The Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog

If you like the Dutch Defence so much why don't you play 1. f4 as White?

That extra tempo is going to hurt me.

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About thirty years ago - or maybe it was a million - I was invited to play in a simultaneous exhibition given at a primary school which sent pupils to the secondary I then attended. Having been reading some opening theory, perhaps for the first time, I thought I would try it against the master giving the display: and so, for the first and last time in my life, I rolled out the Czech Benoni and was duly rolled over without a struggle, the word "life" being just about the last that could be applied to my position. What made my choice particularly stupid was that the master, William Hartston, was in fact the author of the book, Benoni, which I had been reading.

I still have the book and still like it: but wasn't his most famous book of the era. That was How To Cheat At Chess, a book written so long ago I can't find a decent image of the cover to post on here. Indeed, younger readers - or indeed half the authors of this blog - may never have heard of it and may not even know who Bill Hartston is, let alone recall when "are you playing for a win?" was a favoured method of almost-offering a draw.

Well, he said, settling down in his armchair, Hartston was a strong international master who was an early favourite to become the first English grandmaster, a title, however, that he never ultimately obtained.

He was also perhaps the first English chess professional to find that writing about the game was rather more lucrative than playing it, not least as a result of the publication of How To Cheat At Chess in 1976. I was fortunate enough to be given a copy a few days ago when I was back in England. It's quite dated now, in a number of respects (notably as regards women) but it's still an amusing read, not least because it retails several entertaining anecdotes involving skullduggery in international chess events, often Student Olympiads which Hartston attended. Some of these may have been embroidered a little for publication (his recollection of this episode, for instance, differs a little from David Levy's) and real names are omitted, but when, after our game, I asked Hartston who was the opponent who asked him "you vant draw at moof tventy?" - after fifteen moves, the extra five moves being "for the spectators" when there were none - he was quite happy to tell me it was Florin Gheorghiu.

Anyway, rereading the book the other night, I wondered if it was not time,that I found out who the other masters of sharp practice were, more than thirty years after Hartston wrote about them. So I thought I'd ask. If you can convincingly identify any of the subjects below, can you tell us in the comments box?

• The Belgian player "languishing in a continental prison for illicit currency dealings".


• The Swedish player who conned his English opponent into agreeing a draw after having sealed a blunder, and the Englishman concerned.


• The American player who invited his teammates to laugh at the poor sealed move of his English opponent (and that opponent).


• The Hungarian and Yugoslavian masters who complete their scoresheets inaccurately in order to deceive their opponents into thinking that the time control has (or has not) been reached


• The player who won a county championship by falsely informing his last-round opponent that he had lost his penultimate game, thus making his opponent think that he was half a point ahead - rather than behind - and that a quick draw would therefore suffice for the title.


• The Yugoslav who in a lost position loudly accepted Gheorghiu's draw offer (which the latter had promised to make, a promise he had not honoured).

No speculation please, this is a respectable blog. But if you happen to know the guilty men in any instance, my, ah, thirst for historical truth and accuracy is just begging to be quenched.

My long unbeaten run in correspondence chess is over, stretching to nineteen games before I was finally, earlier this month, obliged to resign one. A shame: I'll never achieve a sequence like that again. Still, there is some consolation in the knowledge that one of those nineteen has won the Surrey County Chess Association's 2008 prize for the Best Game In County Correspondence Matches. You've probably already read about it on Chessbase or in the papers.

Normally I never win anything: even if I'm in the running, there's always a last round in which I throw it all away. One of the virtues of correspondence play - and indeed, of Best Game Prizes - is that there's no last round for me to face.

The game, in which I beat Lorin D'Costa, is here. (I am of course not Rafa Tymrakiewicz, you need to scroll down in the menu box until you reach the appropriate entry.) You can also find it here. So good, he blogged it twice.

Oh, a diagram? Well, I can't really show you the position before a decisive coup, because there weren't any: I don't win that sort of game. But I'll give you the position before Black's 12...Be7. Quite likely he should have preferred 12...Nc6 instead, but either way, it wasn't until I started constructing the diagram that I really noticed what had been going on: I chose to use the set pieces up in start position function, because, looking at Black's first rank, they're practically all still there.

This is the penultimate installment of this series, and it is different to all the others, including the next. In each other article I suggest ways to improve your chess directly or less directly linked to one way that I improved mine. This article is different. Instead, here are various things I've been thinking about, without reaching any conclusion. I'm not sure if these things are related to chess improvement, or not: maybe, maybe not. Btw, each subsection can be read separately or skipped entirely. They are not in a particular order, and they are more or less independent of each other.

The final installment of the series next week, incidentally, may well include the most important single thing I did to improve my chess. But first, something else, or maybe nothing . . .


Winning Ugly
I've not played a game I've been really proud of for quite some time. Comfortably over a season, at least. Instead, most of my wins from the season just gone have to me seemed bitty, inconsistent, lop-sided, or boring. Yet in the years where I didn't improve, I played many games I was chuffed to pieces over.

Now, I've not read John Watson's famous books, but friends who have say one thing he emphasizes is that in modern chess winning is ugly. I think what he means is the grand plans of the past, the positionally perfect games, logical as clockwork - games won in such ways are gone, at least between players of equal strength. The reason? I'm not sure, maybe the way computers have shown how chess is far more tactically random than previously realised, maybe that Kasparov's reign demonstated how pieces were far more dynamic than previously understood; that pawns are less the souls of chess than ever before.

Whatever the case, I think being psychologically contented to win ugly might help improve your chess, because it brings your way of thinking closer to the reality of the game itself. Here is an example from a game I played in February. I am white and it's my move:
This position is the outcome of successful opening preparation. I'd realised who I'd likely face before the game, and noticed he always played the Open Ruy Lopez as black. So I'd prepared 5.d3 for this encounter, which rules that out. Visibly flustered, he'd gone into a version of the Closed Spanish where he managed to lose two (!) tempi and then misplay the resultant position anyway. Clearly, in the diagram, there is a lot of wind gusting around his king, and this spells trouble.

After I won the game, a spectator I knew was blinking at the final position, so I said hello. He couldn't believe it was the final position, because my knight was still on g3, black's pawn on h5. How had I not played Nxh5 at some point? He was incredulous - and indeed, Nxh5!? was a plausible move many times, not least in the diagram position. But, I said, it was never clear, and anyway, winning material was a cleaner solution. "Yes, but . . ." he mumbled, infatuated with the glamour of sacrifice. But in the diagram position there is no need. Exchanging material, releasing some of the tension and surrendering a part of the centre with the positionally-ugly 23.axb5 axb5 24.Rxa8 Bxa8 25.dxc5! just wins material, thanks to the threat of Bb3 combined with the pin on the d-pawn. I won eleven moves later.

Conclusion? Chess demands ugly play, so be ready to win ugly. Maybe.


The Sicilian is Different
Each of the last five undisputed World Champions have, at one stage of their career or another, played a substantial number of games on both sides of the Sicilian. I'm not sure, but I don't think the same has always been true of their challengers. I think that the Sicilian - I mean, the open Sicilians, the complex mainlines, where a simple pawn exchange in the opening unbalances the position fundamentally, where all other material is left on the board - is different to all other openings. Maybe it's the degree of difficulty, maybe the direct blending of tactical and positional phases, maybe that attack and defence are routinely combined, often on the same sector of the board - I'm not sure. But I am sure it's different.

The Sicilian is something else. And I think it helps improve our chess if, for a certain period of time at least, we commit to playing it with both colours in the mainlines. Why? I'm not really sure. The Sicilian forces us to think. The Sicilian forces us to be constantly alert to shifting strategical feature and an array of tactical opportunities. The Sicilian reminds us how difficult chess is. That kind of thing. Perhaps it's rather like, if you want to be good at pool - practice snooker.

