Quality Chess Blog

In the autumn of 2013 I gave ten hours of training to a GM who has been struggling for years, unable to improve his play and slowly bleeding rating points. I felt he had certain problems in concrete positions, but in general needed to work more on improving his play.

After the sessions he sent me a long list of additional questions that I agreed to answer, if I was allowed to share them with the readers of the blog. As long as I kept his name confidential, he saw no problem with this.

As we are talking quite a lot of material, I have decided to cut up the Q&A session into five posts that will come over the summer.

This post continues from last week’s post.

3) I have been suffering from Openings for many years.

It can be categorised in many aspects

i) Unable to remember existing theory and also what I have seen my own analysis or some GM’s games

It is a common misconception that the strongest players are much better at remembering their analysis than other grandmasters. I used to believe this as well, while now I am not so sure. There is of course a tendency in that direction, but it is probably more like 10-20% better recall on average than 100-200% better recall.

So how do the best players manage to remember the theory much better? They spend a lot of time on memorisation. They do it in various ways; for example with training games and so on. I have personally found that using the TRAINING function in ChessBase is quite useful. If I want to remember something, I go through my files a few times over 1-2 weeks and say the move aloud before pressing on the arrow to see if I have remembered correctly. I only do this with my own moves.

I am sure there are more useful techniques out there, but this is the one I use.

ii) Don’t have any new idea / interesting novelty ready. Just following some games played by some elite players.

A lot of players are like this. I am not sure Carlsen has many great ideas in the opening. I think it is more important to understand the ideas available to you in the openings you play. Studying the middlegame seriously might easily earn you more points than finding a subtlety in the opening.

Obviously things change to some extent when you get past 2600. The difference in level often decreases and in order to win a game, it is very useful to start the game from a better position.

iii) Often I have mixed up ideas of one opening with another or forgot the correct move order

Again you have to invest time in order to gain the benefits. You forget things because you have not invested a lot of time in understanding the nuances of the various lines.

iv) Facing more problems with lower rated opposition in terms of choosing right opening. Always getting into some sort of positions which are unpleasant for me to play. Unable to choose any effective lines.

I suggest that you spend a lot of time, finding players that have similar strengths and weaknesses to you and who have a high score against players rated lower than themselves. I guess it would not take too long to work out. See what openings they play and find out how they win the games. Is it persistence? Is it knowledge of the opening? It can be a lot of things; you will need to make it a study to work it out.

v) Spending too much time even in known positions. Spending lots of time after facing a new move and therefore approaching nasty time trouble.

Learning to make decisions is an important part of chess. One of the ways to do this is to understand what it is that makes you spend too much time, when you should be making a decision instead. If it is fear, as it often is, know that you will need to change your behaviour. Even if you are afraid, you need to act as if you are not. You cannot expect that the tension of a high-level chess game will have no effect on how you feel. What you need is to get to a place where you feel the tension, but act as if you did not.

It gets easier with time.

4) What is the ideal way to study openings?

Read more…

In the autumn of 2013 I gave ten hours of training to a GM who has been struggling for years, unable to improve his play and slowly bleeding rating points. I felt he had certain problems in concrete positions, but in general he needed to work more on improving his play.

After the sessions he sent me a long list of additional questions that I agreed to answer, if I was allowed to share them with the readers of the blog. As long as I kept his name confidential, he saw no problem with this.

As we are talking about quite a lot of material, I have decided to cut up the Q&A session into five posts that will come over the summer.

1a) In case I am working alone what should be the most effective training method?

Obviously I can only give an opinion, not a definite answer to this question. I think an important point is to refer to a previous blog post, where I clearly state my belief that there are many ways to do just about everything.

But this does not mean that there are not a few ways of training that you can do on your own that have a proven track record.

a) Analyse your own games (and those of others)

Not all grandmasters use this method, but quite a lot do and owe a considerable amount of their success to doing this. Here it is important to understand the difference between turning on the engines and looking at their recommendations, and then going through the game thoroughly, questioning everything and trying to understand the difference between the moves played and the alternatives, as well as to determine the accuracy of what you were thinking during the game and the reason behind the mistakes you made.

b) Solve exercises

At the board you are trying to think. If you do not train your thinking at home, you will be like someone who never runs and enters a 10k race, only to find that it is tough going. He might complete it, but he will certainly walk a lot of the way…

c) Improve your openings

This works to some extent. It is easier playing good positions than to defend. And if you have good openings, you will get to play good positions most of the time. It is intentionally only third on the list, as the two other methods not only lead to better results in my estimation, they also have longevity that opening preparation does not have. Still, if you are already doing the other things, this does help.

d) Study the endgame

With a World Champion such as Magnus Carlsen there is no reason to put this after opening preparation on the list; and this is also not a question of priority. But understanding the endgame and remembering some of the main theoretical positions will definitely improve your game. If you want to combine this with b) I know a good source: Grandmaster Preparation – Endgame Play by yours truly. Read more…

I was asked again about when you should calculate and when you should trust your intuition. It is one of the big recurring problems of chess techniques and rightly so.

