Category Archives: Improver (950-1400)

A Proper Charlie

When teaching basic opening principles to my pupils I use the acronym DCK to emphasise our three aims at the start of the game: Development, Centre Control, King Safety.

A few years ago someone asked me a good question. Given that these are our aims at the start of the game, how come so many players choose the Sicilian Defence: 1. e4 c5.

1.. e5 appears to be a better developing move: it opens lines for the bishop as well as the queen, while 1.. c5 only opens a line for the queen, which we’re not supposed to bring out too soon.

1.. e5 also appears better in terms of central control. It controls d4 and f4 while 1.. c5 controls d4 and b4.

Finally, as 1.. e5 releases the f8 bishop it leaves Black one move closer to bringing his king to safety by castling.

So, a good question indeed. How should I answer it? I explained that, in the main lines of the Sicilian Defence (and why they are the main lines is another good question, but let’s just say that, at higher levels at any rate, they score better than the alternatives) White plays 2. Nf3 followed by 3. d4. Black’s plan is to trade off his c-pawn for the enemy d-pawn, reaching a position with an advantage of two pawns to one in the centre.

We teach beginners, naturally enough, to use their centre pawns at the start of the game, and not to move our wing pawns more than is necessary. We demonstrate how Morphy only moved his e- and d-pawns when beating his aristocratic opponents. Perhaps we’re missing a trick in failing to explain that in very many openings Charlie the c-pawn plays an important role.

Consider also the Queen’s Gambit: 1. d4 d5 2. c4. Again, White is hoping to trade his c-pawn for the black d-pawn, giving him a two pawns to one advantage in the centre. There’s nothing very much wrong with Black allowing this as long as he’s ready to hit back at White’s centre with ..c5 or ..e5 at an appropriate point.

Another way to look at the opening from White’s perspective is that he’s trying to get two pawns together on the 4th rank. Often this will be on e4 and d4, but sometimes he’ll prefer c4 and d4, and occasionally e4 and f4. The Hypermodern School taught that this is not necessary, and instead you can control the centre from the flanks, but that, again, is another story.

So after 1. d4 Nf6 White will usually choose the non-developing 2. c4. He wants to get two pawns together in the centre, and Black has prevented 2. e4.

Understanding that if we’re White we try to get two pawns together on the 4th rank, and that we can use Charlie to help us do this, is important in understanding the Giuoco Piano and the Ruy Lopez. After 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5, White can, instead of the boring Giuoco Pianissimo, play 4. c3, following up with 5. d4. (Or, as is the modern fashion, with 5. d3, preferring to develop first while taking d4 away from the black minor pieces, and perhaps finding a suitable moment for d4 later in the game.)

Again, in the Ruy Lopez, we see very similar ideas. We also see the typical knight manoeuvres for White: Nb1-d2-f1-g3-f5 or Nb1-d2-f1-e3-d5. This will be the subject of a future post when I reach the relevant chapter of Move Two!.

There are other ways, apart from the Sicilian Defence, for Black to use his c-pawn in the fight for the centre.

In the French Defence, the key move for Black in most variations is ..c5. We can see this, for instance, in the Advance Variation: 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 c5. Again, Black would like to trade his c-pawn for White’s d-pawn, and perhaps later, via a timely ..f6, trade his f-pawn for White’s e-pawn as well.

In the Caro-Kann Defence, as well as some lines of the Scandinavian Defence, Black plays ..c6 to help set up a solid position in the centre. In these openings the black knight will often be developed via d7. In the Queen’s Gambit, Black is well advised not to play an early Nc6, blocking the c-pawn, unless he really knows what he’s doing. Instead, he has the choice of setting up a solid central position by playing c6, as in the Slav Defence, or hitting out at White’s centre with c5, as in the Tarrasch Defence.

Finally, White can move into Hypermodern territory by choosing the English Opening: 1. c4. Now if Black plays e5 it’s a reverse Sicilian Defence, but he has many other viable options as well.

So perhaps we need a different approach to teaching the openings to novices. While it’s easy to get children to play Giuoco Pianissimos and Spanish Four Knights, at some point fairly quickly we need to ask them to consider Charlie the c-pawn. We’re often using three, not two pawns to fight for the centre: the c-pawn as well as the d- and e-pawns. Very often, as a result of this, our queen’s knight will emerge, not at c3/c6 but at d2/d7 instead. Learning this important lesson will steer our students away from turgid positions with e4/d3 against e5/d6, teach them how to handle a wide variety of pawn formations, and give them a wider understanding of chess culture.

