Improve Your Chess VIII: Improve Your Chess!?

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.

[Index]

Improve Your Chess VI: Join a Club!

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!)

[Index]

Improve Your Chess VII: The Habits of Talent

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.

[Index]

Improve Your Chess IV: Read Rowson

In May last year, I wrote here:

I don't know anyone who can say: "I followed Rowson's advice, and gained this many grading points."

Well, I do now. It's me, because in the season just gone I gained 23 ECF points - approximately 115 FIDE Elo points according to the usual conversion, although Richard commented previously that 180 Elo points is the traditional figure! Anyway, although there were several things I tried to improve my chess, the simple advice of Rowson's I followed was to simulate over-the-board (otb) chess at home. Indeed, aside from "practice concentration" that's more or less the only piece of direct advice Rowson offers in his two books about psychology and chess improvement. And despite that, and despite all my misgivings about advice (here) - today, I'm advising you not just to base your attempts at chess improvement around otb simulation - but also to read Jonathan Rowson's two books about chess improvement. That is, my advice today if you are an adult player wishing to improve who has hit an impasse is just to read The Seven Deadly Chess Sins and Chess for Zebras and in that order.

And, that's it for today, that's all. The next in this series is on Monday next week. For now, all that's left to say is:

What?

Still here?

Not entering your credit card details at Amazon, and simulating otb chess while you wait for the postman? You mean you've dared not to follow my advice? I knew it. I suppose I had better justify my opinion instead then. I'll focus on The Seven Deadly Chess Sins, henceforth Sins, adding a brief word about Chess for Zebras, henceforth Zebras, toward the end.

There are two reasons why you should read Sins, and the second is somewhat paradoxical and requires substantial justification. The first reason is simple, and it is that some of the content of the book - about psychological causes of error in chess with a number of well-annotated examples - will almost certainly be pertinent to your play, training, and thinking. However, there are lots of books that are pertinent to every chess player's play, in this kind of way or in other ways. Why I am recommending this one in particular? Indeed, over and above its practically-orientated competitors? Now I come to the second, paradoxical reason: the second reason you should read this book is for the style in which Sins is written, which is as follows. Sins is very badly written but in very useful ways which oblige you to really think differently about chess and yourself. The rest of this article are a justification of that statement, whereby I describe the main ways Sins is badly written and how this links to reader's learning. I am using here a slightly stretched meaning of "style" which includes Rowson's use of not-chess to write about chess. Anyway I've given each way a subheading.


Humpty Dumpty
Firstly, although there is an overarching structure at work in Sins - the book is organized by the seven different sins - for the most part the writing is disorganized, rambling, and stuffed full of digressions. This manifests itself less in the annotations than in the long stretches of unbroken prose, but even here there are plenty examples. Take the position to the right, for example, from Tal-Botvinnik, World Championship 1960 game 17 - on page 151 in the book in Chapter 5. Tal has just played 24.Qe3, and Rowson has just quoted Tal's explanation of why white is objectively worse, but why this isn't the end of the story: there are subjective factors at work here, because the position is complicated and the decisive complications look likely to crop up during time-trouble. Indeed this is what happened, and Botvinnik eventually blundered the whole game away on move 39.

Now, to Tal's description of the position and events, Rowson adds this digression:

This reminds me of something GM Peter Wells told me of a post-mortem with GM Stuart Conquest in which Peter asked 'Did you think you were better here?', to which Stuart replied: 'I don't have such thoughts during the game. I just look for ideas.' This is a little at odds with my suggestion in Chapter 2 about having some feel for whether your position is getting better or worse, but it is a valuable insight all the same. Certainly in games which are exceptionally tense, like last-round games for example, you might do more harm than good by trying to keep track of the 'objective' assessment because the errors which decide the outcome will be more closely related to the tension than to the assessment.

This anecdote demonstrates the disorganization in the book because it is more pertinent to the content of chapter two than the diagram position, and it is a digression because the diagram position and game itself have already been more than adequately explained up to this point. So all this is a distraction from Tal's explanations and Rowson's additional analysis. And this is one reason why the book is so useful. At this point, the reader who is willing to be fully engaged with the book is thrown back to thoughts of a previous chapter and further distracted from what's going on in the game for himself. In other words, s/he is forced to mentally arrange the book, the chess content and the psychologizing for him/herself, if s/he is going to keep up; in fact I might go so far as to say s/he has to deal with something of the messiness of thinking that occurs in our actual games. To stretch this even further, I might say that we are forced to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again: But that because this impossible, the working trying to do so means that the book fully commands our mentally faculties, and in doing so even reminds of us of the infinite difficulty of chess.

