The Chess Manual That Taught Me How to Think — Not What to Think
Part I of The Checkmate Strategy traces twenty books that shaped the way I think. This is the second.
There is a book that serious chess players know well and almost nobody else has heard of. Think Like a Grandmaster was written by Alexander Kotov, a Soviet grandmaster, and published in 1971. It is dense, technical, and written for players who want to improve their calculation at the board. It contains diagrams, variations, and analysis that would mean very little to anyone who does not play chess seriously.
I am not sure it matters. Because the central argument of the book has almost nothing to do with chess.
What Kotov Observed
Kotov's starting point is deceptively simple. Most chess players—even experienced ones—think badly under pressure. Not because they lack knowledge or intelligence, but because they repeat themselves.
They identify a candidate move. They start to analyse it. Then anxiety or uncertainty pulls them back to the beginning. They look at the same move again. Then again. Circling the same options, consuming time and mental energy, without advancing their understanding of the position.
His solution is equally simple. Identify your candidate moves first—the options that genuinely deserve attention. Then analyse each one properly, in order, without jumping between them. When the analysis is complete, make your decision and commit to it.
Do not go back. Do not recalculate. Trust the work you have done and act on it.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
The temptation to recalculate is not laziness or indecision. It is anxiety.
Under pressure, the mind seeks reassurance. It returns to what it has already considered because repetition feels like thoroughness. It mistakes motion for progress. It believes that going over the same ground one more time might reveal something it missed the first three times.
Kotov names this clearly and without sympathy. Repeating your analysis does not improve it. It simply delays the decision while giving the appearance of rigour.
This is not a chess problem. It is a human one.
A Note on the Book's Critics
It is worth acknowledging that Think Like a Grandmaster is a contested book within the chess community. Many players and coaches argue that Kotov's description of how grandmasters actually think is not accurate—that pattern recognition and positional intuition do most of the work, not systematic candidate move analysis.
Some of the book's own calculation examples contain errors that later annotators have identified. The chess psychologist Adriaan de Groot, whose research Kotov drew on, suggested that even Kotov himself did not fully follow the method he prescribed. The book may describe how Kotov thought grandmasters should think rather than how they actually think.
These are fair criticisms of the chess method. They do not touch the insight I am drawing from it.
The tendency to repeat rather than conclude—to circle the same analysis rather than move through it toward a decision— is not a theory about chess. It is an observation about human behaviour under pressure. You do not need to accept Kotov's method to recognise the pattern he identified.
Most people who carry significant professional responsibility will have experienced it directly.
The value of the book, for my purposes, is not in its prescription but in its diagnosis. And the diagnosis is accurate.
The Distinction That Changed How I Work
Kotov draws a distinction I have returned to many times since first reading this book. The distinction between analysis and decision.
Analysis is the phase in which you think. You consider options, examine consequences, weigh possibilities. It requires time, concentration and an honest engagement with what you do not yet know.
Decision is the phase in which you act. You commit to a move, accept the consequences and stop recalculating.
Conflating the two—trying to decide while still analysing, or retreating into more analysis when a decision is required—produces neither good thinking nor good judgement. It produces the worst of both.
The Mind, as The Checkmate Strategy describes it, is the discipline of keeping these two phases distinct. Clarity before commitment. And once sufficient clarity has been reached—commitment without retreat.
How It Showed Up in My Own Work
There is a moment in professional life—and most people who carry significant responsibility will recognise it—when you have done enough thinking and you know it. The position is as clear as it is going to get. The analysis is sufficient. What is required now is not more calculation but a decision and the accountability that follows from it.
That moment is uncomfortable. Because commitment closes off alternatives. Because being wrong becomes possible in a way it was not while you were still thinking.
The Making Tax Digital study I describe in The Checkmate Strategy is an example of this in practice. Rather than accept the prevailing professional consensus about digital record-keeping, we paused, designed a methodical study, gathered the evidence and then committed to a position—one that turned out to be materially different from what most of the profession assumed. The discipline was not in the conclusion. It was in doing the analysis properly and then trusting it.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think of a decision you are currently circling—one you have returned to more than once without resolving.
Ask honestly: have I actually done the analysis, or have I been repeating it?
If the analysis is genuinely incomplete, do it properly and finish it. If it is complete—if you already know what the position requires—the question is not what to think. It is whether you are willing to act on what you already know.
That is Kotov's discipline. And it is one of the hardest in the book.
The Checkmate Strategy is available on Amazon. If you are finding these posts useful, subscribe below to receive one each week — drawn from the twenty books and forty-two lessons that shaped the framework.
Next week: Chess for Tigers — and what Simon Webb taught me about winning the game you are actually in.
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