Richard James

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Aristocratic Allies

Last time we looked at Chapter 2 of Move Two!, which concluded with an introduction to Paul Morphy and the famous Opera House game.

Hugh Patterson considered this game in an excellent recent Chess Improver post, but it’s worth another look. Like most chess teachers, I demonstrate this game regularly (most recently last Monday). When teaching young children we try to keep things simple, but we always have to be prepared for difficult questions. About 30 years ago a bright young boy asked me a difficult question. Now, with the aid of computer analysis, I can answer if it comes up again.

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 Bg4 4.dxe5 Bxf3 At this point many children will prefer gxf3 because they’ve been taught not to bring their queen out too early. I recently saw a boy move his queen rather than take back at all in a fairly analogous position because he’d been told not to bring his queen out too early and to avoid doubled pawns. Children need to understand that (other things being equal) Superior Force Wins before they move onto positional play and the tricky concept of Compensation. 5.Qxf3 dxe5 6.Bc4 Nf6 7.Qb3 This is a very difficult move for children to find. I think it’s hard for them to see the threat on f7 because the queen’s backing up the bishop. Not only do we teach children not to bring their queen out too soon: we also teach them not to move pieces twice in the opening, but Morphy does just that. Why? It’s a double threat that wins material (although Morphy chooses not to do so) and also forces Black to make an awkward move in reply. 7.. Qe7.

Now we come to the point where I was asked the difficult question. As it happens, White has an interesting three-way choice here. The obvious move is Qxb7, but Black has prepared Qb4+, forcing the queen trade. With a healthy extra pawn White should win: this is the computer’s first choice and you couldn’t really fault anyone for choosing this option. So, the bright young boy asked me, why doesn’t White play 8.Bxf7+ Qxf7 9. Qxb7 when he’s decoyed the queen so can now win the rook on a8. Had a 9-year-old spotted something the great Morphy missed? We need to take a look.

After 9.Qxb7 Black’s going 9.. Bc5. Now 10.Qxa8 0-0 (10.. Bxf2+ doesn’t work here but it’s now a very big threat. If, for instance, 11.Nc3, Bxf2+ is still winning. So White needs to defend his king: 11.0-0. Now Black has 11.. c6!, cutting off the white queen. The immediate threat is Nxe4 when White has problems defending f2 but there’s also a slow threat of Qc7 followed by Nbd7, trapping the queen. It turns out that White has to give up a piece in order to complete his development.

White can also go for the other rook instead: 10.Qc8+ Ke7 11.Qxh8. This time it’s best for Black to play 11.. Bxf2+ at once. First we have to consider 12.Kxf2 Nxe4+. Although he’s a rook down and with his other rook and knight stuck in the corner Black has a winning attack, with all White’s pieces out of play. Observe how well the queen and knight work together. So White’s best move is 12.Ke2. Now Black has a choice. He can play another check, 12.. Qc4+. After 13.Kxf2 Qd4+ 14.Ke1 Qxe4+ White has to ditch the bishop with 15.Be3 to avoid the perpetual. Alternatively White can try 13.Kd1 when the computer can’t find anything immediate for Black. Instead Black could retreat his bishop on move 12, when White seems to hold onto his extra exchange. The computer has a slight preference for White in all these lines after 10.Qc8+, but they all look seriously scary to me.

I think we can agree that Morphy’s judgement was unerring in rejecting Bxf7+. Next time you are asked why he didn’t play it you can explain that Black has some compensation for the exchange in a highly unclear position.

Moving on: 8.Nc3 c6 9.Bg5 b5 This is the decisive error, although the alternatives were not inspiring. Plausible options were 9.. Qc7, when after 10.0-0-0 b5 11.Bxf6 gxf6 my silicon friend recommends another piece sacrifice: 12.Nd5! and 9.. Na6, threatening to drive White back with Nc5, when White can smash up Black’s pawns by trading his bishops for the enemy knights. The rest of the game is self-explanatory and more or less forced. 10.Nxb5 cxb5 11.Bxb5+ Nbd7 12.0–0–0 Rd8 13.Rxd7 Rxd7 14.Rd1 Qe6 15.Bxd7+ Nxd7 At this point, when I ask my pupils to choose a move for White they immediately go for Qb8+, announcing mate, before noticing that it can (and must) be captured and moving on to consider alternatives. At this level they haven’t yet learnt HOW to think ahead. 16.Qb8+ Nxb8 17.Rd8#

When you ask children what they learnt from the game you hope they’ll tell you about the importance of rapid development, about how, in open positions with unsafe kings, the initiative can often be more important than material, and about the need for accurate calculation and knowledge of checkmate positions. But if you demonstrate the game to children who have yet to grasp the basics they’ll probably tell you that Morphy lost a bishop, then lost a rook, and finally left his queen en prise, but it didn’t matter because he got checkmate with his last two pieces. So they won’t mind if they lose a few pieces in their next game because they may well get checkmate just as Morphy did.