The Law of the Instrument as first phrased by Abraham Maslow goes like this: “The man with a hammer views every problem as a nail” (though Maslow said it less poetically). The relevance to chess is that we have different ways of thinking about a position and it is highly valuable to be able to shift between them, based on the demands of the position.

In some positions we do not really have to think. We need to recapture – or we already know what to play, because we spent last night studying the variation into the early hours. In these positions all we need to do is to ensure ourselves that this is indeed the case. Or said in another way:

The first thing we need to do is to establish if we have a choice

The next thing (baring that there is indeed a choice, without which it makes no sense not to just make a move immediately), the usual thing to do is to check the basic tactics in the position. We also call this for a candidate sweep.

Take this position:

Le Quang Liem – Svidler, Tromso World Cup 2013

White to play

 It seems that there is not really a big choice, but once we look for a few seconds, we can see that there is indeed a choice and that one of them is vastly superior to the other.

After we have checked for candidates it makes sense to try to understand what our goals should be in the position. Are they short term or long term? Are they dynamic or static? Are they offensive or defensive?

In most cases the way to solve the problems we have in the position will be by gradually improving our position. But in some cases our opponent’s scope for improving his position is greater than ours (by my estimate about half the time, in case anyone was wondering) and it makes sense to consider choosing to change the nature of the game. This might not necessarily be possible, but it is something we might want to pay attention to.

Or we might want to pay attention to how our opponent would want to change the nature of the game.

I could go on – but so far I have actually not talked about calculation yet and this is sort of my point. It is an important tool. Very important. Yusupov once plucked the number 30% out of thin air as an estimate to how important it might be for the professional player.

Now some guys are calculating everything. You can recognise them easily, as they are always deeply frustrated with “boring” positions. Positions where there is nothing to calculate. This does not mean that there is nothing going on. It just means that the hammer is useless. It is time for the screw driver, the spanner or the plaster…

If this is you, I strongly recommend the 3Q method. You can find many posts about it on this blog under my training tips or you can go to the source and read Grandmaster Preparation – Positional Play.

And if you are the one hoping for a clear algorithm for when to calculate, I am sorry. Chess is too complicated for that. There are simple ways to approach things, but they will always be models. They are not the territory.

The Solution

Le Quang Liem took on d5 with the pawn and the game was soon agreed a draw. He could have secured a winning advantage with 23.Rxd5! based on 23…Rxd5 24.e6+! and White wins.

Try to find the best move in these two positions. I have reduced the problems to sort of candidate moves in order to make it easier for you. There is no need for deep calculation.

[fen size=”small”]r2qr1k1/1pp2pb1/3p2pp/1N5n/1PP1n3/p3B1PP/P4PBK/1R1QR3 w – – 0 19[/fen]

White to play

[fen size=”small”]3R4/4np1k/6pp/R3p3/1p2b3/5qP1/PP3P1P/4Q1K1 w – – 0 34[/fen]

White to play

Read more…

I promised a long time ago to give some sort of explanation about what I mentioned at some point as understanding the mechanics of chess. It is not so easy to do, but when I mention it to fellow grandmasters, they seem to understand what I am talking about.

It has a lot to do with understanding where the pieces belong. Understanding sequences and how they relate to each other.

To give an example:

[fen size=”small”]r1bqkb1r/p1pp1ppp/2p2n2/4P3/8/8/PPP2PPP/RNBQKB1R b KQkq – 0 6[/fen]

Here the main line is 6…Qe7 7.Qe2 Nd5 and so on.

I was talking to a GM yesterday that mentioned this as being an example of a pattern of moves that can be used in several situations. He immediately mentioned two:

[fen size=”small”]rnbqkbnr/ppp2ppp/8/3P4/4p3/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKB1R w KQkq – 0 4[/fen]

Apparently this is popular among juniors in the US. A lot of knight moves are usually played, but it White plays 4.Qe2! then after 4…Qe7 5.Nd4, he is fighting for an advantage (with an extra pawn as a secret weapon).