The Sicilian puts us in our place: players struggling very hard with some very difficult things. Now, of course, the results won't necessarily be pretty, but maybe this teaches us a lesson too. For instance, here are the evaluations only of the last 8 moves of a recently friendly game I played as black against a strong opponent in an Open Sicilian. Exclamation marks correspond to moves which are Fritz's first choice, ?! to moves suboptimal by at least a pawn; other marks to the shifts in evaluation given with varying severity. We left theory on move 14 when the position was already =+:

14. ? ! ( -/+) 15. ?? (-+) ?! 16. ?! ?! 17. ?! ?? (=+) 18. ! ? (=) 19. ?? (-+) ?? (=) 20. ! ! 21. ?? (-/+) ! 22. ?! ! 23. Resigns?? (-/+ of about 1 pawn, says Fritz).

My conclusion? If you've not before, then commit to playing the mainline Sicilians with both colours for a significant period of time. The Sicilian is different, and forces us to be different players. This whole experience helps us improve. Maybe.


Your Own Chess Language
Chess has a language: "plus-equals", "passed pawn", "middlegame", "attack", and so on. However, chess itself is a wordless game, not an argument couched in certain key terms. Finding the right balance between thinking in words and analyzing positions and sequences is not an easy thing to do. Too much wordage and we risk confusing ourselves, talking ourselves around in circles; too little, and we don't grasp the fundamentals of the position, instead spend all our time looking for fleeting tactics that are never there.

Being aware of this is one thing. Possibly another, is to develop our own chess language, prioritizing certain terms to ourselves when they reflect problems we regularly face more often than others. For instance, a few years ago I had a spate of games where I got pieces trapped. I realized that there was no neat term for "piece-trapping tactic" like pin, fork, etc. So I made myself consciously check for "piece traps" in every game I played, and increasingly this kind of mistake has left my play.

Or more recently, reviewing some games with the computer, I realized that whilst I was playing many stages of the game reasonably, I was handling the part when the position explodes - when all plans come to fruition, where threats are made each move, when three different unclear endgames are available with every second exchange - particularly badly. In short, I was playing the complications badly. Having realised that, I now try to recognize complications when they occur, calm myself down, remind myself it's meant to be a struggle, and compose myself. My new awareness of the word complications also helps in not thinking for too long in positions that aren't, well, complications.

Now, complications isn't a word that one sees in the book titles of chess literature. There isn't an Informator symbol for it, either. Nonetheless, for me it's become at the centre of my chess vocabulary - the intersection of one of my main problems with the game and the reality of the game itself.

Does developing your own chess vocabulary help you improve? Maybe!


Player Types
"I don't really know this stuff," I said in our second post-mortem in a month, sat on the black side of the position after 1.e4 e5, "but I thought I'd vary. I figured you'd have come up with an improvement in that Sicilian line you lost in last time."
"No."
"No ? ? ? . . . ! ! !"
"No."

What was strange about this was that in our first game, I'd found a very simple improvement for him, but still hadn't fixed the line from my point of view. However, the improvement was an unthematic move (punting e4-e5 in a Closed Sicilian, rather than the usual f4-f5, as he had unsuccessfully tried.) And in our second game? It had been a Closed Spanish, and when I'd prevented him from making the usual kingside manouvers for white by breaking first on the queenside - he'd swapped off as many pieces as possible and offered a draw. I had no reason not to accept.

On the way home I was puzzled. The whole thing in some way reminded me of the second game here, against a different opponent, where white in a Closed Sicilian had been prevented from playing the thematic f4-f5, and so instead had exchanged material into a totally lost endgame. Compare white's pawn structure on move 20 to that on move 25 in that game, and you'll see what I mean.

From this, I speculated that there is a certain type of player who always wants to play the same game. Each game they want to execute the same thematic same plan (usually a kingside attack in a closed position - a King's Indian or Stonewall being typical; maybe it's the "safety" of the closed position mixed with the single-minded simplicity of purpose - mate - that attracts) and if they can't . . . they instead exchange pieces and hope the endgame is drawn.

Conclusion? Players who try to play the same game each time can't improve their chess, so stop doing so if you are one and wish to improve. Also, such players are relatively easy targets if you can recognize them as such, susceptible to severe misjudgements in the transition to the endgame as well as confusion in middlegames that do not follow the pattern they know. In general, recognizing and understanding such "player-types" and their limiations help us improve our chess by overcoming our own limitations, and exploiting the weaknesses of others more clearly. Maybe.


Reading with Empathy?
In my advice about simulating over-the-board chess in training, I briefly discuss trying to read chess books with the ethos of simulation in mind. This involves only reading chess books with a proper set, and being willing to put the book aside and study the positions and games in it without the actual book to hand. That is, on our own - like during an actual game. I admit there that I find this a difficult thing to do, especially with opening books.

When we read this way we are fundamentally trying to objectively understand what's going on on the board in a situation close to otb; typically this involves an expert usually of Grandmaster strength explaining the position and the game. Often the explanations of the game itself will include interesting asides about what the players were feeling, what the tournament context was (last-round must-win, etc) and so on. In the past I've tended to filter this stuff out as "entertaining but irrelevant" in an attempt to come closer to the "objective truth" and "Grandmaster understanding" I assume is on offer.

But maybe this is a mistake. Maybe it is better to "read with empathy" - to try to think about what it's like from an annotations for a top player to be at the board. A position I previously used before in the series can serve again as an example:
Here Nunn writes how he was "dumbfounded" by 16...Nxe4 and that "for several minutes I just couldn't see the point of it . . . Then I suddenly saw the idea." The game continued, 17.Qxe4 Bb7 18.Rd5 Rc8 19.c3! Qc4 20.Qxc4 Rxc4 21.Bg2 Bxd5! 22.Bxd5 and then black played 22...Rxh4! to which Nunn writes: "This move is the key point which it took me several minutes to see at move 16."

Reading the whole of his annotations with empathy (for the rest of which see Secrets of Practical Chess) we see his mood change from complete surprise, to sudden realisation of the unfortunate truth, to grim determination. We also see how quickly he manages to analyze a hidden tactic six moves and five captures from the diagram position: "several minutes".

So what? Well, my feeling is that reading such annotations with empathy, we develop a much more involved intuition for what it is really possible to do in chess. That is, for that we can expect human beings to do at a chess board - and what is hard to do. Not only that, we can relate it to how they are feeling during the game: whether dumbfounded, excited, caught-up, or grimly determined. And in doing so, we open ourselves up for thinking differently at the chess board. In particular if we read the annotations of stronger players this way, perhaps we come to understand how they are at the chess board better, which enables us to be more like that ourselves.

Now, I don't know if this is true or not. But I think we see something comparable in the history of our game and other games. Once Steinitz had demonstrated a defensive technique that made the romantic openings more or less obsolete at the highest level, other leading players followed. Once the hypermodernists had shown the centre needn't be occupied, players at all levels were able to follow their lead. Or in football, when total football changed the way teams approached the whole game. I believe something similar also happened in snooker, when Alex Higgins showed it possible to open the reds in more positions than previously thought possible.

Conclusion? Try reading annotations with emapthy, rather than just the search for objectivity and understanding. Maybe it will help you be more in tune with the experience of playing chess, which will have a useful practical effect.


Overall Conclusion?
Maybe, that because we can't know in advance what will help our chess, we should leave ourselves open to all sorts of changes, always ready to reject, rethink, revise, or alter what we are doing or think we know. Embracing such uncertainty is not easy, but there are a lot of different and confusing things involved in trying to improve your chess. Or, maybe not.

Some entertaining internet stuff recently has caught my eye, recommended for your perusal on a lazy and rain-laden and bank-holiday-weekend Friday.

• First up, you might not think that a blog called USCL news and gossip would promise much entertainment, but don't let the name fool you. Recent articles have featured: a T-shirt with the slogan Thou Shall Blunder on it - imagine facing that over the board; a report on how chess in the US is exploding with lawsuits - on which note, see also; entertaining and honest annotations to an interesting game; a humorous post comparing Susan Polgar's husband Paul Truong with Sam Sloan, now accompanied by a poll in the side bar; testosterone; and, well, much else besides. Definitely worth keeping an eye on the whole thing, and I've added it to our sidebar.
  