Finally, perhaps you’re wondering what happened to the bright young boy who asked the question about Bxf7. His name was Caspar Bates. He was very strong up to age 11, played rather less after that and dropped out of chess on leaving school. A few years ago he made an unexpected comeback. He played in Gibraltar 2008 and 2009, and in the London Chess Classic 2012, has an ECF grade of 206 and a FIDE rating of 2205. He also has a new chess career as a composer of endgame studies. You can find one here.

Richard James

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Best Games v. Own Games

I’ve been thinking about a couple of older posts here, Tim’s Is Age Relevant to Chess Improvement? and my somewhat responsive Chess Master at Any Age? A Reply to Tim Hanke. The part that interests me is the idea in Rolf Wetzell’s book Chess Master…at Any Age to mainly study one’s ‘own games,’ though he includes playing through master games ‘guess the move’ style. I suppose that in a way that makes them one’s ‘own.’

Many a chess author has recommended that the chess improver obtain a volume of the ‘best games’ of the great players, like Botvinnik’s, Alekhine’s or Kasparov’s and play through them. While this method can hardly hurt your game, these days I wonder if it is the best way to spend the majority of one’s limited study time. It seems to me is that ‘best games’ books, as beautiful as they are, have certain flaws. First, they generally (with the exception of Fischer’s My 60 Memorable Games) contain only wins by the player; there’s not a draw in sight. Second, they universally exclude games where the opponent blundered or played weakly. After all, they’re Best! Third they often (though not always) are annotated to show the Great One in a great light; errors of the winner are not always pointed out.

I am emphatically not here to tell you that you shouldn’t spend time with these classic books, games and authors. I am just wondering what the proper percentage of effort should be for it, versus tearing apart your own tournament games. And I wonder if it might be best to obtain a grandmaster tournament book and study ALL of the games, decisive and drawn, great and blunderful.

Not ‘guessing the move’ but thinking hard, as if the game meant something, and playing with positions, exploring alternatives. That method is undoubtedly the most important aspect, rather than which games you are using.

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The Chess Human Condition

I have touched previously on a few of the players I have known, including Bad Hair Guy and Dr. Porsche, and on Meetings With Remarkable Chess Masters, but just as the chess board can be seen as a kind of miniature model of the Universe, so too can chess players represent the wondrous and amusing diversity of the human condition.

“Stereotype” is now almost a forbidden concept, a Thought Crime to the politically correct, but of course it is extremely useful in the real world of politically incorrect human beings. The following are indeed stereotypes, but if you have played in more than a handful of chess tournaments you will have run into them. If you are a youngster just starting out in serious play, consider this a guide to what you can expect to face in the chess jungle:

The Relentlessly Combative

Anyone who continues beyond their first real chess tournament, like anyone who lasts beyond their first boxing match, must have a certain level of combativeness. Otherwise, they would revert to playing and thrashing their younger siblings, or perhaps needlepoint. But given that we all have this quality, in certain individuals it is taken to extremes. There is a school of thought that fighting with the organizers, other players and perhaps spectators is the way to an “edge” that will carry over into playing a fighting game. Robert J. Fischer was considered the very exemplar of this approach, which seemed to work well for him, except when it resulted in his withdrawal from a competition (Sousse Interzonal, Reshevsky match). Grandmaster Walter “Six-Time” Browne, who strove to emulate Fischer in almost every way from the Najdorf  Sicilian to the King’s Indian to the pairings disputes, and who was very enjoyable to watch, was the second greatest exponent of this mindset that I personally observed.

Relentless combativeness does not serve most of us well in trying to win chess games while still enjoying them. In your chess career you will encounter players who argue about the color of the squares, the pieces, the clock, whether your writing a ? on your score sheet is legal, whether you are adjusting your glasses too often, and whether your candy bar is causing their allergic reaction. They will roll their eyes, smile, laugh and snort after your moves. You must develop a vast, calm and empty space in your mind where all of these things fall soundlessly and without causing a ripple. But on the board, aye, there’s the place to be relentlessly, mercilessly combative. The rest is foolishness, worthy only of your amusement.

The Relentlessly Unorthodox

There are quite a few players right up through the ranks of master who seem to enjoy being different for difference’s sake. Though few become GMs, some are very strong players. Their unorthodoxy is, of course, mostly associated with the choice of opening, though I have known a few that extended this into the middle game by sacrificing material, regardless of whether it was good.