[fen size=”small”]rn1qkb1r/ppp2ppp/3p4/5b2/4n3/2N2N2/PPPP1PPP/R1BQKB1R w KQkq – 0 6[/fen]

Famously in Miles – Christiansen the players had agreed a draw in advance and were just making moves here. Miles polished the e2-square before eventually playing the harmless 6.Nxe4 and after a while the game was drawn. It was inserted into Chess Informant without annotations and Viswanathan Anand used it as Black against Zapata. After 6.Qe2! Black will lose a piece as 6…Qe7 is met by 7.Nd5. Anand resigned. Read more…

I got an email from Patty describing a consideration:

Candidate idea, ie strategies. I will come up with a idea (strategy) and run with it. But rarely will I come up with more than one idea. In my post mortem I seen a million different things I could do. But I never trained myself to come up with different ideas, just look at different moves. (which translates to different ideas) Just seems easier to wrap my mind around coming up with different ideas or strategies. When a position is per say static, and i have to come up with something I normally only try to develop one plan based around the best move. Versus coming up with multiple plans based on the best move, the position , weakness. And so on.

This is the extent of the information I have been given. Based on this I will have to make a number of assumptions and guesses to try to say something meaningful about this situation. Forgive me for this.

My first thesis about why this is happening is that we all have a tendency to revert to out default way of doing things, especially when stressed and under pressure.

The second thesis is that Patty mainly thinks in move-move-move during the game; the good old I go there, he goes there, I go there – and so on.

It becomes clear that once Patty is relaxed and the immediate pressure is gone, he is able to think of things in a more open way, considering things from different perspectives and so on.

My suggestion

For this reason I think the main focus here should not be on the chess (though there are some interesting questions about how Patty thinks and if there are potential for adding some ways of thinking to the mix – f.ex. by reading Positional Play and do the exercises in that book), but on why Patty is so tense during the game.

There are some people that believe that when you feel agitated, stressed or in other way in a sense of urgency, you perform better. They probably would not express it in this way, but they act as if it is true. So, I would call it a firm life strategy.

I believe that I can do anything with passion and joy without losing focus or perform worse. My results show that it has worked for me. Obviously I do not enjoy losing, but I do not fear it and I do not fall apart when it happens, as many other people do (whether or not it is their behaviour towards themselves or others that malfunction is irrelevant to me; their character collapses, which is bad). I would suggest focusing on playing good moves and enjoying the thrill of the fight more than focusing on the result and feeling terrified about it.

There are some people that only can function under pressure. There are also people who can only function if they had their fix of caffeine, nicotine, heroine or whatever. To use adrenaline is maybe less unhealthy, but it is not healthy and it is not a great strategy. If this is you, think it over.

I see confidence as preparation in action. You will feel more confident during the game and have more confidence in what you are doing, if you have done training. Deciding to do things another way, without training your neural pathways to do it rarely works. And when it works it is never with anything as difficult as chess.

So, do training, be conscious of what you are training and pay attention to whether or not you are actually managing to train what you are trying to train in the process. It will get easier all the same, as it is with learning any new skill.

Juicing

I have small confession. I love my juicer. It is a Matstone Masticating juicer. It put me back about £150 five years back and has needed a few spare parts over the years. Maybe another £50.

Juicing is the process of extracting the liquid from vegetables and fruits. The hard ones. You cannot juice avocado, banana and berries. But cucumber, courgette, apples, pineapple, spinach, kale, ginger, lime, sugar snap peas, carrot and beetroot frequently get molested in my juicer. It takes brilliant and fresh and is full of micro nutrients.

The last 28 days I have been through a juice fast. I have done a few in the past, maybe 3-5 days, but this time I felt that I had gone to rather an unhealthy place during the writing of Endgame Play (long long hours and the feeling that it would never end). I needed to do something to get back on track.

Read more…

I will take this one up front. No, there was no room on the list for Watson or Silman. But also, there was no room for Kasparov, Karpov, Kotov, Reti and so on.

John and I agreed our way to ten books and I have put them in order of quality, as I see it. It is certainly up for debate. Below I will give books that fell just outside the list.

One of the rules of the list is that the same writer cannot be repeated. Another rule is that the books should be relevant today.

1. Mikhail Tal: The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal

2. Bent Larsen: 50 Selected Games

3. Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games

4. John Nunn: Secret of Practical Chess

5. Isaak Lipnitsky: Questions of Modern Chess Theory

6. Mark Dvoretsky: Secrets of Chess Training (now School of Chess Excellence 1)

7. Alexander Alekhine: Best Games

8. Mikhail Botvinnik: Best Games

9. Aron Nimzowitsch: My System

10. David Bronstein: Zurich 1953

Other books we seriously considered were: Practical Chess Endings (Keres), Secrets of Pawn Endings (Mueller/Lambrecht), The Art of the Middlegame (Keres/Kotov), Simple Chess (Michael Stean), Endgame Strategy (Shereshevsky), Modern Ideas in Chess (Reti), Zurich 1953 (Najdorf), Three Matches (Kasparov), Karpov’s Best Games (written by Razuvaev, but published as if written by Karpov).