  
• Secondly, ever wondered what would happen if you crossed a chess board with a subway map? Tom Brown has, in multiple posts across his blog. In fact he's constructed such a map showing every move for every piece on every square of the board, in subway map style. To the right is d5. If you explore his blog you'll find the rest.
  
  
• Next stop is Grandpatzer who seems to have answered the question Was Alekhine Unaware of the Noah's Ark Trap? with the surprising: yes, he was.
  
  
• Finally, The World Team has been winning against high-class opposition again. This time they beat 15th World Correspondence Chess Champion Gert Jan Timmerman at the website Chess Games in a complex struggle. From the looks of the website's newsletter 31.b4!! was the key move, a move with thousands of hours of computer analysis behind it no doubt. The World's next game is against well-known correspondence Grandmaster Arno Nickel, who's out for revenge with the white pieces after a previous loss with black, and you can find out more as well as how to join in the fun here.

And that's it for today. Enjoy the extended weekend.

Zeitnot

Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, Friday 15 August



I like to tell myself that I am not a violent person. The feebleness
of my right hook is matched only by the lack of dignity I display upon
being assaulted myself. My knees go weak at the sight of blood. I
don't like war (controversial, I know) and when I recently stubbed my
toe on the District Line down to Kew I felt the tiniest tear begin to
form in the corner of my left eye. It is beyond me why I don't wear
glasses, just to officially consummate my weediness. And yet, I could
never honestly describe myself as a full-blown pacifist, and nor could anybody
reading this blog. Why? For the simple reason that we are chess
players.

Violence, in its crudest form, can be imagined as something requiring
body contact: fisticuffs, muggings, taekwondo. But when one brings an
adversary to the ground with a single punch it is not the crack of the
skull in itself that is thrilling but the knowing fact that you are,
for the time being at least, superior. Quite apart from its vulgar
military overtones ('how warmakers love to play games!' screams
Bronowski in The Ascent of Man) chess is a violent pursuit. In
competitive play we exert huge energies on a weekly basis in order to
destroy the morale of people who are more often than not complete
strangers. The very best of us, like Bobby Fischer, take great
pleasure in 'the moment when I break a man's ego.' Delivering checkmate is
just as satisfactory as battering an opponent senseless with the fist,
only far more damaging. At least a knockout punch gets things over
with quickly.

And so the relatively recent marriage of chess and boxing – as
mentioned previously on the blog here and here – only makes explicit
what anyone who has played the former long enough knows too well: that
it is a carnal, primitive 'hobby' that satisfies bloodlust in a
superficially unobvious way. It is as if some passer-by in The Sixth
Sense had shouted 'oi, Bruce! You've got a bloody great hole in yer
chest!' But this does not mean that chessboxing – which made its
debut on British soil five days ago at Bethnal Green Working Man's
Club – is pointless or doomed to failure.



There is one obvious appeal to chessboxing. If one were normally to
ask a decent, upstanding, non-chess playing member of society to come
with you to a chess event, they would rightly tell you to take a
running jump. If you mention, however, that the chess will be
interspersed with people punching each other, and that there will be
both a bar and an after party, then you may have more success. I
certainly found this to be the case on Friday, when I was joined by two
'decent', 'upstanding', non-chess playing chums. In fact the biggest
surprise was just how few chess players there were in attendance: not
once did I see the familiar bearded face of an habitual 170-er or an
unpleasant junior with an inversely proportionate knowledge of opening
theory and the real world. Instead, the Bethnal Green crowd was
comprised mostly of casual boxing fans attending for the sheer novelty
value. 'Take his bishop!' yelled one jack-the-lad before a single
move had been played in the evening's first bout between 'German chessboxing
sensation' Sascha Wandkowsky and Holland's Hubert Van Melick.

It is probably for the best that there were none too many ECF points
floating around in the audience. Play was not of a high standard
(1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.d3 e6 4.Be3 was Van Melick's botched attempt at a
Closed Sicilian, for example) and there were repeated technical
difficulties with the relay software that ensured we lost track of the
position every five moves or so. This might not have been so much an
issue if the 'commentator' had had the slightest clue as to what was
going on over the board, but his kibitzing was inane and free from
analysis (think David Pleat, but without the dark past). He also took
at least thirty seconds to realise that Wandkowsky had delivered mate
in round 7 of his contest. And this was all capped off by the
organisers inexplicably managing at first to have a light square in
the left hand corner of a computer generated display board. Truly,
this was not one for the purists.



I rather feel that these quibbles are beside the point, however. This
was not a quirky attempt to popularise chess (as Justin complained of
the Britain-Russia ice chess game two years ago) but an exhibition of
a fledgling hybrid sport, one that has every much to do with boxing as
it has with the Royal Game. I was informed by a charming lunatic in
the lav that the boxing was far from impressive too, and I have no
reason to doubt him. But from a position of ignorance I was able to
find it curious and exciting; with any luck, this is what Bethnal
Green's non-chess playing fraternity thought about the chess, too.
Chess and boxing are natural bedfellows, and certainly the evening's
main event between Stewart Telford and Tim Woolgar proved to be a much better
demonstration of both. Woolgar, London chessboxing's head honcho, at
least seemed vaguely au fait with the black side of a Philidor. For
the sport to succeed, however, stronger competitors from both chess
and boxing shall need to be found. As such it is the duty of Woolgar
et al to ensure that their next event shows both sports in their true
glory. In chess terms this means making sure the bloody display board
works and finding a commentator capable of providing simple yet
accurate analysis for the baying masses.




But it is a highly promising start: as we were dutifully reminded by
our compere on Friday night, the 100-strong crowd in Bethnal Green did
mark the largest paying audience for a chess match in Britain since
Kramnik beat Kasparov in Hammersmith back in 2000…

The Incident of the Lucky Pen
"Darling, just give me the damned pen."

"What pen?" she says, so innocent. "You don't have time to look for it now. Just take that one instead," she goes on, wafting me toward some grotty biro.

"What pen? The lucky pen. The black one. The one I told you about. The one I won with last Tuesday. I left it on the table this morning."

"The sleek-looking one? That writes so nicely? Not seen it. It's probably in your bag."

"It's not - I -" and then, I see it.

There on the bookshelf, tucked inside one of her folders.

She knows I know, she sees I see.

Across the table we eye each other.

Who's closest?

Who'll get their first?

A mad dash and . . . I grab it first. Lucky, I say to myself, scampering toward the door, feeling ready at last for the game tonight.

"You know it makes no difference," she says glumly. "It's just a pen. But good luck!"

. . . and, yes, of course I still know now what I also knew then. The pen was not a lucky pen, invested with magic properties. It was just a pen, black ink, available from a newsagent around the corner, along with dozens like it. So what that I had won with it the week before? I also won wearing a certain pair of socks, having washed my hair with a certain shampoo, having been a certain number of minutes early or late, having had a certain sandwich for lunch, and none of these things I thought of as lucky. And I know they make no difference. Not like my lucky pen.

What was I thinking? I had never been a superstitious person, after all. But as I strolled relaxed and confident to the club, I wasn't thinking about much at all apart from getting to the game along with my lucky pen.

Trying to understand superstition
But a few weeks before, I'd been thinking a lot about superstition, luck, the little acts of ritual top players acquire, their odd beliefs. Like seventh World Champion Vassily Smyslov's belief he was kept alive after his eyesight failed for some divine purpose, related in some unknown way to harmony and endgame studies. Like twelfth World Champion Anatoly Karpov only washing his hair after defeats. Like thirteenth World Champion Garry Kasparov's belief that his lucky number was, well, number thirteen. Like Grandmaster James Plaskett's beliefs that coincidences weren't just coincidences, something suggested too by Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson in the Acknowledgments to one of his books. Like . . . the list could go on and on.

