Category Archives: Robert Pearson

Meetings With Remarkable Chess Masters

Those of you who don’t grok the reference to Gurdjieff, seriously consider getting the book. But back to the precise subject at hand:

Tim Hanke published his fascinating Conversations With Rustam a couple of days ago, and the piece reminded me of my own encounters with NMs, FMs, IMs and GMs, though I have never had the privilege of having dinner with someone who threatened to kill Nigel Short. That aside, the chess world is actually quite a small world after all, and I have had a number of encounters with famous, semi-famous and infamous masters. Here, in stream-of-consciousness no-particular-order, are some of the more memorable:

When I was 21 years of age I played in a small tournament in Reno, Nevada at the private home of a gentleman who was a friend of GM Larry Evans. Evans showed up shortly before a round and chatted with our host and the players. Evans, who was in his 50s, said something like “Us old guys are not the future of chess, these guys are the future of chess,” waving in my general direction. I blushed. It was not one of his most accurate predictions.

I played in a tournament in Los Angeles in 1986, and had one of the best results of my career, but aside from that I participated in a discussion of the author Raymond Chandler with GM Larry Christensen and some of his friends in the analysis room. I think we disagreed about whose games Philip Marlowe played over in the books. I said Steinitz, and I still think I’m right, but I don’t have the books handy so perhaps a reader will correct me.

I believe it was at this same tournament FM Eric Schiller, Facebook Friend of Nigel Davies and prolific chess author, corrected me in the book room when I said the Slav Defence was a variation of the Queens Gambit Declined. In those days I was still studying books that were old enough to call it such. The “Slav Defence” didn’t become important enough to have its own name until the 1930s, I think. I tried to tell him this but I’m sure he was writing his 67th or 68th chess book in his head at the moment, so I don’t think the point got all the way through.

IM Byron Nickoloff was the friendliest strong player I ever talked to. At the 1990 World Open in Philadelphia, I watched him play GM Seirewan a long tough game, which Seirewan won, and I asked him about whether he might have drawn. Not only did he talk to me like a friend for at least 15 minutes, he revealed that he had many novelties ready, especially as black. “These guys (grandmasters) don’t really want to play e4 against me,” he said, laughing. It was the only time I ever spoke to him, but I could tell he was a Remarkable Man.

Also in Philadelphia I stood at a bar for awhile and struck up a conversation with GM Nick deFirmian. I was drinking whisky, and he was drinking something potent, I think. I don’t remember what we talked about, more’s the pity. It was undoubtably brilliant.

A last player I had an interesting encounter or two with was IM Bryan Smith, the strongest player ever to come out of Alaska. He writes in his article “Chess in Alaska“:

Some months later the year’s biggest tournament took place. This was called the “Fur Rendezvous” and took place along with the annual festival in Anchorage of the same name.

Yes, I played in a number of “Fur Rondys” and once got paired with Bryan in a preliminary “fun” team match at G/30. We had similar ratings, but given his youth (I believe he was 15), he naturally played very quickly and I got into serious time trouble and lost both games. I recall him as being pretty annoying in the postmortem, too. Years later I played him some friendly blitz and a simul, and he was quite a nice person. So it goes. Bryan also writes:

I played two matches against a fellow named Bill Anderson, one in the fall of 1994 and another in the spring of 1995. This was a guy who really loved chess and followed all of the top level games. He was one of the nicer people there.

Well, I played Bill Anderson a match in 2000 and defeated him, as well. So the IM and I have that in common. And Bill was and is a great person, too. I haven’t seen him for a number of years but I hope he reads this, because the point is that chess is wonderful game, but it’s the people we meet, defeat and are defeated by, the talks and drinks and analysis and camaraderie that are really the point. None of us would pay for travel and entry fees and hotels to play against computers.

Improving your chess play and your rating is an important and worthy quest, but along the way, have fun and seize your chances with both hands to talk to and learn from and enjoy the other players, masters or not.

Chess Master at Any Age? A Reply to Tim Hanke

So far the new slate of writers here at The Chess Improver have merrily done their ‘own thing’ and provided interesting, insightful pieces about chess and improvement. There hasn’t been much point/counterpoint among us, but today I provide some.

Tim Hanke’s excellent Is Age Relevant to Chess Improvement? from last Tuesday touched on something I happen to know a good bit about, Rolf Wetzell’s book Chess Master…at Any Age. Tim notes that he doesn’t actually have the book, and relies on the Amazon reviews, which are mixed. I’d like to add something of my personal experience and explain why the book’s methods are really not ‘unorthodox’ at all, but in fact conform to the latest ‘scientific’ findings on chess improvement for all ages.

Wetzell is a trained engineer, and developed or refined his study methods in a period much like Tim’s now; past age 50 and with a lot more time for chess than during his full-time professional career, he sought what worked for him to improve his tournament chess results. What he found was actually right in line with Tim’s ‘overlearning’ and with this famous quotation from Grandmaster Nigel Davies (Prop.):

The reality is that you’ve got to move the pieces around the board and play with the position. Who does that? Amateurs don’t, GMs do.

The essence of the ‘Wetzell Method’ is really quite simple: 1) Study ones ‘own games’ (your own serious encounters plus playing “guess the move” in master games); 2) Identify key errors; 3) Make ‘flash cards’ (nowadays, computer generated graphics or whatnot) of these positions with the right move and a memorable phrase (mnemonic) that anchors the position and right move in your memory; 4) Keep regularly adding ‘flash cards’ and periodically run through the whole set of cards fairly rapidly, refreshing these right moves mentally; 5) Avoid time pressure, avoid time pressure, avoid time pressure.

