Related Resources • Chess Directories • Resource Reviews

(May 2004) It certainly wouldn't surprise us if the single biggest category of chess pages on the Web covered chess instruction, improvement, teaching, and similar topics. Chess is, after all, a game where your goal is to win by playing better than your opponent. Why play if you have no ambition to improve?

To increase our coverage of instructional sites, we started with a review of our existing 'Improve Your Game' links (see the navigation column on the left of every page) and found that we had 16 external sites linked. We decided that the best way to tackle the subject would be to see which sites these 16 had linked themselves. Who should know instructional sites better than other instructional sites?

Many sites, chess or otherwise, are either reluctant to send their hard-earned visitors off to another site or don't want to be burdened with the ongoing chore of maintaining external links that are constantly changing and disappearing. Of the 16 sites, we found that 8, exactly half, are courageous enough to link other sites. We extracted their links, combined them with appropriate links from the 'Chess Directories' (see the link box in the upper right corner of this article), and looked at the results.

Of the approximately 700 links, many of which pointed to the same sites, 170 were no longer active, 290 were already covered by other links on About Chess, 90 were not interesting for various reasons, and 15 were not in English. Of the rest, we classified about 40 as instructional sites.

We combined these with the links we already knew and looked for subcategories. We found five, listed in the following table.

• Tips for Better Results : Sites that encapsulate chess knowledge into pithy tips, usually organized by some logical structure.
  
  
• Teachers / Trainers : Sites associated with a player who offers personal insights and instruction. Many of these also offer teaching for a fee. This was the largest of our subcategories and, since many of the sites have biographical data, we crosslinked it in our 'Players / People' category.
  
  
• Improve Your Openings : Sites where the main emphasis is on understanding the opening phase. A handful of these have an in-depth look at a single opening. We think there's more digging to be done here and will come back to this in a future exercise.
  
  
• Improve Your Tactics : Sites with a strong emphasis on tactics, usually in the form of solving tactical puzzles.
  
  
• Improve Your Endgame : Sites with a strong emphasis on endgames or endgame studies. Not too surprisingly, this was the smallest of our subcategories.
  
  

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