Quality Chess Blog

 
Michael Neill, the Hollywood success coach, once said that he had met no one in his time in Hollywood who had achieved success on their own. Everyone had someone who supported them, someone who was a part of their team in one way or another. This could either be as a manager, coach, parent, sibling, spouse and so on. It was always: “my people will call your people” and so on. The construction was always different.
 
I heard this on his internet radio show in early 2007 and I immediately could see reasons why this was so, on top of the obvious sharing of tasks: we are social animals and we simply do much better if we are not alone in our quest.
 
In chess you have very few exceptions to this rule (Fischer, Larsen). I would like to point to the two most obvious examples of symbiotic relationships:
 
Kasparov had Dokhoian to carry his suitcases, book his tickets and help him with the chess.
Topalov has Danailov to organise everything and tell him what to do.
 
In the first case the player was the boss, in the second case the manager is the boss. I attach no value judgment to either set-up; they both suited the player ideally. Kasparov has a great need to dominate his surroundings; Topalov, on the other hand, would rather play tennis than be involved in business discussions.
 
The consequences of this idea were dramatic for me in 2007. I played in the Spanish team Championship and got a few ideas at home from John, who had taken on the job as my second. The same happened during the British Championship. In both events I scored 2700 performances and at times played brilliantly.
 
I won the remaining points I needed to go over 2500 and became a grandmaster – as well as won the British Championship.
 
What this means for you!
 
Not everyone is able to hire a second for a tournament, but there are a lot of things you can do to add people to your chess team. The following is probably the only training tip I have that can compete with the 20 minute/6 times a week tip: create a training team!
 
The idea is simple: collect 1-3 friends of similar strength and meet up regularly to do training together.
 
The main training should be solving, but you can also discuss opening ideas and play training games. But this would require that everyone studies consistently, which is often not the case.
 
The combination of social interaction with friendly competition is very powerful. It has the power to produce champions…

My Danish teammate Grandmaster Sune Berg Hansen mentions Foundation of Chess Strategy by another Danish Grandmaster, Lars Bo Hansen, as the chess book that has had the greatest influence on his own chess. It is not so much the explanations or the chess in the book, but the concept of dividing players into four categories that made an impression on Sune.

Lars Bo Hansen puts a name to four types of players and debates how they should play and how to play against them. They are: Activists, Reflectors, Pragmatics and Theorists.

They are divided into a grid that looks like this:

Lars Bo Hansen describes the inherent characteristics of each player, their strengths and weaknesses and so forth. While I find the chess a bit uninspired in the book, I do find the concept extremely useful and would recommend anyone to read this book and identify themselves in the grid.

The point to this is that the idea of the all-round player is close to being an illusion. Of all the World Champions the only one continuously mentioned as an all-rounder is Boris Spassky and I have a feeling that this is as much tradition as it is fact. And anyway, the ‘narrow-minded’ players who beat him up in matches, Petrosian, Karpov and Fischer all stand above him in chess history as far as I am concerned.

So, what we should do is design our opening repertoire according to our style and slowly improve in the areas where we are weak (avoiding them at all costs usually means a lot of rating points). But there are parts of chess that are better suited to our way of thinking, to our character and so on.

A final note on Hansen’s book: The references to business are poor as far as I am concerned and could with benefit be ignored entirely. Luckily they quickly disappear from the book. The idea of this particular grid does not originate in the world of business anyway; as with so many other things, it was thought up in Russia. I first saw it in Mark Dvoretsky’s writings as a brief note so it is possible the idea was his to start with.

We have been negotiating for a while with the owners of Forward Chess relating to our books being published on their app. We are happy to announce that we have come to agreement and that we have signed an agreement.

This is of course the easy part; next follows the conversion of our books to their format. It will be a lot of work and it will take time before all our books will be available in this format; if ever (some books are no longer relevant). But it is certainly the intention that most of our future books will be published in this format.

During the candidates tournament in London I had dinner with my good friend Alan Minnican and not surprisingly, the conversation circled to chess improvement at some point. Alan was considering lessons, but is very busy with work. I assured him that hiring a good trainer would be worth it, but that the first thing he should do was to spend 20-30 minutes a day solving exercises.

Now, usually when you give someone advice, nothing happens. People generally do not change their habits or their way of approaching things and for this reason rarely have changed results. But of course there are exceptions. Alan turns out to be one of these:

“You can thank Jacob for his chat at the candidates and his recommendation for daily calculation/combination work. I only have two books here: Calculation and his older one Excelling at Combinational Play.” Alan Minnican, 2013 U-2200 ACO World Champion.

Besides just stating that the first advice given in this series of postings has already paid off with tournament success, I want to talk about an issue I have been thinking about recently.

You get what you pay for

Although this old adage certainly is not true regarding everything, it does seem to be true when it comes to chess training. I see a lot of kids and amateurs using free exercises from Chess.com or Chesstempo.com in their training. The attraction of having a rating for your solving and to have a system that chooses the right exercises for you is of course high. Unfortunately the quality of the exercises is generally low. So, in order to satisfy a very primal need for instant gratification (the rating part) and follow the basic business model we use (money in good, money out bad) people end up spending a lot of time dealing with very low-quality training material. And a chess book is really not that expensive!

But I would like to add that you really want to use a somewhat recent book, which has been checked with computers. Not because people played worse in the past, but because sometimes something flashy was stupid and the exercise in itself was pointless.