I'd been thinking how these little beliefs must have some benefit to the players who employed them. Something along these lines: what's the point of worrying about the result of your next game, if you've managed to convince yourself it's particularly related to a certain pair of gloves? Then all your anxiety, all your nerves - all these little things that punch around before your games like little fists in your stomachs - could simply be smoothly tucked away by use of superstition - in a favourite pair of gloves.

Or, you're at the board itself, and you start to lose track of the position, miscalculate, and suddenly all your doubts balloon up - wouldn't it be nice to puncture them by tapping on a favourite tie-pin? That is, your lucky tie-pin, the one you always fiddle with when calculating clearly? I'd been thinking that if I could really get myself to believe something like that, then maybe I would be able to arrive at the board itself in a better state of mind. How about a lucky pen? Then I could look at my pen as though it determined all the luck in the world, and so concentrate fully only on the board itself.

Would I try it? Maybe. After all, one thing that improving at chess had taught me, was that I wouldn't know in advance what would work, what would not work. Maybe superstition would work, maybe it wouldn't. Who knew? But I wanted to work one thing out first. Why were more talented players frequently more superstitious than less talented players? My guess was as follows in the next three paragraphs.

Why are strong players superstitious? Why aren't weaker ones?
The way I guessed it was that for the most talented players, the world outside of chess is never demystified. No nihilist biology teacher ever convinces them that all their actions and feelings and thoughts are nothing but confused ciphers for the brutal and basic wishes of their genes - they are too busy playing around with the chess set in their desk draw, coming to terms with the passed pawn's lust to expand. They are never disappointed to find out there is no tooth fairy swapping their milk teeth for coins, or no Santa delivering gifts, or no real Lord of the Rings - because last weekend some company magicked them off to Moscow, where an ancient white-bearded creature - just like Gandalf in fact - clarified for them what black gets in return for the Sicilian ..Rxc3 exchange sacrifice. Meanwhile, because of their talent, the world on the chess board becomes increasingly demystified as they grow-up. Maybe there are dragons in the real world, maybe not - but certainly not in the Sicilian, because they have mastered the logic of this oddly-named variation by the age of ten, and all the intricacies follow by their late teens. For the talented chess player, the world is thoroughly mystical, enchanted with irrational forces, the whims of the goddess Caissa wafting around arbitrarily: but the chess board is the one objective plane of cause-and-effect. The phrase fire on the board is just an advertiser's mystical metaphor for dynamics.

For the less talented player, like myself, things are the other way around. The chess board remains a mystical place, full of impossible goings-on: Grandmasters perform incredible feats of calculation, make the International Master who creamed me look like an idiot - what . . . ! ! ! And positions we are sure are winning turn out dead-lost, and we practice against computer programmes three-pieces up and they magically turn it around, random combinations appearing out of nothing, like a sky of crows flung from a magician's hat, and all the remarkable improbabilities the world would never allow come alive. The great players of the past aren't just great players - they're titans, or magicians, or whirlwinds, or pythons. Elsewhere, we've already learnt otherwise, learnt the world's cruel lessons. That the world is not flat, as our childhood feelings tell us. That the horizon not infinite, that the stars are there all the time, that the sun does not rotate around us. And so, thanks to this disenchantment, this initiation into the dry factual state of being called adulthood, we've already learnt to dismiss our innermost feelings as fabrications, our fundamental intuitions as idiocies - already learnt that the miraculous is impossible amidst the deterministic routines of the real world. Impossible. Impossible anywhere, that is, but amidst the beautiful unpredictability of the chess board, where all laws come undone.

What does all this mean? The talented chess player benefits from living amidst a highly-subjective world, whilst the chess board for him remains solely the realm of objectivity. All the strange habits of talent acquired in the real world - all the superstitions, the lucky objects, the little rituals - make perfect sense to the talented chess player, who does not know he is constructing totem poles in his shirt pockets. The less talented player scoffs at these habits, because he has never had cause to create them for himself. But for the talented player, these little acts of madness, the momentary subjective nothings, function to keep the world as crazy it is, so they can come to the chess board and once again find it the zone of crystalline truth and artistic clarity, and meet the facts of the fight with as much objectivity humanly possible.

Or something like that. Out of all this thought, anyway, came the following basic reasoning: talented players acquire, by accident, strangely-subjective habits in the real world. These paradoxically function to keep their thoughts at the chess board itself as objective as possible. But whilst less talented players such as myself do not acquire such habits as a matter of course, there was no reason not to choose to develop them consciously and deliberately. That way we can make use of the various functions of superstition and ritual, such as concentration, calmness, focus, and so on.

And so, I bought myself a lucky pen.

Conclusion
No-one knows in advance what will help improve their chess, what not. However, there are reasons to believe that superstitions or similar based in the real world and off the chess board help talented players achieve their full potential at the chess board itself. Paradoxically, this is because they allow the talented player to be more objective at the chess board. Less-talented players do not acquire such superstitions normally, but can acquire them by choice. However, this should all be kept in perspective. Whilst I did acquire myself a lucky pen, and whilst my chess did improve, I think the majority of the improvement came from more direct methods such as those previously discussed.

Note
The final round of the Staunton Memorial starts today at 12noon at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, and will probably finish between 5 and 6pm. So several of us are going along after work at 5pm to see the games, and we plan to go out after, have a drink or two, and so on. All are invited to join us.

Black to play

Judging by the overflowing crowd at the venue last night, or by the Grandmasters merrily analyzing away in the bar after their games, or purely by the entertaining chess being played, one would think this year's Staunton Memorial Tournament another unqualified success.

Yet organizer and arbiter Eric Schiller's interesting Behind The Scenes article suggest a problem with certain metaphorical termites: a problem which threatens the very future of the event. These termites, says Schiller, are people who complain on the internet about certain aspects of the event - such as the inclusion of underdog Bob Wade - whilst attacking the organizers personally.

"The foundations of the event are ... being undermined by a tiny minority of “termites”," writes Schiller, going on:

The organizers are subjected to abuse for many decisions, often under circumstances beyond their control, as the termites would know if they had ever in their lives attempted to put on a Grandmaster chess event ...

Termites have an affect. They nibble away and cause the true chess workers endless grief, and organizers and staff grow tired of it and become less enthusiastic about repeating the experience. We have lost many good organizers and staff because of this. None of us are making any money on this ...

The termites threaten to destroy the Staunton, as they have destroyed many fine tournaments in the past. Keep in mind the hard work required to put on a major chess event and don’t become a termite! I hope we’ll have another fine event next year, but the insidious insects try to make this less likely.

Indeed, it would be a real shame for London to lose the Staunton Memorial, and I've often wondered why Dutch sponsor Jan Mol hasn't considered moving the event to Holland.

Still, the negative comments on the internet are clearly in the minority, and it's usually best not to engage in such squabbles anyway. On which note, the tournament website has today introduced a positive response, in the form of a new page called Quotes. In fact already there's two enthusiastic comments there to read - one from Shaun Taulbut and one from Andrew Martin - and there is also an email address provided for fans to send in comments. Will local chess-loving Londoners - who perhaps feel lucky to have this tournament held here each year - follow suit and email in their support to help bolster this event?

Or will this summer see the last Staunton Memorial - with all that remains a dust-pile at the centre of our city, the termites scuttling off in search of fresh wood for next summer?

Black to play
Adams-Short, Staunton Memorial (6) 2008

Black to play
Wade-Adams, Staunton Memorial (5) 2008

Thanks to Vad for these splendid pictures of yesterday's Staunton Memorial Tournament, which witnessed the first clash between the English greats Adams and Short this century, I believe!























Thanks again to Vad for these great photographs. The homepage for the tournament is here. Today is a rest day, but the tournament continues from Thursday until Monday from 2pm each day (except on the final day, when they start at noon.) Entry to the venue on the Strand is free and highly recommended.

