What is the best way to improve calculation abilities?

Many people recommend tactics for pattern recognition skills. But what is a good practice to improve calculation abilities? What about visualization skills?

Do you know any good ways to improve these abilities?

You can use 100mg modafinil to improve calculation. It worked for me.

Ok how to do it without chemicals. That is the question.

The more tactics you practice the better you get at calculation.The more patterns you absorb and familiarize yourself with. Use a real tournament board and tournament pieces and play through grandmaster games. Stop and analyze when you feel like you see some interesting idea or move. The more your repertoire of tactics increases the more your vocabulary of chess will increase. Willy Hendriks in Move First, Think Later says that chess notation alone is sufficient language for anyone to improve their chess and that the only way to improve is to force feed yourself tons of chess theory. 

 Well, as an aside to the mantra of tactics, tactics, tactics; for improving upon visualisation, playing, or solving a puzzle, (even just holding a position in your head) whilst blindfold is very helpful (and hard). And, whilst it is much more fun to play someone else directly in such a way - it is not always possible (nor convenient). That being said, I'd recommend trying out the "blindfold" option on the board piece settings, here on chess.com, and try out some games (in full) against the computer. Then you can play at your own pace. And should you lose the position in your head, you can reconstruct it from the move list; which is good practice for visualising the board and pieces. You can then objectively see how well you performed to normal by replaying the game in regular view.

Start with 2 move mates and move up to 3 move mates and so on.  That will help. 

I'm one who needs improvement in pattern recognition and tactics recognition and key positions like a great N Outpost, backward Pawns, Weakness on White Squares, etc.

I'm also a retired teacher with an Advanced Teaching Certificate who knows how to identify goals, identify weaknesses in the prerequisites needed for those goals, and knows how to put together a program to correct those weaknesses.

So when I - almost daily - do Tactics problems here or at chesstempo.com, when I finish a problem - successfully or not - I go back over the problem and identify by name the tactics and positions used and ask myself why I didn't recognize them or took a long time to do so.

Here are interactive pages of tactics and positions every player should memorize and be able to name and demonstrate on demand: the name provides a "hook" in your brain from which you can more quickly retrieve the information:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples

https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html

https://chesstempo.com/positional-motifs.html

Take a look at how this 67 year-old improved in tactics during 2017 with my chesstempo ratings:

 Do a lot of tactics, you will improve your chess skills dramatically. Endgames studies is another way to become even stronger; both skills, tactics and endgame will improve your calculation; before your opponent know what going on you will see it many moves.

The number one thing to improve visualization and calculation skill of longer patterns is to play lots of very slow games. During your games, just try to visualize where things are going as deeply as you can. I believe this is why Dan Heisman recommends playing about 100 slow games per year in order to improve.

The second thing is to try and go through known sequences in your head. This can be done with longer tactical puzzles, or by going through a sequence from a game using a board, and then trying to recreate the whole thing in your head.

For instance, I have the book "How to Beat Your Dad at Chess" by Murray Chandler, which is a great book despite the silly title. It has a lot of 6-8 move tactical positions in it. After reading it the first time, I actually photocopied it, cut up the pages, and put them on index cards. This was 15 or so years ago, before there were good free tactics sites on the internet, so this was a great method at the time. I shuffled them up to get them out of context, and went through them over and over, like any other tactical puzzle set. But besides memorizing the tactical patterns, because I was dealing with longer patterns that I knew, it was also good practice for visualizing what the board will look like after all those moves are played. For instance, there are more than a dozen "Greek Gift" style bishop sacs in that book, and I had to calculate sometimes 8 moves deep to determine which version this was, and what the correct moves will be. 

Or, as I said, you can go through sequences from known games. Maybe pick a short (25 moves or less) game that ended in checkmate. Play it through on a board first, then try to play through the whole thing in your head. Or maybe start with just a longer sequence from some point in the game. Actually, after spending a few hours playing a slow game, trying to recall the whole thing in your head without looking at your scorepad might be good practice for this. 

tactics, and pawn structure

Start with solving Mate in 1. Then mate in 2, 3 and so on. It's effective to start with forced variation like forced mate. If you can solve mate in 4, start solving tactics like in tactics trainer, and other tactics books.

watch IM David Pruess explain how to learn chess tactics.  Its chess gold.

You learn how to calculate by not calculating!

Lmaooooo

My opinion for learning hard calculating is to take some complicated positions and think for 10 mins. But today nobody doesnt have time to do so, so taking puzzles that are neither easy nor hard is practical solution

Sometimes I play myself and study the position.

My games against myself are very interesting, and I think if you do it enough it might help with calculation.

Also, chess.com has the nice vision tool, to make it easier and faster to recognize squares. Solo chess may also help.

Engage in solving more complex and challenging chess puzzles. Look for positions where multiple moves are required to find the solution.

90 percent of people here dont know the differnece between tactics / pattern recognition and calculations. thats so amazing to waste your time reading nonsense

The fact that matter is "visualization". I assume the more you navigate variations in your head the more you become better at visualizing longer lines. same goes with visualizing the board and squares. some people (myself included) are very good at 3d spacial visualization but weaker memory to keep up with chess board positions. I tried practice on moving pieces on the board that helped a lot. Im not serious about chess all my obsession at a short period of time was to visualize the board as vividly as possible and moving around the pieces. I dont care about solivng tacics or opening or anything at all which is bad for improving in chess generally but i can tell you a thing or two about calcuations. It is a hard practice to master