IM Michael Basman is perhaps the best known exponent of this approach, and has beaten many grandmasters with a variety of unorthodoxies. Hugh Myers is another good example, an interesting player, writer and man, who strove not just to explore but to use the byways of chess in practical play, with quite a bit of success.

Fortunately, most of the Unorthodox are not nearly as strong as Basman and Myers, and their reluctance to do the known and expected can usually be used against them if we take the right tack in meeting their attempts. The Unorthodoxers rely partly on shock and partly on our tendency to underestimate their moves. After 1. g4, for instance, many players of the black pieces believe they’re almost “winning” and proceed to recklessly storm forward with unjustified abandon to “destroy” the weakened king side. The right approach is just to “play chess” and find good moves until the opponent commits some additional errors. After all, the position is almost certainly still “a draw” after white’s first move, whatever it may be. Don’t get cocky, Kid.

Here’s an example from a game of my own. The opponent’s opening lands him in a bad position, but of course I didn’t play “perfect” chess and he had to make more errors for me to win. But I remember that at least I had the right mental approach after seeing his first few moves…

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Chess for Fun: Tim Krabbé’s Chess Curiosities

It is good to be reminded, from time to time, that “improvement” is more than just raising one’s grading. I presume everyone reading this plays chess because they enjoy it. Of course, we all like winning chess games, but understand that we are going to lose some, as well.

Beyond the fight in the competitive arena, chess has many other areas that I find fascinating, including the history of the game and its players, problems and studies and the unusual and sometimes bizarre “human interest” stories that come out when people interact with each other.

I’ll write about the historical part in a future post. For today, I point you to a treasure trove of fascinating games, positions and personalities, Tim Krabbé’s Chess Curiosities. If you’ve never had the opportunity to expand your chess horizons beyond the intricacies of the Semi-Slav and how to win rook endings, Chess Curiosities will provide hours, indeed, days, of enjoyment.

Now every thing there is not for every body; I don’t get too excited by the position that contains 53 consecutive checks, though I admire the thought and effort that went into it. But even for those “practical” players who disdain certain types of studies and problems, there is a wealth of the strange, the surprising and the beautiful.

Some examples: A Tragedy in Elista wherein two strong masters play a 127-move marathon with the result-changing mistakes coming thick and fast; The Ultimate Blunder (Resigning in Winning Positions); and  A Love Story With a Diagram.

For those who just want to see serious chess moves there are the wonderful and often almost unbelievable “110 Greatest Moves Ever Played” (start with 110-100 here and work you way up).

While no. 1, played by Spassky, indeed required a “leap of imagination” beyond the ordinary. my personal favorite is no. 8, played by Kholmov against Bronstein at Kiev 1964 (USSR Ch.). White to move and flabbergast:

The rest of the game is here, but do NOT peek until you have found and calculated the implications of the strongest move for White!

There is so much more at Chess Curiousities. It is a joy, and along the way you will find improvement material as well!

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The Genius of the Kibitzer, Part II

In Part I, we wondered why a person observing a game (The Kibitzer) often sees things the players miss, which is really just an example of the general case: Why are we, in most serious games, unable to apply our full chess strength to all the moves?

It seems to me that this is the heart of the half of chess improvement that doesn’t involve chess, as such. To be a decent player of serious chess, it is vital to spend the time “moving the pieces around” as Nigel has emphasized, to gain a storehouse of typical positions and patterns that can help you find a good move quickly and efficiently. It is important and useful to have a decent knowledge of some opening sequences and basic endings. Given all of that, we know how some players are simply better at putting this skill and knowledge into practice. Certainly no one is “perfect” and no one wins them all, but just as in other forms of competition, from poker to football to politics and war, some people perform better at chess “in the arena” than others.

The fundamental question is: What are the differences?

I will not address those things all of us already know: Decent sleep and food, and moderate regular exercise will all help to maintain attention and alertness during the stresses of a serious game of chess.

But wait! Why is chess “stressful” at all?

We often take for granted that it should be so, but by now almost everyone knows that “stress” is a generic term for something we do to ourselves. There are “stressors,” say a bear appearing suddenly out of the bushes (it’s happened to me) but the “stress” is caused by our own physiological reactions. Parts of the brain we share in common with reptiles explode with activity, various hormones and other chemicals are rushed into the blood and we prepare for “fight or flight.” When I was a beginning tournament player and spotted the possibility of a “winning” combination my heart often beat as fast as if I has just run 100 metres; you can imagine that if the game wasn’t over quickly my play fell off steeply later in the session. Eventually I learned to control this overreaction, but it was not simple or easy.