There are lots of reasons to join a chess club, mostly not directly linked to chess improvement. Drinking buddies with a similar interest to you. Something different to do on a Tuesday night. A way to be more involved with the local community. Or less, if you choose one away from your local area. Pure love of the game. The extra competition. Pragmatics: you can easily pick up chess news, gossip, information about tournaments, and so on. Maybe even, via your club you get to indulge a pet-project, like a newsletter, or a website or . . . a blog! Lots of reasons.

However, being a part of a club offers unique opportunities for chess improvement unavailable elsewhere. Today's piece is about what these opportunities are, and the overarching advice is simple: join a club suited to your chess improvement. Or if you're already in a club, orientate your club-based activities toward chess improvement. And finally, if it's impossible for you to join a club because the nearest one is too far away, then why not start yourself up a chess club closer to home?

Practical opportunities to play more
There might be some players who play too much chess, but not many. Regularly playing over-the-board (otb) chess in serious competitive games - rated games under reasonable time-controls - is one key way to improve. It is the only way we really test ourselves, the only way we really come to feel how real our limitations are - and more importantly what they are, the only way we start to look the reality of chess in the face - the difficulty, the confusion, the practicality of the thing. Tal put it succinctly: “Minutes of play and years of analysis are not the same thing.”

And joining a club will always provide more opportunities to play than not. Many clubs have internal competitions (I played 12 rapid-play games in ours this year.) Many clubs are members of several leagues. For our part, for instance, we have a twelve-board team in the London League Division 1, a ten-board team in the London League Division 3, and an eight board team in the London League Division 3; four-board teams in each of the three Croydon Leagues; a four-board team in the Stoneleigh Trophy (although admittedly this is a rapid-play league); a team in the Lauder Trophy; and, an eight-board team in the Surrey League. We also frequently enter teams in Cup Competitions, that is, knock-outs - and we also have links to the Surrey County sides and the 4NCL team the Celtic Tigers. I myself played around 30 games this last season for my club. Not only that, via your club you might hear news of upcoming individual tournaments, get offers of lifts to venues, and so forth.

In short: joining a club should enable you to play more chess; playing chess regularly is important for improvement.

Chess events
Sometimes clubs will arrange events directed toward chess improvement. For instance, a few years ago we held a day of talks about openings. Several strong players each researched a different variation, and each gave talks on their findings. After each talk we played practice games in the variations given. I vividly recall being intrigued that day by the Hedgehog, whilst also being appalled at my lack of comprehension of the mainline of the Scotch. The contrast was confirmed by my results in the practice games and subsequently the former has joined my repertoire, the latter left it.

Of course one shouldn't be merely a passive recipient in these kinds of activities. This is just not for reasons of fairness, although I myself gave a talk about the games of Greco a while back. It's that in getting ready to talk about chess to others, we have to really be sure we know what we're talking about. Often our chess studies aren't like this: we think we've prepared some super-sharp line, we sit down at an actual game and half-way along our opponent varies, disorientated we blunder and bang we're mated five moves later. Back we go to our private preparation, telling ourselves we'll be really sure we've learnt it for next time . . . but not so when you're talking in front of people. You really have to know you know what you're talking about - else the humiliation isn't just a loss under twenty moves, but a flustered silence and red cheeks in front of twenty bemused friends from your club. This is different to putting a chess video on-line, when you can answer any critical questions via Fritz. (There is some overlap here with my advice to coach others.)

In conclusion, at chess clubs you can both organize chess events that force you to work on your chess, and learn from those that others put together.

Chess buddies
There are some people who learn best entirely on their own, but even amongst chess players not many. Most top Grandmasters have seconds, and during top one-on-one matches both competitors will often have teams of players assisting and advising them. And even in this computerized age, some top players even play training matches against human opposition. For instance, Grandmaster Morozevich recently played GM Navarra in an unrated match, the moves of which have been kept secret. (And not over the internet either, but face to face.)

It is unlikely that you and members of your chess club will be quite able to emulate all that. However, even tiny things can help - like extended postmortems with your club-mates after in the pub. However, there is more than that that club mates can do together. I regularly have lunch with team-mate and fellow-blogger Jonathan B, for instance, and we've recently decided to work through the exercises in Jacob Aagard's Excelling at Chess. We take it in turn to set out the pieces, and after some thought talk about how we think about the position. Then we come to a decision: a move and the idea behind it. Sometimes we're bang on, sometimes close but no cigar, sometimes only vaguely thinking about the positions in the right way. Having someone else there helps in several ways: the focus, the impossibility of cheating, and the sheer competitiveness! Although there is a loss in realism due to talking, there is a corresponding gain in tension which brings the experience closer to the ideal of simulating otb chess. (As an aside, I should add that I think the positions in Aagard's book are appropriate for the kind of simulation exercises I talked about previously.) I certainly feel a flutter of nerves much closer to otb chess as we reach for the solutions than I do when, say, playing a few games on www.chesscube.com at lunch.

Personal advice
Shared activity is one thing. However, for all-but-one member of every chess club, there will always be at least one stronger player, and usually stronger players prove good sources of advice. In fact I would say the ideal person to give a player chess advice is a person who (1) is a stronger player and (2) knows the player and their play personally. I don't think that (1) is a particularly controversial claim, but I think that (2) is. I am saying that it is better to follow chess advice from someone who knows you and your play personally than from any other expert - even Grandmasters who write books, even World Champions who produce DVDs, even from the works of undoubted world-class trainers. Indeed, I have benefited this way myself, following advice from club-mate and fellow-blogger ejh about my opening repertoire, that I detailed here. ejh knew me and my play, and knew my openings needed fixing, and went about it in a way that worked for me. No book has had anything like as powerful effect on my repertoire or indeed my overall attitude to the opening in chess.

Having said that, I do still stand my advice to read Rowson. There is not really a contradiction here. As I explained in my previous article, I find Jonathan Rowson's two books about chess improvement confusing and badly-written - but because of this, they are hugely provocative, shake up our assumptions, and are a stimulus to change. And they contain only one or two pieces of truly direct advice anyhow - practice concentration, simulate otb chess - so they hardly can be considered a surrogate for the personal touch.

On which note, in my article on Rowson I compared his work favourably with Nunn's Secrets of Practical Chess. Again Nunn's book provides a contrasting example to the kind of thing I'm talking about here. One piece of advice Nunn gives is "DAUT" which stands for "Don't Analyze Unnecessary Tactics". Undoubtedly true, good advice, and when we have a clear-cut positional option we should not plunge headlong into muddy tactical waters for the sake of it.

One question Nunn doesn't ask, though, is: what's a necessary tactic to analyze? Instead he assumes the reader errs on the side of tactical analysis. I think it's fair to say this preference for tactics is a part of Nunn-the-chess-player, but there is a tacit assumption it is part of his readership too. This makes him a bad source of advice for players not like him.

Let me make this concrete for anyone not convinced. Even if you've read the book, try this test. The test is: come to a conclusion about the tactics in the diagram position after 16...Nxe4, analyzing for several minutes at most. This is from page 91 of the book, the chapter on Middlegames. Nunn is discussing how to play bad positions - whether to try to hang-on with grim defence, or try to create confusion in complications. What are the necessary tactics you need to analyze here to make that decision? The answer is implied in Nunn's annotations. After 16...Nxe4 Nunn writes how he was "dumbfounded" and that "for several minutes I just couldn't see the point of it . . . Then I suddenly saw the idea." The game continued, 17.Qxe4 Bb7 18.Rd5 Rc8 19.c3! Qc4 20.Qxc4 Rxc4 21.Bg2 Bxd5! 22.Bxd5 and then black played 22...Rxh4! to which Nunn comments: "This moves is the key point which it took me several minutes to see at move 16."

Several minutes to see 22...Rxh4 at move 16?

