Quality Chess Blog

After a long break, I’d like to return to discussing the mental stuff. Especially the following topic as I see it again and again being a problem with people I have worked with:

They think about how the game will end.

Now, to most of you this might seem like a very natural thing to do. And indeed we all do it. But it is quite the opposite of ensuring the most favourable outcome of the game.

Let me explain why:

The most favourable outcome of the game comes from making as many good moves as possible. I hope we agree this far. Making the best possible moves comes from focusing on the problem right in front of us. I hope we can agree that most of the problems we have to solve in a game are not of a decisive nature. Sure, we can blunder on every move, but to somehow think that this makes every move a critical moment is a misconception (surprisingly commonly made).

Only rarely are we in situations where the difference in value between one move (or two) and all the others is half a point or more. On most moves we have to decide between seemingly equal value moves and try to work out small differences.

And in neither situation will thinking about the result help us one iota with solving the problem we are facing.

What we should focus on is: understanding the problem we are facing on this move (easier said than done!) and solving it as fast as possible. The game will end. I am not personally playing a game started when I was 15 and neither are you. All games end. They end with a result. Thinking about what that result will be, should be, should have been or whatever, will not change it.

Now all of this might seem elementary. All good knowledge is. Worrying about the result is really a damaging thing to do. Your mind simply cannot deal well with your hopes and dreams at the same time as it is trying to work out if Bxh7+ works or not. Or more importantly; the calculation gets all messed up.

One problem I see a lot from students wondering too much about the result is that they play a different move from what they actually consider the best move. Because they are nervous, want to avoid risk or something.

There is no magic bullet I know that will solve this problem for you quickly. I think accepting the logic that you need to play one move at a time, and that this is more than difficult enough, is a good start. This will not make you indifferent to losing (though sometimes it will make you cope a whole lot better), but it can help you become a tougher player, a fighter if you like.

And don’t worry. The game will end and you will get the result you deserve, based on the quality of your moves…

We are very busy today. All sorts of things going on, including posting a lot of books.

So, this weeks training is the promised easier sheet (easier – not easy). The exercises can be found here and the solutions in pgn here.

Recently I have felt compelled to consider what the properties of the ideal chess trainer should be. Obviously there are a few different types of chess trainers, each with their own function. Let’s have a look at them:

a) the junior trainer

This starts with teaching children the rules, notation and so on, then goes on to teaching them basic strategic concepts, such as development, king safety, the value of the pieces.

The junior trainer will often go through games with a group of children, discussing ideas, telling them when to look out for simple opportunities and so on.

The junior trainer will in most cases be a much stronger player than the children, even though he might not appear to the readers of this blog to be a very strong player. After decades in this game we tend to forget how difficult it was to understand even the most basic things in the beginning.

In my opinion, the junior trainer’s two most important tasks are to keep the juniors interested and to guide them towards good training material when they are ready. But in the beginning, the best training material is probably playing lots of games. The difficult thing is to understand when the juniors are ready for more.

b) the talent trainer

In this phase of the talent’s development the trainer is likely to still be a stronger player, at least for a part of the process. He is able to show the talent a lot of ideas and typical patterns, structures, combinations and so on. At the same time he will also be able to help the talent prepare for games, analyse his games with him and choose what books he needs to read, which types of exercises he should solve and so on.

This is the standard trainer you can find online.

c) the second

Once a player reaches a certain level he will start to play in tense competitive situations. This can be national championships, international championships or even matches.

I think most players over 2400 would benefit a lot from a second, but with the low amount of money in prizes at “normal” tournaments, only players at the top or participants in junior championships usually have access to a second.

Personally I have not played many tournaments since 2007 without a second. In only a few cases my second (for the last few years Nikos Ntirlis) has not been at the location with me, but assisted me over Skype from Greece.

The two jobs of a second are:

c1) to help the player choose a good opening and come up with some concrete suggestions and advice in that direction.

c2) to be on the player’s side. This is usually not fully understood by most people. Since we are flock animals, trying to do something on your own is usually doomed to fail. The only reason this works in chess tournaments is because everyone is doing it like this! In 2007 I won the British Championship (one shot – one kill) and no doubt benefitted greatly from John Shaw’s advice over the phone, especially for game five (against Nick Pert), and for Brian McClement serving dinner in the caravan for his son and me.

d) the grandmaster trainer

The final category is the one I have moved into over the last decade, by natural progression.

Read more…

What can you do? Sometimes chess is just not interesting. – IM Yochanan Afek

IM Sam Collins had a question about “boring positions” and why he scores so poorly in them. He had read a blog post by a GM who used to be 2600, but has now dipped below 2500. This GM claimed that the loss of strength was to a great extent because he became bored in simple positions and lost them seemingly effortlessly. Sam felt he had the same problem and thus asked me if I could maybe have a look at a few of his games and explain why he lost these equal positions so reliably.

I certainly have limited talents in all directions (which is maybe a reason why I do not like the idea of talent a lot) but I do pride myself on having a reasonable bullshit-detector. Well, the red light was on high alert when I read this. Not what Sam said, but what the GM said.

Because what is boredom in chess? It is not a question of style or taste, as some would like to think. I have personally never heard that anyone found complicated tactical battles boring. Difficult, unpleasant and so on, yes, but boring, no.

The only boring things I have heard attached to chess (with the exception of studying opening theory or the game itself) are technical positions; especially those of a fixed symmetrical nature.

But why would some find these positions boring? Sure, I understand that these positions are not the most fascinating, but they certainly hold plenty of challenges, as Sam’s and other strong players’ record shows.

