About a year ago, I visited Jacob in lovely Glasgow and we made together a series of videos (5 of them) where he explained briefly his theory on the “Four Types of Decisions” we make in Chess. In this article, I’d like to talk about Type of Decision #1: Automatic Decisions and how I realized, one whole year later, why such a simple idea can have a huge effect on the level of the chess I (and I am sure also you) play. If you have no idea what are the “Four Types of Decisions”, you can check the introductory video of the series, where this legendary dialogue took place:
Jacob: “What is the one thing you should always do when you have an automatic decision?”
Nikos: “Maybe check if this is not the only move?”
Jacob: “He is not as stupid as he looks!”
If you want to expand on this topic, there are two books where this theory is explained in detail:
Also, you can check this video which is dedicated to this type of decision.
So, let me now share with you my recent experiences and why I think I (and you) should take seriously Jacob’s advice on that subject.
First of all, what is an automatic decision?
According to Jacob: “Moves we make almost without thinking”
Some players relate this thing to intuition, or to the first move that comes to mind or what I have heard many times as moves that we would have made in blitz.
During the Batumi Olympiad 2018, Sam Shankland met across the board Rauf Mamedov, Azerbaijani GM. Rauf didn’t buy Sam’s book and I know! How? Well, he did exactly the kind of mistake Sam warned about in his book, Small Steps to Giant Improvement, proving once again that every chess player, regardless titles, can make simple mistakes that cost dearly.
As Sam explains in page 232 of his book, “…Black has advanced a7-a5, so White will not be able to play b3-b4. As such, white is condemned to have a pair of doubled pawns where the further-advanced one cannot be protected from another pawn.”
What kind of simple mistakes have you made and you still remember them?
Andrew Greet asked if I would mind answering questions appearing in the comments to his blog posts. However, I see that Andrew has already done that, while also sharing his own experience. Thanks! It’s also nice to see all the readers’ efforts. I hope you have enjoyed all the hours of solving. Just like many of you, I consider the boring part to be checking the solutions. But sometimes it has to be done.
As I am afraid to find silly mistakes, I usually don’t read anything I have written after it’s published. But this time a reader gave the book back to me, with marks to a lot of games. “White and Black have been confused in too many games,” he said. “It’s not possible that the world champions blundered that often.”
But the book is right in this case – these blunders really were played by the elite, even though some of them were in simuls and exhibitions. Doesn’t it feel good to excel over a world champion?
However, one real error was accidentally added during editing: diagrams 11 and 18 are similar, but with the wrong solution to the first. Given the time it took me to solve the replacement exercise (pdf), I guess I need to Woodpecker!
My wife is already on the way. She hasn’t played in two years, but after smelling the new book (always the most important thing to her) she started solving. With limited time available, she skipped the introduction, and several times she asked me questions that definitely are discussed in the book.
“Read the introduction!” was my constant answer. Read more…
“Early this year we were interested to hear from Chris Wainscott, an enthusiastic amateur from the US and an avid fan of our books. Soon the ‘Quality Chess Challenge’ was born, and earlier this week we were excited to receive an update from Chris about his training.
We are pleased to present a guest blog post from the man himself, where you can find out about the goals he has set for himself and his progress so far.
Over to you Chris…”
Chris writes:
Before I delve in to detail, let me first take a moment to acquaint the readers of the Quality Chess blog with myself and the Quality Chess Challenge.
My name is Chris Wainscott and I am from the USA. I am 43 years old and currently working to prove that it’s quite possible to become a master after the age of 40. I stopped playing chess in 1992 and didn’t begin again until 2011. At that time my Elo was just under 1500; now I am 1800.
The Quality Chess Challenge came out of a discussion between a friend and myself that caused to me make the offhand remark to Jacob Aagaard that I felt that it would be possible for me to get to 2200 reading nothing but books published by QC.
So for one year, from 2/13/17 through 2/13/18 I am committed to training using only books published by Quality Chess. Of course I don’t expect to become a master in that time frame, but I do expect to show the value in using high quality training materials.
Right now I’m about one quarter of the way through the Challenge, so it’s time for a progress update.
Current Scottish Champion GM Keti Arakhamia-Grant and former Scottish Champion Jonathan Grant, both FIDE Trainers, are running a training seminar in conjunction with Edinburgh Chess Club, on the topic of Critical Moments.
The primary focus will be on practical application through solving exercises and playing positions after following demonstrated examples. Aimed at all aspiring players prepared to work hard on improving their game, up to titled level.
The chess season in the UK runs from roughly October-May, so now seems like another good time to ask about your own playing habits. The majority of games are played in midweek league matches or weekend congresses, and there are also 9 round international tournaments on the continent almost every week (and a growing number here too).
If you had the time and the inclination you could play all year round, but at least one elite grandmaster would advise you against that: “When you play too much chess in a short period, bad things tend to happen” tweeted Hikaru Nakamura after a below par performance at the European Club Cup, which came shortly after his rather excellent one in Las Vegas. So our question this week is how many games of chess do you play in a year? Count all your over the board matches, FIDE rated or otherwise (but leave out all these blitz games on Lichess!) 0-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-75, 76-100 or 100+
Last week’s poll showed a clear preference for Magnus Carlsen to behave like Merv Hughes over Alastair Cook.
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