Frankly, I can barely visualize the variation and resultant position now, despite having played over the line several times. DAUT is all very good advice - provided you're at the level where you can see sequences like the above after several minutes; that is, provided you're a Grandmaster with excellent tactical vision, or at least a player with a far superior command of tactics compared than your positional sense. Incidentally, I think it's rather a shame Secrets of Practical Chess wasn't written twice: once in its current form by Nunn - a Grandmaster with strong tactical leanings - and once with the same chapters but by a positionally-orientated GM with relatively weak tactical abilities. It would be interesting to see the overlaps, more interesting to see the potential inversions.

Anyway. My points is that Nunn's advice is going to be a poor-fit for some players, because he doesn't know them personally and so his advice is not tailored to them. A team-mate who knows you well will certainly not advice you to analyze less tactics if they watch you blundering into two-movers every other week!

Which club is right for you?
Obviously, you can't just roll up to a chess club and demand free lessons. That's not how the world works. My point is more than many chess clubs are conducive environments for learning, especially through the friendships you make there, which often prove mutually-beneficial from a chess point of view.

Sometimes whether a chess club is likely to be right for you is pretty obvious from just the name of the club. The membership of London Deaf is self-explanatory, whilst teetotalers might feel somewhat out of place at Drunken Knights. Other times it's not so obvious, so the best thing to do is find out. Nowadays, first contact is frequently through the web:


View Larger Map

For our part for instance, we're on google maps as you can see. However geography nowadays isn't as crucial as it might seem: our teams in the London League play in central, not south London; our team in the Surrey League plays as far away as Guildford. We also have a website with the essential facts about our club here. Forty members is a healthy number, and it should be clear from the ECF grades that we have players of widely varying strengths. After that, second contact might be in person on a club night, or phoning or emailing a club official. For instance, the contact details of our captains are available on our website who can be contacted as appropriate. Incidentally, if you're not improving, want to improve, and are a member of a club - I don't mean to imply this is the club's "fault"! More, that being in a club is an opportunity to set-up situations suitable for improving, even if this kind of thing is directly structured into the goings on of the club itself.

Conclusion
There are lots of reasons to join a chess club not related to chess improvement. However, there are several ways to improve your chess from within a chess club that are not readily available elsewhere. One is that they increase the opportunities for you to play competitive chess. Also, you can be involved in chess events orientated around improving. Less formally, you can make chess friends who can help you train and vice versa. A special example of that is the situation where stronger players give weaker players advice. I argue this advice is more likely to be apt than that found in books. Finally, it's not necessarily obvious what the right club will be for a player, so it's worth exploring the options. (And do drop us a note if you think Streatham & Brixton Chess Club might be the place for you!)

White to play and win the British Championship

The Chess Players

Cornelis de Man (1670)

[Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest]

This afternoon, give or take a possible play-off, sees the end of the British Championships. When I say "the end of the British Championships" I mean, of course, the last round, but the phrase does have a more baleful meaning and given the decline of the Championship, over the past twenty years or so, there is surely every reason to ask how long it can survive in its current form.

The British used to attract, as a matter of course, pretty much every top player eligible to enter: but now, by my count, we're down to two of the top ten - and maybe half of the top thirty. Given that the top echelon of British chess is not what it used to be either, we're talking about a smaller selection from a weaker pool.

The long-term reasons for this decline have been discussed elsewhere: they exist and they're not anybody's fault. Chess is short of cash in a world where money matters: chess is never going to pay, say, Luke McShane what Goldman Sachs are paying him. Besides, the world has changed from the days when every leading British player could be counted on to turn up at a seaside resort for two weeks to enjoy the company of the rest of the chess community (as they would not have called it then). Most of our leading players are professionals: people say, quite rightly, that Short and Adams would be expensive, but even below their level there are plenty of players who expect to receive "conditions" and can quite likely get better conditions elsewhere. London, for instance.

The world has changed in other ways. A number of our leading players live abroad, and can get to a international open with attractive prizes as easily as they can get to Liverpool: indeed, even for the rank-and-file it's no novelty any more to go abroad to play in a strong open tournament. Not so long ago the British used to be the strongest tournament most people were likely to see, let alone play in, all year: but now, it seems like just another open tournament, and not as strong, by a long chalk, as many. And this is the problem. The British is no longer special.

It needs to be special: it's our championship. It needs to be the best we can make it. Something is badly wrong when a player of my strength can find twenty players in the tournament lower-graded than myself. I'm a decent enough player sometimes, but I shouldn't be playing in a national championship. It's reaching the point of absurdity and I think there is a strong case for a drastic change.

I want to make a proposal here for how I think the British could be revamped. As with all proposals, it'll have strengths and weaknesses. As with all proposals, there will be much that I have overlooked. And as with all proposals, it is easier to make than to put into practice. Nevertheless, easy as it is to say it, I think that from 2010 onwards the open, Swiss format for the British Championships should be dropped.

I think instead that

• the tournament should be an elite one, a twelve player all-play-all.

• the top eligible players should be invited, in order of strength, and places filled on that basis until all were filled.

• it should continue to be a part of a wider festival of British chess, with other tournaments running alongside, most significantly what would, hopefully, be a strong Major Open.

I don't want this piece to run for thousands of words, so I won't deal with all the details, all the justifications, the arguments for and against, all the possible variations on the theme. Hopefully these will be discussed in the comments box*. I have, hopefully, set out above why I think the present arrangement is no longer satisfactory. I'll briefly, here, add some detail and discuss some of my reasoning.

(a) I think the national championship needs to be an elite event. When all the top players played, it didn't matter if a few weaker players took part and scored 2.5/11: no problem, the best players were all there fighting for the title. This no longer applies. So if we're going to pretend that it's anything more than just another open, much more than a weekend tournament, we have to select the best of those who enter and show that to the world.

If we can't get Short and Adams, well, that's something we can live with. The top ten (I'll explain later why I say ten rather than twelve) at Liverpool are Jones, Nick Pert, Conquest, Bogdan Lalic, Hebden, Haslinger, Gordon, Arkell, Gormally and Williams: that's a good tournament. But it's a far better tournament if there's only two players weaker than Williams than if there's sixty. And I think that an elite tournament might well, even if gradually, attract the stronger players.

(b) The top ten would be picked in grading order: from which particular list, I care not, whether it be ECF or FIDE, so long as the rules are set out clearly and stuck to. Players 1-10 invited, made an offer. Then number 11, and so on until ten places were filled.

I am aware that this is a complex and difficult process. Inevitably some players will ask for more than can be offered: inevitably some players will be offered more than others. Inevitably there will be accusations of favouritism.

Moreover I have said nothing about where the money is to come from: and this is plainly a difficult problem, since if you do not know what your budget is, you cannot make a firm offer, while sponsors are unwilling to commit sizeable sums until they know who is likely to be playing.

People who know far more than I about these things, and who have experience in the field, would have to manage the process. But I hope it could be done.

(c) My proposal would be to allow two other places: one for the winner of the Major Open and one wild card, to be used as the ECF saw fit: perhaps a promising junior, perhaps a popular veteran, perhaps a player who's no longer active enough to have a rating, perhaps a player of notably interesting or aggressive style, perhaps a strong local player. I know that this, too, is fraught with difficulty (as anybody who follows golf will know) but it does provide the organisers with some genuine discretion to make the tournament even more attractive.

The qualifying place from the Major Open is an old tradition and a good one: it should be maintained. Other than that, I've made no provision whatsoever for qualifying. I know this goes against what many people want. I'm sorry about that. I like the idea in principle. But I also like the idea of an elite tournament and the two conceptions are simply not compatible. Qualifying belongs to the era of a strong open British, when it was hard to get into and you were playing for a once-in-a-lifetime chance. If the open goes, I believe qualifying, the single Major Open place apart, has to go too. (I hope, in fact, that qualifying through the Major Open would be much more difficult than it is now: because it would be a much stronger tournament.)

(d) If elitism is in some ways important, so is inclusivity. It's crucial that it should be part of a chess festival and not a single tournament, held on its own with the rest of us only attending as spectators. All that would achieve would be to replace "just another open tournament" with "just another all-play-all".