I am a very competitive person who wants badly to win at every competition I do, and I don’t think this served so well at chess, during the game itself, early in my career. Strong competitive spirit can mentally prepare us to do our best before a game, but constantly ruminating about winning during a game, rather than concentrating on making good moves, only hurts our ability to apply our skill.

That’s an attitude adjustment, but what else can be done to better our results?

An excellent television program, “How Smart Can We Get?” has some key information at Segment 5, about 41:00 in (but the whole program is of great interest). A neuroscientist who had her own sporting experience of “choking” explores the mechanisms that prevent top performance. During mental tests, the activity of the amygdala and other emotional centers of the brain can produce actual, physical interference with the neurons of the pre-frontal cortex that we need in order to (among other things) play good chess. What top performers do is a sort of “cutting off” of the connection between the emotional centers and the rational mind.

A method that has worked to assist in this (as applied to academic tests) is writing down emotions and thoughts for 10 minutes before testing begins. Students who did so got an average of a half-grade higher (B+ vs. B-) as against a control group who just sat doing nothing for the 10 minutes before the test. Examination of the student writings shows that as the writings progress there is an evident change of attitude and more positive feeling about the test. The scientist compares it to “off loading” unnecessary programs from your computer, freeing resources and allowing for clearer thinking and memory–and presumably, better chess!

Another way to do this is through mental training via meditation or a martial art. There are many studies going back decades about the various physical and mental benefits of meditation, but for our purposes I would point to the ability through practice of achieving certain mental “states.” Many hours of experimentation and practice gradually make it easier and quicker to focus and integrate the various parts of the brain. When not integrated, they simply interfere with each other.

There is an expression in the martial arts that in various forms simply says: “Mind like water.” This is a state of no expectations, no hopes, no fears. Like a pond on a still day, there is no apparent motion, but the mind of the artist sees, hears and feels the opponent and his intentions and reacts without conscious thought, without anger, doing the right thing at the right time, as he has done a thousand times in training. This is not a way to “play chess” but a way to a higher level than writing of “off loading unnecessary programs” from the mind. Seeking it will increase your chess, and life’s, performance and results.

I don’t attempt here to analyze or compare various forms of meditation and martial arts that might serve the purpose. A classic old book that I recommend for the basics of meditation is The Relaxation Response. Regarding the martial arts, Nigel’s Tai Chi might be a good thing to try, as opposed to the forms that break boards and such. But everyone who tries will find their own right way.

So this post has not been about “chess” much, has it? Yet I believe strongly, from my own experience, that the “Genius of the Kibitzer” is based on two important points:

POINT THE FIRST: The Kibitzer is not trying to win a game, just looking at a chess position and finding a good move. The Kibitzer is not invested, emotionally, physically and spiritually, in the game.

If you play good chess the winning will take care of itself.

POINT THE SECOND: The Kibitzer’s brain is not resonating with conflicting waves interfering with his clear thinking about the position. The Kibitzer’s neurons are often firing more freely and efficiently than the players’ because his mind is more like water.

If you free your mind you can play chess freely.

(Coming next time: I offer myself up as a test subject for these scientific theories!)

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The Genius of the Kibitzer, Part I

Kib·itz (kib·itzed, kib·itz·ing, kib·itz·es Informal)

1. To look on and offer unwanted, usually meddlesome advice to others.
2. To chat; converse.

 

Michael Koblentz’s Saturday post Chess Blindness led to some interesting discussion on Nigel’s Facebook page; my own thoughts on true “chess blindness” were:

I think chess blindness is due to a narrowing of visual attention similar to the “tunneling” reported by people in combat. For a vital moment we see only part of the board, or only some of the pieces. Visually imaging ALL of the opponents pieces before moving catches many of the superblunders.

Michael’s move Rxf3??, as opposed to a common- or garden-variety “error”, really was chess blindness; as he states, “I never even saw White’s capture with the King!” A truly spectacular blunder of my own can be found in the post Chess Humour where I have a crushing position at move 9 and after almost 15 minutes contemplation allow mate in one because I stopped looking at the opponent’s queen and only looked at what material my own queen moves could gain.

However, these are exceptional blunders, and while we all have made them, they’re rare enough. I am more interested in something else, only tenuously related to real chess blindness. As I also wrote on Facebook:

If we answer the question of why kibitzers so often see what the players miss we will be on the way to improving ourselves.

