THE best chess knowl edge comes subcon sciously: You absorb it by looking at a diagram and asking yourself, “What would I do here?”
Players often do without thinking as they flip through the pages of a book of a grandmaster’s games or follow a live GM game via the Internet.
They won’t realize it at the time, but their minds are building up a databank of patterns. In each of those patterns there is a “correct” move. In this way, they acquire intuition – the muscle memory of chess.
A more direct way of building intuition is reading quiz books which show positions and ask you to guess the right move. Among the classics of this format is Fred Reinfeld’s “1,001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations.”
An excellent new version utilizing this format is “Forcing Chess Moves” by Charles Hertan ($24.95, New In Chess).
But there are few quiz-format books for building positional, rather than tactical, intuition. “The Chess Cafe Puzzle Book 2” by Karsten Muller ($24.95, Russell Enterprises) helps fill that gap. The positions are much harder than “White to play and win” examples but are valuable for the aspiring student.