I believe this proposal is worth thinking about: thinking about hard. I love watching the British Championships. But they're not, really, the British Championships. I don't believe, in the current format, they can ever properly claim that title again. The world has changed, the world of chess has changed, and I think the British needs to change with it. Is it not, manifestly, time for a rethink?

Funny what slips your memory.

A few weeks ago I wrote this posting concerning a blunder - or a pair of them - made during the last round of the 4NCL in my game against Philip Bonafont. In a completely won position, I missed a simple reply - also unseen by my opponent - which would have forced a draw.

I say completely won - perhaps that underestimates just how "won" it was. At the time, I wrote:

Had my opponent seen it, it might have beaten all previous contenders for the most completely won position I had ever failed to win.

The previous contenders are pretty strong, good competitors in almost any field for won games that were not won: and yet they may not be the best, or worst, in my chess career.

A couple of days ago I was looking through some old scorebooks and noticed a game from Ilford in 2002, the score of which I'd failed to copy up correctly, there being a move missing in the early middlegame. So I played through the game to find out what the move played must have been, in order to enter it. And I was horrified to find, when I reached the end, that I had agreed a draw, inexplicably, in a position where I was overwhelmingly winning. The draw was agreed in the position given below, which shows the state of play after Black's 37...Kg7-g8 (which position had already been reached once before, on move 35).


It's a real shocker. Astonishingly (or not) we were past the time control, which came on move 36: missing the win on move 35 or 36 with seconds to go is one thing, missing it again on move 37 absolutely unforgiveable. Black is winning, easily, with 37...Kh8 (or 35...Kh8) and would also be winning if the game continued from the diagram position, since 38.Qd7+ is met by 38...Kh7 and if 39.dxe6, Black mates in two. (36...Kh7 would of course have been the same position and the same win.)

Other than that, the two lines come to the same thing, since if, after 37...Kh8, White continues 38.Qe8+ then Black plays 38...Kh7: whereas if 37...Kg8 (as in the game) then 38.Qe8+ Kh7 and we are in the same position, shown below.


So what on Earth happened there? I can only speculate that I thought it was a forced perpetual, since if 39.Qd7+ Qg7 White has 40.dxe6 with a frightening passed pawn. It is, however, nothing: Black could easily win with 40...Ra8 (41.Bb6 is no threat) but in fact has a much faster win - and not one hard to find - with 40...Rd3!


since now if 41.e7 (or indeed nearly anything else) Black wins very easily with 41...d5!

Of course if I really started looking there might be worse still (this, for instance, comes to mind). Odd, though, that I should have failed to remember this game when writing about a blunder against Philip Bonafont. Because - as you will already know if you've scrolled to the bottom to play through the game - my opponent, at Ilford in 2002, was also Philip Bonafont.

The advice to study one's own games, defeats especially, is common - and the usual medium through which to do so is that of annotations. Kotov:

A considerable part in chess coaching in the USSR is played by writing notes to games. The best notes are published in magazines and newspapers, but this is not the main aim. A developing player has to write notes to his games in order to develop the habit of having a self-critical approach to his play. By spotting the flaws in his play, he will more easily eradicate them.

Similarly Kasparov in his Preface to his first book The Test of Time:

My chess philosophy has largely developed under the influence of Ex-World Champion Mikhail Moiseevich Botvinnik . . . Especially important, in my opinion, was the assimilation of Mikahil Moiseevich's main "axiom" regarding the necessity for constant analytical work, in particular the thorough analysis of one's own games. By strictly observing this rule, with the years I have come to realize distinctly that this provides the foundation for the continuous development of chess mastery.

The point is that annotating your games isn't meant to be an end in itself, but that it should function as a means for improvement. Annotating your games should mean that a "self-critical approach" becomes a "habit" whereby "flaws" are identified in order to "eradicate" them; thus there can be "continuous development".

Unfortunately, I myself have never been able to satisfactorily annotate my own games, something I will discuss further later on. But I have found that studying them using basic statistics via a spreadsheet extremely useful. Today's article, then, is about two things. Firstly, I describe my use of a results spreadsheet integrated with advice to those wishing to employ similar. Secondly, I discuss my problems with annotations with the hope of opening the subject up for debate in the comments. For clarity's sake there are two large-font subheadings to separate these two things out, and a number of other subheadings in the first section. Those not interested in reading about how to use a spreadsheet to study their own chess results might skip to the section on Annotations, which can be read independently.

Statistics

I first discussed my use of statistics here and today I want to expand on that and say how my use of statistics has changed. However the basic set up is essentially till the same today. I have a spreadsheet,
and after each game I add the information required for each column. I then analyse these results for information that may or may not be hidden there. Before that though there are some basics to establish.

The Essential Columns
The following columns are essential: opponent's name and grade; the date (including round if appropriate), venue, opening and result of the game; your colour. Why? Your opponent's name is important because you may have cause to recall them and the game for future use. For instance, early this season I lost a game to a William Linton. Then looking at a match fixture ahead toward the end of the season I realised from previous team-sheets that I was likely to face on board 1 a certain Mr. Linton again. Thanks to the spreadsheet I was able to recall who he was and how the game went. I drew the second game but had chances to win it; an improvement. It's also useful to place your results in a fuller context later. How you feel about surprise wins against higher-graded players or bad results against lower-rated players might be modified a year later if you choose to look up their new grade the next season and find it's radically different.

Date and venue are both important because there may be patterns in your results linked to them. For instance if you lost all your games in January, it's a good bet you were suffering from post-Christmas rustiness. The season after you might then choose to play some practice games in the New Year, for instance, to try to resharpen. Or if your grade turns out much higher at home venues than away, you might try arriving at away venues earlier in future so you can get used to them and "settle in" before the game starts.

Result, colour and opening are all important for far more obvious reasons. You need to study how you do as black, as white, and in different openings, and if there are radical differences this will give a good indication of where your strengths and weaknesses are. For instance, if you do very well in the Sicilian with both colours, but poorly as black when you defend the Stonewall, it's a good bet you need to either focus on your understanding of closed positions, or change your repertoire against 1.d4 to something more dynamic.

The Openings Column
How you fill in the Openings column needs some thought, however. For instance, if you always reply to 1.e4 with the Sicilian and play it yourself as black, there is not much point merely recording those openings as just "The Sicilian", because this will cover 75% of the games you play in a season and so you won't be able to slice the data in a very meaningful way. You would be better off writing the variation, or ECO code, or even sub-variation. However, if you never open 1.e4 and only play 1...c5 against much weaker players, who you rarely get to face anyway, you might as well record each game of yours that you start with 1.e4 c5 as "The Sicilian" and nothing else, since it will only account for a handful of games so any further subdivision would be meaningless.

Which Games?
You should only in your spreadsheet record rated games played at a slow-play time-limit over-the-board (otb). This is partly because of the ethos of centring your training around otb-simulation, but there are other reasons, specific to the alternative forms of the game.

For instance, my last tournament was in the Surrey 125th Birthday Celebrations, a rapid-play event, and I have not recorded the results of this tournament in my spreadsheet. A description of each game should make it clear why. In the first game my opponent was sixty or so points rated lower than me and playing black, but he held his own in a slightly-off-beat Sveshnikov Sicilian amidst enormous complications to reach a position where I had a passed pawn that he was firmly blockading. By rights it was either a difficult win for me or a difficult draw for him; despite matching me blow-for-blow in the most complex parts of the game, he then blundered into a basic back-rank tactic. My second game against FM Steve Berry graded 16 points higher than me you can play through here and so judge for yourself whether or not I deserved the full-point. My third round victory versus a 182 was certainly not deserved, however, because I blundered a piece for a pawn with no real compensation and had it not been a rapid game I should have resigned - yet I kept it tense, he defended poorly, and eventually he fell apart in chronic time-trouble. My fourth round game, by contrast, was against an IM rated much higher than myself, and shortly out the opening we reached the position to the left. I have the white pieces, and it's my move, and your computer can tell you just how winning this should be - but if you've seen 17.fxe5 dxe5 18.Be3! then you probably don't need it to. I hadn't and despite winning a mere pawn with 18.Bxe5 and maintaining various advantages, I was still completely outplayed in the subsequent position and I think lost around move 30. My final round game was against someone rated forty-four points lower than me, and somewhat dejected and distracted we reached an approximately even middle-game. I then launched an unsound attack which he promptly refuted outright to reach a won endgame, where he immediately offered me a draw. I accepted, of course.

