Quality Chess Blog

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:

• Strategic Play (2013)

• Thinking Inside the Box (2017)

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.

My girlfriend gets upset with me whenever I claim to be old. She does not remember the fall of the wall at all, while I remember the Iran hostage crisis. I cry about the death/retirement of Rock ‘n Roll, while she sees it as a genre of Classical music, as I see Mozart, Gershwin or Charlie Parker. 
A decade ago Yusupov told me he participated in the European Championship and played eleven GMs between 2500 and 2600 of whom he had never heard at all! This was his “I am from the past” Epiphany. 
I have lots of them these days and honestly I enjoy them. I like the way new chess publishers are trying new things. As the old fart I am, I like what we do best of course, this is why we do it this way. But I really like that things are moving forward.
Yesterday I was made aware of two videos by GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko, whom I honestly still thought of as 21 years old. Actually, he is 32 and has three beautiful children, as the internet informs me. But thank you for Michael to making me aware of these videos, they are very complimentary to me.
The first one deals with the method of the three questions in a tactical setting, with a position I first saw in Byron Jacob’s wonderful little book Analyse to Win, but there were a small mistake, which was the justification for me including it in Excelling at Chess Calculation, with some chat.

White to play

The second position is more positional in nature and comes from one of his own games.

This one is a bit harder and I have to confess that I got it wrong! But it is all very logical and instructive.

Overall this first visual encounter with Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko was been a total pleasure for me. Not so much because of the nice recommendation of the three questions, but more because of the clarity and high level of his explanations of the positions. If you are looking for a private trainer, I think he teaches on Chess.com, which apparently is not just about Puzzle Rush… You can find him on Facebook here.

I saw that the excellent gentleman and highway robber in blitz Kevin Goh said a few nice things about me after making his last GM-norm.

JT: Was there a different approach you took towards this event and the previous other GM norm attempts you made during the barren years that made your chances better (preparation, mindset, living conditions etc)? 

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Hi guys,

Best wishes from Heraklion, the capital of the Greek island Crete. Kallia and I are here to inspect possible venues for our next big project – the Quality Chess Training Camp! We have so far found three possible venues and will now have to debate the prices with the hotels.

Meanwhile, let me explain the basic concept for you. A seven day training camp in beautiful surroundings at affordable (off-season) all-inclusive prices.

This year I am hosting a training camp in my house for the third time. The first year had two participants, the second year six and this year we will be nine. However, I had to push people to come the last two years, while this year 21 people expressed serious interest.

I prefer such events greatly to one-on-one training. I charge £700 all-inclusive for the seven day summer camp, which involves a few sofas, some AirBnb and so on. With nine participants it feels like it has outgrown the “do-it-yourself” stage.

So here is the plan. Quality Chess will cooperate with a local organiser in Heraklion to have a camp in a hotel here for something like €899. Depending on the hotel we choose and get a good deal from. We have a favourite and they seemed interested.

The first camp will take place 4-10 November 2018 and will most likely be capped with a minimum rating of 2300. The second camp will take place in the beginning of May 2019 and be open for everyone.

In the first camp in November there will be two coaches, GM Boris Gelfand and GM Myself. Exactly how we will divide the job between us, we are still negotiating. I hope he will not jump ship in the process, so do not read this as an invitation, but as a blog post!! But the dates in November are specifically decided to fit around his schedule.

In the second camp in May, there will be more coaches and hopefully more participants. The November camp is a trial run for us to learn how to do this right. In May we will not have any rating restrictions, but a big camp with classes at multiple levels at the same time and some big lectures. The evenings will have blitz tournaments by the pool (not guaranteed a pool for November though :-(), simuls, a quiz night and so on. We hope for it to be possible to bring family members at good prices. Wives, kids, parents, siblings, grandparents. Whatever is needed for you to be able to come. I want it to be something special, which incorporates a great holiday with top level chess coaching.

Look out at this spot or sign up for our newsletter for more information.

I am no longer studying chess to learn the basics in the way I did once, but I am going through that process with improving my technique on the guitar. As with many chess players, I have picked up this and that over the years from others, but not really been through a systematic programme to learn the chops. Tiger Hillarp Persson is learning to play Go, among others because learning a new game from the beginning (he is no longer a beginner though), has made him a better teacher. I work hard on improving as a musician and as a tennis player, because doing something I really like well is a pleasurable experience for me and because I really like to improve my skills. Learning is simply fun.

There are a few tips I have picked up from the highly skilled teachers I have been working with, which I might as well share with your guys.

Train every day. Working a bit every day is better than working twice as much on the weekend. We need our subconscious to keep working in the background or something. I will not claim any type of scientific insight, but I am experiencing a great leap in my technique.

Take a small break to consider what you have just learned. We are all too keen to move on from a potential transformational insight to the next thing, the next exercise. Stopping up to look at what we have just worked on and give our brains a chance to catch up on the various sensations before we demand it to confront a new challenge is paramount. Also, our energy and our attention span increases. You can only sprint for a minute or two, no matter what type of athlete you are, but there are people running 100 km races. And yes, sometimes they walk…

Play with confidence. Actually, this is a chess insight, just happy to see it replicated elsewhere. You cannot second guess yourself all the time. You have to accept that you are limited in ability and should try to execute the stroke, chord, positional decision, whatever it is, in the correct way. When you fail (learning is failing and reflecting, mainly), you will be able to look at what you did wrong and how you can do it right. Second guessing yourself does not work. It may win the point, the song may not sound entirely stupid and you may not blunder something. But not attempting to do things right, means that you will do them wrong for longer. This is a main reason why practice is so glorious; it gives us a chance to fail on purpose, so we can reflect.

The best way to learn to do something right is by doing it right. This is known especially from music, but I find it useful in tennis too. And other things. In chess, when you are learning to apply a proper candidate search to each move, you should allow it to take minutes. By doing the technique (“of just looking for options and ideas” – very simple, but any technique you really want to use should be simple) slowly means that you stay in control and can fend off impulses to just guess or just do something and similar. I know of World Class players that have not implemented the techniques they need to compete at the level they could. And the main problem seems always to be impulse control. So, slow down.

One of my observations in my thirty plus years in chess is that you can divide people into groups of those who get motivated by their own successes and ambitions and those that get excited by the prospects of others. This is one of the reasons why many grandmasters write bad books or are lousy trainers, while some less strong players are excellent coaches and write fantastic books.

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