Most of us have had the experience of casually observing a tournament game, and in just a few seconds spotting some “obvious” two-move combination that would win material, or some “obvious” threat by the opponent that needs to be immediately attended to. If the players we’re watching are below expert level, most of us have also often seen the person overlook the killer shot, or the opponent’s threat, generally accompanied by suppressed groans from the observers. Some of these moves are of a type that, if the same player were to be shown a diagram while sitting on a couch at home, they would find the move within 2 minutes 98 times out of 100.

These kinds of mistakes are not the result of lack of knowledge, lack of ability or failure to do thousands of tactics problems.

The difficulties of substantially improving your chess results, especially as an adult whose grading has plateaued, are an interesting conundrum. Not overlooking the “obvious” is a step in the right direction. I have a several methods to share, from a range of coaches, psychologists, neuroscientists and even actual chess players that might help if assiduously applied, but I will reserve the details for my next post.

I would rather hear from readers this week. Have you experienced the “genius of the kibitzer,” and do you have any ideas for how we might see these things in our own games, rather than uselessly finding them while observing the games of others?

Use my contact page or leave a comment on Nigel’s Facebook. I would be happiest sharing a variety of ideas rather than just pontificating on my own!

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Attention!

I have had a life-long interest in the mental training and psychological methods that are often placed under the heading “self improvement,” and since I became an avid chess player 30 or so years ago I have looked at ways to use these methods for stronger practical play. In future I will explore a number of these with you, and hope you will share your experiences in this area on the entry for the post at Nigel’s Facebook page. Especially if you think I’m all wet.

The book Rapt by Winifred Gallagher argues that the quality of our lives depends to a great extent on what we choose to pay attention to, and how well we do so. I recommend you read the whole thing, but as far as chess play goes, a main point is that we really can focus (consciously) on only one thing at a time, and that our focus is narrower than we usually realize. In human vision, the eye has a limited number of receptors, and a little self-experimentation will prove to you how you actually see only a small part of the visual field at all clearly; the rest is a fuzzy haze filled in by your mind (for some fun examples, see here).

Apart from vision, what we focus on has many other effects on our experience; when presented a business opportunity, do we focus on risks, or rewards? While playing a game of chess are we able to focus on the game itself, or do we sometimes think about how many points our grading will go up if we win, or how much prize money might be ours if we win this one, then the last round? Despite my own study, work and training, I too have had thoughts like this during important games, and while I won my share, this can’t be helpful.

Grandmaster Frank Marshall has been quoted as saying that, “In chess, attention is more important than concentration.” (And say, look at the quote third below Marshall’s, from Nigel Davies! But that is another post). Whatever can that mean? Now that we have got the preliminaries out of the way, with the material gleaned from Rapt and other sources I present a practical list of ways to train and play that work with your human attention capabilities, in order to improve your chess:

Attention span is time-limited; use this to your advantage. The amount of time you can pay attention to one thing (like your next move) is limited, and resting your mind periodically during a game is the best thing you can do to ensure that you stay fresh for move 50, 60 or more if needed. At time controls like Game/90 or similar, I don’t think you should ever use more than 10 minutes for a move, no mater how complicated, and 6-8 is probably the maximum for actually finding anything useful. Time spent after that is likely to be wasted and tiring. Most moves need to be made in 2-3 minutes at modern time controls, so find a move and play it! It may not be the “best” but if you get into time pressure plus mental exhaustion what are the odds of a serious blunder?

Pay as much attention to your opponent’s position as your own. This has been a bête noire of mine throughout my chess career, and I believe from observation it’s true of many other players as well. I have a tendency to focus too much on my possibilities: I’m going to advance my center pawns! I’m going to attack his king side! The opponent, one may be sure, has plans of his own, but non-masters are less attentive to these. I’ve developed a couple of techniques to counter this tendency; one, what I describe as “Look at the opponent’s pieces.” Write that at the top of your score sheet before the game. If you spend a good bit of time visually attending to your opponent’s formation, where the focal points of his pieces come together and so on, you will notice things that you would miss if you spent too much time looking at your own pieces and considering the wonderful things you might do with them. Also, you may recall the old Soviet advice of calculating on your clock time and looking at “positional considerations” on your opponent’s time. I would change this to “calculate for your opponent” on his time! While his clock runs, pretend you are he (or she); find the best move. If the opponent plays something else, you may have a head start on why it’s not good! If you’re surprised, also good. Now you’ll be looking for what the opponent is trying to do to you with the move, instead of immediately starting in on what you want to do.