In short, the games were all odd, higgledy piggledy affairs, frequently with quite random results unrelated to large stretches of the game itself. Such is the nature of rapid-play chess, and there's not much point subjecting these games to statistical scrutiny, or polluting the pool of games played at slow-time limits, where there's a lot less randomness involved.

When to analyze?
You should analyze your results when you have enough of them to do so, is the simple message. There is no point doing so after just, say, two games. I have tended to analyze mine after around thirty games, a little less than I play in one season (a season being approximately nine months followed by a summer break.) Another factor to remember is time-span. It might be more meaningful to analyze your performance over six months than six years, or, indeed, six days.

What to analyze?
This is the crunch question. In my spreadsheet, I have a column called "gpg" which stands for "grade per game". So, for victories I have my opponent's grade plus fifty, draws their grade, losses their grade minus fifty (with appropriate adjustments made for the forty-point rule.) I then sort the spreadsheet according to different criteria to see how my average grade varies according to each subset of the data. For instance, I compare things like black with white, Sicilian versus non-Sicilian (irrespective of colour), results against stronger opponents versus results against weaker opponents, and so forth.

Generally it turns out my intuition about my results is not wholly accurate. For instance, I always enjoy playing either side of the Sicilian, but statistically it is my weakest opening with either colour (albeit not by much.) This surprising finding indicates which opening I should seek to improve most urgently, contrary to my belief that it's in fact my defences to 1.d4, which statistically have been holding up really rather well, it turns out. Who knows what similar secrets lurk in your results?

One final thing to remember is that when understanding your results, grade is not everything. There is also your win:draw:loss ratio. It is worth calculating your average score between 0 and 1, because sometimes this sheds a different light on your results. For instance, last season my average grade with white was 190, and with black 181. This seems reasonable given that black begins the game with a slight disadvantage, but my average score with black was 0.75 (13W, 3D, 3L) compared with 0.68 (9W, 8D, 2L) with white! In other words, I actually scored better with black, but I faced significantly stronger opposition when I had the white pieces.

So, the main technique is to "slice" your gpgs in various ways, to look for surprises in the averages that result. With enough games you should be able to find out basic things like which openings are your weakest, to things like whether you prefer evening league matches to weekend tournaments. You can then factor these findings back into your training and approach to individual games.

The Meaningful Column
My spreadsheet has gone through several generations of columns, and one column in particular has proved particularly difficult to get right. This is the "meaningful" column where I type in some kind of summary or statement about the game, and I really don't know what to advise about it. The first such column I had was called "At what stage was the game decided?" and I thought that if I had a preponderance of things like "Endgame" crop up against my losses or "Time scramble" against my victories then I would be able to work out my strengths and weaknesses accordingly. I did learn from this that most of my games weren't decided in the opening, but little else. Chess games aren't similar enough for them all to be decided in simple and linked ways.

The second iteration of the meaningful column saw it renamed as "Summary". I've had many problems keeping this convincing, because I state details I can't remember, use it to attribute blame, boast, and generally just blurt stuff. Here is a concise example: "I positionally outplayed him I thought (Crafty is less convinced but I think I am right) only to blunder a pawn into a lost position." Pretty useless. Compare it to this, a summary of a victory: "Move order nuance and transposition confusion, messy middlegame, he blunders/sacrifices a pawn to try escape the pressure, gets a lot of compensation (at least cheapos) but eventually I am two pawns up in a BOC endgame I contrive to almost lose in a mad time scramble." Also pretty useless, but in fact the two games were thematically similar - Kings Indian type games, where I set about undermining the queenside pawn structure in the usual fashion. This isn't something my spreadsheet tells me.

This season I've divided the meaningful column into two: "Strengths" and "Weaknesses". My hope is that if I frequently see things like "calculation" or "composure" cropping up in one column and not the other, I'll get a clearer sense of what I should work on, what not. I'm not crossing my fingers, probably because the "The Meaningful Column" is really just a poor man's version of . . .

Annotations

I started this long article with advice from Kotov, Kasparov and via him Botvinnik about annotating your own games. Once I'd gotten over my own resistance to advice, I then decided annotating my own games was a good idea. I did this via a diary initially, but when that became little more than an exercise in gloating or self-laceration, as per the result of the game, I gave it up. Next I tried maintaining a file called My Chess Games, and got as far as game 1. And looking over the annotations again, I can openly admit now what I secretly felt then: I didn't do a good job, and was in some way deceiving myself.

For instance, here is the position after 11... Nc6 12. Nb3:

I annotated it as follows:

The point of 11...Nc6 is that 12.g5 can be met with 12...Nxd4 13.Qxd4 hxg5 (the order of these captures is important, it took me an age to realise, because if they are inverted with 12...hxg5 13.fxg5 Nxd4, 14.gxf6 Bxf6 15.Rxf6! wins for white) 14.fxg5 d5 and the threats of ..Qxh2+ and ..Bc5 oblige white to search for ways to bail out.

I had not realised, however, that my opponent would play the retreat 12.Nb3 automatically. Indeed it is consistent to avoid the knight exchange, thus leavning the bishop rather roleless on d7, and making sense of a4 by supporting a5. However, such subtle queenside concerns are not consistent with the shape of white's kingside pawns, as 12.Nb3 is hardly an all-out attacking move. White's inconsistency soon starts to tell, especially as he eschews g5 now entirely on move 13 and 14, allowing me time to organise my own break.

Here, I fall into two psychological traps. Firstly, there's implicit boasting about calculating a somewhat-complex sequence, and the implication I should have done it quicker ("it took me an age..."). But in fact this sort of complexity does take me time, and is probably close to the threshold of complexity that I can be confident dealing with. Secondly, the second paragraph is long-winded and over-elaborated. All that happened in this game is that white punted g3-g4 in the opening without having waited for me to castle kingside. As a result, I got to castle queenside and prize his own king open with a well-time ..g7-g5 break. However, I annotated g3-g4 earlier with a !? rather than the ? it deserved, and what I'm trying to do in the second paragraph is imply I out-thought my opponent over a number of moves based on a deeper understanding of the opening, rather than just admit the fact he muddled his move-order and I exploited it.

One final problem I have with annotations is using the computer effectively. I don't always feel confident enough to argue with it, and don't always understand what it's telling me, especially when its evaluations don't tend to settle but bob around uncertainly. Also, when staring into a position with a computer one is usually reminded of how vast and unknowable chess really is, how little we grasp of it. That the computer suffers similar problems unaware, especially to do with positional understanding, is scant consolation when you're trying to improve your chess. Nowadays, I just shrug my shoulders, make light notes in a Chessbase file, and put it on blunder-check in Fritz.

So, I know what Kotov, Kasparov and Botvinnik think about annotations. I just don't know how to do it. Any advice?

It's no secret that chess players are, by their nature, highly competitive people. So why shouldn't chess writers be the same?

And now, here in the quiet holiday month of August, courtesy of Chessvine - along comes just such a competition, uniquely for chess writers on the internet. And of course, almost anyone can write about chess on the internet, so almost anyone can enter!

The details? September the first is the deadline, you must submit your entry via a blog, and the prizes are three accounts on the website organizing the competition. And it doesn't matter if you don't have a blog already, because setting one up is almost as easy as clicking here.

Good luck and get scribbling! I mean, typing . . .