in great shape. I was also able to think about positions differently, and, at least partially, able to apply Aagaard’s thinking techniques.
