Reflex Chess

Tactics from the positions you actually reach

Not opening theory. The tactical patterns that keep deciding games in each opening, drilled in the structures where they happen.

Openings are usually taught as move orders, which is the least useful part of them for anyone under about 1800. What actually wins and loses games in a familiar opening is that its pawn structure produces the same tactics over and over: the same bishop sacrifice on h7, the same knight jump to d5, the same weak f7.

So these sixteen skills are not repertoires and will not tell you what to play on move six. Each one is a set of positions from real games in that opening, past the theory and into the part where somebody has to find something.

Every motif in Openings

Work through the section in order Traps and tactics from the positions you actually reach. Five graded levels per motif, four positions a lesson. Open the course

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