A good example of a book I should have stayed away from is ****** ***** ***** by ********* ******. There I found the following exercise:

Read more…

John Shaw: The King’s Gambit is going to the printer next week. It will be 672 or 680 pages. It will be released together with Playing the Trompowsky and Kotronias on the King’s Indian at the end of June, but we will probably use the chance to shoot out any websales we have earlier, if it comes along.

http://pumpupyourrating.com/

Nice game from Sigemann Cup with nice comments by Axel Smith.

I was quite fascinated with the annotations to the following position in New in Chess by two Dutchmen, Anish Giri and Willy Hendriks. But before we talk about it, we can make it an exercise for those who want it to be.

Black to play and win

The thing that fascinated me about this position (which of course is Svidler – Carlsen, London Candidates 2013) was the way the two authors talked about the missed possibility. Hendriks writes that “you may expect it to be rather trivial (the idea that is, not the resulting variations)” while Giri writes that “…but the line is not for mortals.”

Had I not been in London that day I might have written the same thing in my article for Skakbladet. It is a normal respectful thing to say; the winning idea was nothing out of the ordinary, but making it work takes a bit of effort and since the best player in the world did not play it, the lines must be really difficult.

But as so often, reality is surprising. When Carlsen was asked at the press conference if he had looked at 25…Bxh3! he said no, clearly surprised. He had a look at the position, maybe 10 seconds, and then concluded that it was “decisive”. Those difficult lines were not so difficult for him to work out. After the press conference I took a few minutes to work out that 26.dxe4 Rg5 27.g3 Bg4 28.f3 Rb2! is indeed decisive, on account of 29.Qxb2 Bxf3 and the dual threat of …Bxd1 and …Qh3.

(Update: John pointed out that Csaba Balogh wrote in the Chess Evolution newsletter that Carlsen missed 28…Rb2. The delusion is total.)

In the same article Hendriks makes some comments about Positional Play, which he has told me he has not read yet, and that the comments should be seen as a general reaction to Monokroussos’s review. But it does allow me to underline the basic point of the three questions training method (always remember that it is not meant to be used on every move at the board, though as one of many tools in your kit, it is acceptable) is that it trains your focus.

Clearly had Carlsen, for a second, thought about winning the game in an attack, he would have done so. Even when you are onboard the 2900 rocket your focus is not perfect. This teaches us that we can always improve this, and working with books like those in the Grandmaster Preparation series can aid this.

Later in his article Hendriks says that the only training method that works is looking at good chess. This is a very extreme statement and in some way I think it has helped me a bit to understand how some authors with similar views look at those of us who include general principles in our writing: as opposing extremists. I am not saying that Hendriks does this, but others clearly do in the way they write about the opposing view. Basically, what they believe is that the people who talk about “rules in chess” must view the move Nf3-e1 as a move away from the centre (although, in the case I am thinking of, it should be seen as Nf3-e1-c2-e3-d5, taking the only viable route to the centre). The problem with seeing it in the intelligent way is that it is less extreme and does not work well as an enemy. Or they might want to think that concrete lines cannot co-exist in a belief system that includes general assumptions about chess. If this is you, please read Mark Dvoretsky’s books. They are very concrete and they have lots of general assumptions.

Clearly this blog is not brilliantly planned out and not intended to give a clear course in chess improvement. It is simply about topics I have considered along the way, which for some reason are in the forefront of my mind.

But this week I am trying to write a disciplined blog entry; one that I feel I should write. It is a bit like going for a swim in the ocean, rather than lying on the beach watching the girls walk by. It is good for you and you might even enjoy it once you get going, but it is not your preferred choice.

So here come ten possible ways for you to improve your chess. No matter who you are, if you are seeking my advice on anything, you will find at least a few strategies here that will help you along the way.

1. Analyse your own games deeply (and the games of others).

2. Solve puzzles regularly (my advice is six times a week x 20-30 minutes).

3. Understand what type of player you are and adjust your style accordingly.

4. Push your levels of concentration upwards and become a fighter.

5. Play real openings. Throw away the London, c3-Sicilian or whatever rubbish you are playing. If you want to develop as a player, playing main lines is important.

6. Learn by heart all the 222 obligatory positions from Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual.

7. Play through game collections with good comments.

This might vary from player to play; for some the Move by Move stuff from Everyman might be reasonable. But for most readers of this blog, I recommend books written either by great players, or books with a great reputation. For example, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Kasparov, Nunn, Anand, Karpov (the old books), San Luis 2005 and so on.

8. Use your body to the best effect for the game (stop poisoning it, for example).

9. Analyse your openings deeply and find your own systems with your own ideas.

10. Understand the basic principles of dynamics, statics and strategic play. These can be studied indefinitely of course, but you can always improve your understanding.

There are always a lot of ways to do anything. Anyone who wants to sell “the only way” is either selling chess studies or tablebase printouts. In the same way, it is possible to reach the same conclusion by many different thinking processes.

The only real danger here is that you fall in love with one system and become fixed to it. You can be the openings guy, or the endings guy, or the expert in solving studies. My closest-sitting colleague in the office, GM Colin McNab, is the last two. I am not sure if it has given his over-the-board play any great advantage, compared to if he had spread out his studies. On the other hand, he just regained the British Championship in solving (yes, Nunn and two other World Champions were competing)…

If you have to pick only one strategy (could be ‘Number 11’ for all I care), I would recommend to either do the one that excites you or the one you know you have been delaying forever.