In other words, all this enables us to learn by making us think for ourselves, and helps teach us some broad lessons about our thinking and chess in general.


Memories are made of this
Rowson's book is stuffed full of phrases, aphorisms and quotes, and I mean both stuffed and full. For instance, by page 25 we have had quotes from St Teresa of Avila, Gerald Abrahams, Tarrasch, Samuel Beckett, J. Krishnamurti, Sartre, Rumi, Octavio Paz, Kierkegaard, The Lutterworth Dictionary of the Bible, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bruce Lee. Then on page 25, we get one of the first direct pieces of chess advice Rowson offers: to talk with your pieces. Later on, amidst the analogies with quantum physics, relativity, philosophy, pop songs, Picasso and Churchill quotes, and a whole smörgåsbord more, we find other little snippets of chess advice too, such as remembering to ask yourself if you really believe something (for instance a speculative sacrifice.) If chess imitates life, then Rowson is clearly imitating DJs like DJ Yoda who have a real "mash up" style.

So what? Well, compare this to John Nunn's Secrets of Practical Chess, which contains nothing comparable of the sort. There are a few snippets of aphoristic advice in Nunn's book regarding things one should remember to remind oneself at the board such as "LPDO" ("Loose Pieces Drop Off") and DAUT ("Don't Analyze Unnecessary Tactics") amongst several worthy examples and mini-essays about other practical matters. The struggle with Nunn is making his acronyms memorable at the board, and the lack of alternative phrases if these don't really stick or make much sense to you. Indeed, if you are a strategical player with a taste for closed positions, remembering Nunn's LPDO and DAUT advice is more likely to do more harm than good, since you are probably not analyzing enough tactics and not allowing your pieces to venture out from behind your pawns enough.

With Rowson, there is no such problem. Something is bound to stick, because there is so much random stuff- and for the same reason, something is bound to be relevant. In my case for instance, I find, talking to my pieces ludicrous and a somewhat demeaning experience at the board. However, asking myself if I really believe something has really influenced my play in the season just gone, by cutting out unnecessary worrying. Who knows what will stick for you? Maybe, "jam lust", maybe "moment sensitivity", maybe "talking to your pieces", maybe one of the many others. Who knows? There is only one way to find out.


From The High Street to the Garden
The above section is about how Rowson's writing is great for allowing us via memorable phrases to package broad advice into a small mnemonic. However, the opposite is true too: Rowson's style of writing is great at "opening up" our thinking as well. This is partly because Rowson makes reference to a great many things, but also because he allows himself to "think out loud", unashamedly mentioning passing thoughts in, well, passing. For instance, for no real reason on page 35 Rowson talks about how the stronger the player, the more abstract their visual image is of the chess board. This had an interesting point of contact for me personally, because I have studied the psychology behind mathematical learning (I am a Mathematics graduate) where there is an interesting division between visual learners of mathematics and those who learn in other ways. For now I won't go any further, although sharp readers may wonder what the connection is to my advice here. Instead my point is there are many improbable points of contact that reading Sins allows different readers to make. Perhaps for instance you understand yourself via Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Well, that's here. So too Taoism. So too existentialism. And there's a mention of Star Trek. Or maybe you have a lot of knowledge about quantum mechanics? That's there too, and perhaps reading Rowson's thoughts about it will help you open up and change your own thinking about chess. After all, if you're an adult player who has hit an impasse, that is probably one thing you need to do.

If you're still unconvinced, let me suggest two analogies. One, imagine someone who lives a life of routine based around an average UK high-street, with its supermarkets of microwave meals, its clothing shops of slave-labour jeans - then imagine them visiting Camden Market, at least for an afternoon. They may not buy very much there or even like it, but the effect on their concept of food and clothing will be enormous, opening up new possibilities, although they may only find useful one or two for themselves. I said above that Rowson is a bit like a DJ with a "cut up" style; he's a bit like Camden Market, too.

Or, secondly, think about it this way. Each human mind is like a garden with unknown soil: we know things can grow there, but we don't know what will take root, what will perish. Rowson's writing style corresponds to the scattering of many seeds, whilst the chess content of Sins is about psychological causes of error in chess - so in this paragraph's analogy, it's a weed-killer. In my opinion it's important to remember that, however uncomfortable it may sound, learning is like this: we don't know what will work in advance, as my experience of chess coaching also taught me. Although Rowson's content could be interpreted at a stretch as somewhat prescriptive, his writing style works counter to this, and all the more usefully as a result.


