Quality Chess Blog

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.

Later this summer we shall publish a book by Swedish IM Axel Smith called Pump Up Your Rating. Axel is also writing a related blog called Pump Up Your Rating at the following link. That blog is not controlled by Quality Chess, so it will be up to Axel what he writes about, but I suspect chess improvement will be a recurring theme.

I have read the first draft of Axel’s book and I am delighted with how it is shaping up, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

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.

John just received this e-mail:

Dear John,

I pre-ordered your book “King’s gambit” last autumn for my son as a Christmas present. Do you know when it will be published?

Regards,
xxx

We have for the last nine years been pressuring Tiger Hillarp-Persson to write another chess book after the hugely successful and in my opinion simply wonderful Tiger’s Modern. I just pushed again and he was squirming a bit, saying that he might get a round to it.

More importantly, he said that he is teaching a bit these days and that he has created a nice little website. So we thought, if we push that, maybe he will feel grateful and write another book for us. Is it too much to ask?