“Beware of the Guard Cat”

Switching our attention to something pleasant and non-chess related can help freshen it. Often we get up from our game for a stretch and end up looking at other games. I don’t think this is harmful, but it has worked well for me to look out a window at trees or grass or clouds for a few moments (or even the parking lot!). If no window is readily available, look at the people around you. Just for a moment, take your mind off of your game and look at their faces. What do you read there? What stories might they have to tell? This is not just some humanist baloney, but a very practical method for refreshing yourself. One to two minutes of focusing away from your board every 15 minutes or so, even if you don’t get up, is a recipe for staying mentally fresher.

Just for fun: 12 Concentration Exercises from 1918! I know that Frank Marshall said that attention was more important than concentration, but we haven’t really defined the difference, have we? Mental exercises like this have a long history, from Athens to Zen. I think they can only do one good. I would add that there are chess board versions: take a board and a knight. Forget for awhile all the clutter that comes from the 32-piece  starting position. Place the knight somewhere near the middle of the board. Visualize all the squares it can jump to and color them all a bright pink in your mind, until you actually see the color (some chess programs do this on command but that sort of passive viewing does little of value!). Hold this picture for 10 seconds. Do the same with a queen. Put both queen and knight on the board and turn all the squares they both control purple. Hold this picture for awhile. Make up your own variations with more pieces.

The possibilities for training our attention, improving out chess and having joy in doing so are limitless. Surf around the Web or Amazon for more ideas. I would especially recommend, again, paying more attention to our opponents, for if we can catch them paying more attention to themselves our chances of success dramatically increase.

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Secrets of a Grandpatzer: A Fine Chess Book, an Unusual Author

The book Secrets of a Grandpatzer (How to beat most people and computers at chess)  is a strange and wonderful bird of chess literature. First, it is literate, smoothly readable and consistently humorous, which we might agree is not universal in chess books. Second, it was written by Dr. Kenneth Mark Colby, a psychiatrist and computer scientist who also wrote such tomes as Computer Models in Thought and Language and Cognitive Science and Psychoanalysis. Third, it was one of the earliest considerations of how computer chess could be modeled by humans to improve their play, and coming from the man who had written a computer program that modeled human paranoia, this was significant. Fourth, it provided a philosophical background for why we play chess, or more precisely, why we play chess with such striving effort for victory, even perfection:

Why should a patzer seek to become a grandpatzer? Because of the aristos (Greek: Aristos = best). Life is more than ham sandwiches and beer. Humans strive, not just to survive, but to enhance the quality, the excellence, of survival. Striving for excellence in any endeavor, developing yourself to become your best at what you do, is rewarding and fulfilling to aspirations higher than happiness. Merely happy people, without artistic goals, vegetate in incomplete, hobbled and impoverished lives…A grandpatzer is a strong chessplayer, a threat to anyone (including himself) in a given game.

Published in 1979, this book was very difficult to find for many years–how I got my copy is a great story, which I will save for another time. I was delighted last year to see that it had been reprinted and is easily available (see link above) so I take this opportunity to introduce readers of The Chess Improver to this interesting book.

Colby’s stated aim is to raise the “duffer, fish, woodpusher or rabbit Class E, D, C or weak B” to the exalted status of “grandpatzer” (1700-2200). The “beating (most) computers” part of the subtitle needs some historical context; at the time there was, of course, no Fritz or Rybka and Dr. Colby is referring to the “Chess Challenger” and other machines which played in the 1200-1600 range on their higher settings. Interestingly, he believed one way to get better at chess was to emulate the computer (“the greatest grandpatzer of them all”).

The author, who was a professor at the University of California Los Angeles at the time, backs up his advice with the information that:

After floundering around as a 1600 patzer for 3-4 years, I decided to do something about it. In those doings, I developed, and utilized the herein described heuristics to raise my USCF rating to 1800+ in a year of weekly rating tournaments.

I will give here just a few highlights of this delightful book. Some of the insights the author was especially well-qualified to share were regarding the “ego game,” the psyche of you and your opponent and the assumptions and misconceptions that can hurt your play. He talks about playing women, old guys, masters and computers, but one of my favorite parts is regarding “young guys”:

Some booked-up teenagers are the best examples of contempt-in-action…The way to get an edge on them is to increase their conceit and disdain for you by acting as bumbling as possible.

He gives real practical tips like seeming slightly confused about the time control and clocks, then making the moves in an opening you know cold as if you were finding them all by effort and calculation, taking a couple of minutes over 5. …Be2 in the Closed Ruy, things like that. Young guys almost always lack the patience to wait to attack until the time is right, and tend to be weaker in endings. Of course sometimes they are also severely underrated and will beat you unmercifully. So it goes in the arena. As Colby says of “old guys,” they have won and lost so many games they aren’t going to get to excited when they get in some trouble. Whether you’re a young or old player, or somewhere in the middle, Colby has some excellent advice on how to approach a game.