Remember to Forget
I mentioned above that Sins includes enough phrases, quotes and aphorisms that something is bound to be memorable. However, the book's style means that it is so chockablock with bric-a-brac, that reading it inevitably means a great deal of if will be forgotten too. This then helps us discover anew at least some of its lessons, because as I argue above reading Sins involves the planting of many seeds.

In my own case, I actually managed to forget the book's main message entirely. A little while back I was thinking over chess, and the difficulty of trying to align our thought processes to the enormous actual difficulty of the game itself. Of course we can't do this perfectly, as computers show, but in understanding our limitations we can do our best to work both with and around the ultimately-unknowable reality of the game. Failure to do so often involves some misapprehension of the game itself - supposing it is more positional than it really is, for instance. I was thinking of writing a blog post about all this, when I suddenly thought it sounded like something Rowson might have said something about. In fact, it's very close to the overall main message of Sins, which I had more or less managed to entirely forget. There is, though, no way I would have thought anything along these lines had I not read Sins, both for the stimulation of its content and the high level of forgetability that comes from the (apparent) flaws of Rowson's writing style.


Conclusion
So, in conclusion, the content of Sins is likely to be pertinent to your play, if you are an adult player who has hit an impasse. However, it is the literary weaknesses of the style in which the book is written that provides unique opportunities to learn, because in various ways these oblige the committed reader to come to chess anew.

The same, in my opinion, holds for Zebras, although there are some differences. Zebras has a less clear overall structure than Sins, although internal chapters and passages themselves tend to command more clarity. The reason for this moderate tidying in writing style is probably that Rowson was slightly "dumbing down" in response to certain negative reviews, although this is a shame in my opinion. Btw, I should mention in passing two negative reviews that were useful in the writing of this piece: Taylor Kingston's at ChessCafe, and JimmyBob's at amazon.com. I agree with some of what they say, but my overall conclusion is entirely different.

Anyway, I believe Sins is a better book than Zebras but that you should read both, with Sins first. Of course, by read I mean not just the words - but that you also get out an actual chess set and actual pieces, play through all the examples and games as they come along, and whenever you can put the books to the side to analyze or play back through the particularly memorable sequences. And if you don't believe that, all I can do is recommend you read Rowson's writing in order to convince yourself. And who knows what else might happen if you do?

[Index]

Andy Thake

Newer members of the club won't recognise the name but old timers will recall Andy as a longstanding club regular who moved out to Singapore a few years back.

With no immediate plans to return to Blighty, Andy has generously agreed to donate his chess equipment to the club.

BOOKS
We've decided to auction off Andy's books at a bargain price of £1 each with the money to go to club funds. The books will be available at the club over the next couple of Tuesday's. There are some real gems here - and several I'd buy myself if I didn't already have a copy.

In addition to the sale, top 5 places at this year's club championship will win a book of their choice from the collection.

Here's the list (and it's not exhaustive - there's more I haven't had time to include)

Bent Larsen’s Good Move Guide, Oxford University Press 1982
The Even More Complete Chess Addict, Fox and James Faber and Faber 1993
God knows what this book is but it appears to be about the Alekhine (written in Russian) 1987
The Most Amazing Chess Moves of All time, Emms, Gambit 2000
Attacking with 1. e4, Emms, Everyman 2001
Test Your Positional Play, Bellin & Ponzetto, Batsford 1985
An Opening Repertoire for White, Keen, Batsford 1984
New Ideas in the Alekhine Defence, Burgess, Batsford 1996
The Complete Alekhine, Burgess, Batsford 1995
My System (21st Century Edition), Nimzowitsch, Hays Publishing 1991
Logical Chess: Move by Move Batsford 1998
Pandolfini’s Endgame Course, Simon & Schuster 1988
Secrets of Spectacular Chess, Levitt & Friedgood, Batsford 1995
Kasparov’s Opening Repertoire, Shamkovich & Schiller, Batsford 1990
The Contemporary Anti-Dutch, Andrew Martin Tournament Chess, 1990
Test Your Endgame Ability, Livshits & Speelman, Batsford 1992
Attack with Julian Hodgson vol. 1, Hodgson Enterprises 1996 [ signed ]
Attack with Julian Hodgson vol. 2, Hodgson Enterprises 1997
101 Tips to Improve Your Chess, Kosten, Batsford 1996
A Killer Chess Opening Repertoire, Summerscale, Everyman 1998
The Final Countdown, Hajenius & van Riemsdijk, Cadogan Chess1997
100 Instructive Games of Alekhine, Reinfeld, Dover 1959
Endgame Play, Chris Ward, Batsford 1996
Think Like a Grandmaster, Kotov, Batsford 1978
Chess Explorations, Winter, Cadogan Chess1998
The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess games, Burgess, Nunn and Emms, Robinson 1998
A Contemporary Approach to the middlegame, Suetin, Batsford 1976 [ Hardback ]
The Killer Grob, Basman, Pergamon 1991
Essential Chess Endings Explained Move by Move (vol. 1 – revised 2nd Edition), Silman Chess Digest 1992
Winning Endgame Technique, Beliavsky & Mikhalchishin, Batsford 1995
Zurich International Chess Tournament 1953, Bronstein, Dover 1979
Trompowski Opening and Torre Attack, Bellin, Batsford 1983
How to Play the Torre Attack, Schiller, Chess Digest, 1991
The Test of Time, Garry Kasparov, Pergamon Press, 1986
The Leningrad Dutch, Ehlvest, Batsford 1993
The Master Game Book Two, James & Hartston BBC 1981