Wetzell’s flash cards are not only missed tactics but also positional and prophylactic moves that he didn’t see during a tournament game or when playing one side of master games (especially Capablanca’s) with clocks, which if done right is nearly the equivalent of tournament play. The idea is that by concentrating on these positions, rather than just playing both sides of random master games or solving “White to play and win” diagrams, one builds a custom mental ‘database’ of the vaunted ‘patterns’ that have proven most problematic for the individual, one spends most study time on the vaunted ‘deliberate practice’ and by reviewing the cards regularly one does Tim’s ‘overlearning’. A trifecta!

Wetzell is the biggest opponent of time pressure I’ve ever encountered–he would much rather have you make all the moves according to a schedule, knowing some will be not be ‘best’, than allow yourself to run short of time. It’s a results-oriented approach, disregarding the desire to find the mythical best move at every turn in favor of finding decent non-blunders at times and staying on schedule to avoid true blunders later. Many of us who have the desire to play beautiful chess and have lost games due to time pressure need to give this aspect of practical play more serious thought than it usually receives.

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.

Chess Humour

Chess can be funny–truly.

I know most of us here take it very seriously, most of the time, but we’ve all met funny people in the chess world. An example: At my old club there was one guy who was a pretty good player, rated around 1900 US, but he was a perpetual loser in life. He actually occupied a shed on the grounds of the home of a successful business owner who had known him since they were both avid teen chess maniacs. His hair was unkempt, his overall hygiene…questionable. One night I saw him in a postmortem crowing about a victory over a 1400-rated older fellow, with trash-talking and various put-downs of his opponent thrown in. The opponent took it all with a smile, offering the occasional suggested move, then happily headed home while the winner hung around the club until the last possible minute before being forced to head home to the shack.

The 1400-rated fellow happened to be a very successful medical doctor, who arrived at the club in a $100,000 Porsche, and after the game went home to his very, very attractive younger wife (she came to the club a few times and sat reading a book; the blunder rate immediately trebled). At some point in this scene it suddenly struck me that Bad Hair Guy was trying to convince himself of his superiority over Dr Porsche, and I had to run out the back door and laughed myself almost to exhaustion.

The funniest chess book ever is not Wm. Hartston’s How to Cheat at Chess, though that’s a very fine book, indeed. The funniest chess book ever, by 1.6 kilometres, is The Soviet School of Chess, written, appropriately, by two well-schooled Soviets. It’s full of great games to enjoy, but that’s not the funny part. What is funny is that Mikhail Chigorin supposedly founded the “Soviet School of Chess” even though he died in 1908, almost a decade before the murderous Marxists took over the Russian Empire. In retrospect, he’s probably glad he didn’t live that long. Even funnier are the authors’ attempts to tie the success of the “School” to “dialectical materialism” and the all ’round wonderfulness of the government that murdered, starved and imprisoned at least 20 million people.

The fact is, Stalin’s greatest achievement in chess was making a deal with Hitler and seizing the tiny Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Players like Tal, Keres and a host of others provided a good portion of the Soviet Olympic Teams and Championship entries for the next 50 years. Nice move, Joe.

There are actually a good many humourous chess games, though it takes real discernment to find the hilarity in the 23rd and 24th games of the 1951 World Championship match Botvinnik-Bronstein. However, when GM Tony Miles whipped The Greatest Soviet of them all with black after 1. e4 a6, that was something everyone could laugh about, except Karpov, who spent a whole chapter in a book saying what a bad game it was. It is indeed funny, how when I was a lower-rated player and won, the other guy usually said he played badly. Almost without exception, when someone who expects to win doesn’t, the higher-rated player played badly, in his or her own mind. The other player is often seen as a canvas for us to paint our masterpieces upon; that too, is funny.

The funniest game ever, though, happens to have been played by me. It’s really quite a nice game until move 9. What I’m sure you’ll find especially fun is that I spent almost 15 minutes at that point calculating which winning move was best. If you can find anything funnier than this, please submit for publication in a future column.

In the tradition of naming exceptional games (Evergreen, Immortal, Game of the Century), I dub thee the “Amaurosis scacchistica game”:

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)

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!

A Broad View of Improvement

Since this is “The Chess Improver” I believe it worthwhile to spend bit of our valuable time discussing what improvement, and specifically chess improvement, is.

Until a few years ago I would have defined “improvement” as an increase in my official rating (or grading; I shall try and appeal to readers of all national persuasions). I was moderately obsessed with this number, having shepherded it from 1198 after my first tournament in 1981 to the heights of 1825 (USCF Class A; oooh-rah!) in 1990 and back down to the 1600s in the 2000s. If you think that’s too many numbers in a sentence, I agree.

The revelation that freed me from this mental tyranny was an excruciating loss (blundering in a “won” rook ending) one midnight at the local club that cost me the remainder of the 60-point increase I had gained through a great deal of study and effort over a year’s time. All of that was gone with the wind in two tournaments, and I had a headache to boot. On my way out I announced “I’m never doing this again” and I never have.

I have loved playing chess since teaching myself as a 12-year-old, and I love to compete, test myself, give an all-out effort and yes, win (and like all the greats, I hate to lose. I just do it more often). Over the last few years I have developed a new appreciation of chess improvement, of how work and growth in chess might carry over to other areas of life.

My special interest is in the brain and mind as instrument–how to train, motivate, energize and perform at your best as often as possible. I have read of and tried a great many techniques and systems of mental, physical, spiritual and emotional improvement and hope to offer you, Gentle Reader, something that fits with who you are and adds a little zest, a little edge, a little more joy to your chess, and your life

That’s my broad definition of improvement, which I hope to explore with you in future posts.