In the 1950s, the Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov wrote the book Think like a Grandmaster, which became an instant classic. In the 90s, growing up as a chess-crazed boy in pre-Internet India, this book assumed a mythic aura within our circle. It seemed to hold the secrets of supremacy in this maddening, intoxicating game. Kotov took on the mantle of a Drona, whose astras were almost impossible to attain, but once mastered, gave supreme power to the wielder’s hands.
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After carefully monitoring the movement of nears and dears to ‘abroad’, I was able to lay my hands on it thanks to an uncle settled in London. The opening pages seemed simple enough (the first step to evaluate a position was to count how many pawns you had and compare that number to the opponent’s), but with bewildering rapidness, Kotov introduced the ‘tree of analysis’, complete with diagrams and graphs. The trunk of this tree was the move you were considering, its branches were all the possible replies of the opponent, your possible response to their response were the sub-branches and so on.