There is one area where I disagree with Colby (and I know Nigel does, as well), but I think he was wrong for the right reasons:

The major area where an aspiring grandpatzer can profit from master practice is in the opening, regardless of what masters say about memorizing. Play only opening systems which current masters repeatedly use because they are constantly being improved for you through tournament play…By studying these systems and your pet critical variations of them, you simply memorize, as far as you can, what the best current continuations are.

Ah, “swotting up variations,” the thing that gave Botvinnik and all good chess teachers heartburn. Yet, Colby’s reason is interesting; by playing 6-10 memorized moves you get a middle game you are familiar with and, perhaps just as critical, preserve clock time and mental energy for playing it. That is an aspect of practical tournament chess which I am especially interested in myself. Apart  from a player’s skill and ability, how good is he or she at having mental energy in reserve if the game goes 50, 60 or more moves? How well does the player keep his or her “nerves” (physiology, brain chemicals) on an even keel so that important moments bring out the best, instead of a precipitous drop in strength?

This book, written by a brilliant psychiatrist and computer pioneer (and enthusiastic tournament player) has many insights on this, and other topics, presented in an enjoyable way. I am very happy that it is again available to the chess world.

(NOTE: For readers outside the USA, an approximate conversion formula from US Chess Federation ratings is:

USCF = ELO + 100

BCF = (ELO – 600)/8)

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Cognitive Fluency: Easy Does Not Equal True

In recent years neuroscience  has given us some fascinating new insights that can be applied to chess; it has also confirmed a lot of classic conventional wisdom. The very useful and solid data that “effortful study” or “deliberate practice” is the best method of improving in a discipline, whether chess, music or athletics, would hardly have been a shock to weightlifters of the 1950s, Emmanuel Lasker or even the Greek Olympics coaches circa 396 B.C. All would have known that lifting weights, meeting opponents or playing pieces slightly more difficult than your comfort level is the way to steadily improve. As soon as something becomes easy, bump up the challenge one notch.

Even so, there are many aspects of practice well worth exploration, but that is another post. Some scientific findings are more counter intuitive and less familiar, like the details of “cognitive fluency“:

Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.

(…)

Our sensitivity to – and affinity for – fluency is an adaptive shortcut. According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.

During a game of chess we rely on this familiarity many times, in the opening with the moves we know and then with the “typical” middle game pawn structures and piece placements from those openings, and on into the ending with “rules” about active rooks, the opposition, etc. Of course, many of these short cuts are quite useful, saving us clock time and mental energy for when it’s needed more–the “critical moment(s) of the game” so beloved of Soviet annotators.

However, it seems that this cognitive fluency can easily be taken too far. We mostly want to play the openings that we know in serious games, and indeed many of us in our heart of hearts would probably prefer a “small” advantage in a familiar position to a slightly “larger” one in a “messy” position (whether there actually exist “smaller” or “larger” advantages is also a topic for the future).

But this comfort must be broken occasionally for us to grow and improve. As Nigel wrote in a previous post, “Growth implies change and change is scary, so there can even be a tendency for people to cover up their insecurities with a certain chess machismo.” Or, in turn, a desire for safe, solid positions all the time.

Breaking out of this mindset requires a conscious effort, and I have found some techniques that can help. While changing openings in the middle of the club championship or big-money Swiss might be a little too much growth, for casual or online games play openings you don’t know–indeed the more offbeat the better. If you’re an “e4 player” play 1. d4, or better yet 1. g3 or a3 or e3. With unfamiliar positions from the start you will get more creative and unconventional in the middle game. Doing it repeatedly will carry over to serious games.

You can also be more creative with computer annotations. Just letting a program annotate your games can produce a certain laziness and very little improvement, but by going over the game on a board and trying your hardest to find the mistakes and then having a computer check you can get the benefits of “deliberate practice.” It’s nice that the program will point out tactical errors, but much more important for our purpose is that it will find moves you never even considered because they were out of your comfort zone of positional understanding or material balance. Mikhail Tal was a great and beloved player because he found more of these moves than almost anyone else of his time; now the youngest Grandmasters have trained with and used computers all their livers and find these moves and plans more easily, but all of us can change our mindsets and boldly become Strangers in a Strange Land, breaking out of ruts and, whether winning or losing, becoming larger and more creative as players.

Greats of the past didn’t need computers to find the strange, unexpected yet powerful move. Here is a favorite game of mine, where Alekhine defeats another immensely strong player, Euwe, after  the very “uncomfortable” 9. g4!

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