My theory is that things in general are boring when you look on their surface only. There are a few exceptions to this rule, of course, but in general being bored is (as I see it) a symptom of a lack of understanding.

I could expand this rule to a lot of things, but why not debate so-called tedious chess positions?

As I see it (we are really talking about a working theory here) the reason people find simple positions boring is because they frustrate them. They frustrate them because they are not able to see what is happening in them; mainly because they do not know what to look for. If you do not understand the positional and strategic goals you should be pursuing then you would get frustrated. Why your brain comes to the rescue and supplies you with the emotion of boredom, I do not know. I only know that the way to get past this is to learn to work your way through it. Here I find the three questions very useful – they were specifically constructed to deal with teaching problem-solving in positions where there is nothing to calculate, for players who approach all chess problems with calculation.

But let’s move from theory to practice so I can get on with my proper work!

Read more…

Nikos pointed me towards this video on opening preparation by Anand. Not much new for me in it, but I assume most of you will find it absolutely fascinating.

We all know that water will follow the path of least resistance if its runs down a hill. Unless our house is at the bottom of the hill and there is quite a lot of water coming, this will not disturb us much in our daily lives. But if we look at how we calculate variations at the chess board, we will quickly come to the conclusion that if we do not take full control, our calculation will take the path of least resistance as well.

How can this manifest itself? Here are a few possible scenarios:

• A variation is complicated and offers us resistance. We choose to go with a vague evaluation or guess, rather than going deeper.

• We see a promising variation and choose to go for it without seriously looking for pitfalls.

• We see a problem with our promising variation and we reject it and look for our move elsewhere.

All of them come to the same thing. In the face of resistance, we choose a different path: the path of least resistance.

In real life, the path of least resistance leads to physical, financial and emotional ruin. We call this mediocrity because so many of us choose this path rather than overcoming our weaknesses as human beings. (Personally I live in the fattest country in Europe and do little to improve the statistics).

In chess the path of least resistance leads to mediocre decisions. The only comfort we can find there is that most of our opponent’s decisions will be mediocre as well. The ability to consistently overcome the obstacles we are faced with, overcoming our own limitations, is truly a terrifying ability.

I have little time these days to train individuals, but I do work with a few young people who fascinate me. With the two strongest guys I work with at the moment, the main focus we have is learning to overcome resistance. We do this a lot through exercises. It is not always possible for me to anticipate where they will have problems, but it tends to be in the same places. Maybe we think more similarly than we expect.

A very useful part of the training is to talk through the exercises, to close in on what kind of mistake they were committing. I will not be able to offer this to all of you, but I can offer you one of the exercise sheets I give them for preparation, with a focus on overcoming resistance. The exercises sheet can be downloaded here. The solutions can be downloaded here.

Please look at the solving of these six exercises as a competitive sport. Use 60 minutes if your rating is over 2400 and 90 minutes if your rating is less. The aim of the game is to score as many points as possible in that time frame. The points are rewarded based on which points you saw in the timeframe. Please give your score here as well as your rating to allow others something to compare with. Do not be disappointed if you are scoring far from maximum points. The exercises are hard, so even one point might be an achievement!!

Postscript: John and I have a favourite book called The War of Art by novelist Steven Pressfield. In this he describes a phenomenon called Resistance with a Capital R. I like my description in this article, but I would be dishonest not to recognise where some of the language comes from. In this way many great ideas are extensions of similar ideas in other fields, like Jonathan Rowson’s brilliant quote, “Improvement comes at the end of your comfort zone.”

I was asked recently by a friend about how to avoid/limit time pressure. Rather than answering him personally, I thought I would answer him in greater detail; but share it with you guys.

From my perspective, time trouble is to a great extent a philosophical problem.

A common problem is that we try to calculate as far as possible or in other ways aim to be in control. We do this because we do not fully understand the nature of the problem we are trying to solve. If we try to keep control, to look for certainty, we will certainly over-think, over-calculate and so on.

On the other hand, if we understand that we need to solve a particular type of problem in a limited amount of time, we are better off.

In STRATEGIC PLAY I divide chess into four different types of decisions:
1) Automatic decisions – can be played within seconds

2) Simple decisions (Positional Play) – decisions that do not need calculation, but might still require some deep thinking to determine positional factors

3) Critical Moments – Positions where accurate calculation is needed and positional considerations are of limited value (often there are not too many of these in a game)

4) Complex decisions – what we also refer to as strategy. Where deep positional and tactical considerations intertwine.
I was talking to a famous grandmaster about his battles with the clock and he immediately recognized his problem as being in Category 4. This is where he spent too much time.

His problem was simply that he hesitated in making decisions.

For my friend, I think he was looking too much for control. I think he is calculating too much; trying to put lines on positional questions, where we instead have to trust our feeling, make our moves and save time for making more complex decisions later on.

I have played a few games in my life that were perfect; but obviously I made the right decisions for the wrong reasons along the way. There is no way we can solve all the problems we face during a tough fight at the chess board.

Calculating too much is a control issue – basically we seek to control things we cannot. And as a result we have too little time to calculate the critical moments that tend to come later in the game; and, ironically, then we cannot control the controllable either – because we have wasted our time…

This week German grandmaster Artur Yusupov will answer your questions. Artur is the author of probably the best training series for club players ever produced, as well as being a former World No. 3, a serial Olympiad winner, a trainer for Anand and many others, and he is also an all-round fantastic guy.

The format is simple: Please ask anything you want about his books or general training advice. Artur will answer twice over the next 7-10 days, whenever he has time, after which Artur will no longer be available.