COMPUTER
Andy's chess computer - a Mephisto Nigel Short - will be given as a prize for the highest placed library player/non regular club member at the forthcoming club championship.

CLOCK
Donated to the club for use in home matches.

BITS AND BOBS
Sundry chess magazines to be given away free to anybody who wants them. Also free - a few tapes from Mike Basman's Audio Chess series.

Who wants these? They're yours for nothing ...

The Macho Grob - Mike Basman (2x c90 cassettes)
Global Opening - Mike Basman (2x c90 cassettes)
Polish Defence - Mike Basman (1x c90 cassette)

Improve Your Chess IX: Earplugs

Why did I lose? Because the door kept banging shut behind my board. Because the geezer's throat I was playing kept gurgling. Because of the boredom of blokes and their predictability of prattle, couched away in the corner of their club. Because the light bulbs were weirdly buzzing. Because, because, because. Not because of my own failures of concentration, accentuated by a weakness to listen to distractions good or bad - and certainly not because I was outplayed from start to finish, after which I fished around for some noises to blame that unpleasant fact upon . . .

And so such excuses after losses went on - until I read what novelist Nicholson Baker had to say about the one thing that got his creative juices flowing. He described the effect of the thing as follows: "I can sit anywhere, in any loud place, and work. Everything becomes 20 feet farther away than it really is. The chirping, barking, jingling cash-drawer of a world is out of reach, and therefore more precious." I realised the solution to his problem might work as a solution to mine, too.

Now, don't worry. The solution won't delude you into believing that the world is a cash-drawer and more precious as such, or something. It was just that earplugs suddenly sounded to me a straight-forward aid to concentration and immersion into any activity (except music.) So I decided to try them myself during chess games. Remarkably quickly my results picked up; these two draws, for instance, can be taken as representative from a tournament where my performance grade averaged ten points higher than the rest of the season up to that point.

I had never drawn with an FM before, let alone against an IM - and then with earplugs, I'd done both in one tournament. Can earplugs alone really be responsible for such a sudden change? I'd like to answer yes, but in my case, it's hard to tell for sure because I began nearly all my attempts at chess improvement at approximately the same time. So instead, does it follow therefore that earplugs might be wholly responsible for my improvement, or maybe for none of it at all - and that there's no way to tell? Maybe . . .

But I think not: in my experience, earplugs have not only a practical value, but a philosophical one too. I might even go so far as to say that even as a placebo that filtered no noise, they would have had a useful function for me. And I think these other lessons earplugs taught me have helped improve my play in general, that there is a sort of Philosophy of Earplugs.

What I mean by this, is that committing to wearing earplugs represents not just a practical decision to filter out distractions as far as possible, but that it also engenders a philosophical attitude to the game. That attitude is to take as much responsibility as possible for your chess games: to say to yourself, so what if the opponent is noisy? The venue creaking? The door banging? I'm entirely on my own, insulated in silence, and everything is down to me. I have nothing to blame but myself. Botvinnik probably benefited from something similar, when he used to play seven hour training games next to a blaring radio or in a cigar-smoke filled room.

Aside from helping to ignore distractions, I think the Philosophy of Earplugs helps decision-making at the board itself, too. In the second link above, for instance, you'll find a position where I sacrificed two pawns and a knight to achieve a drawn endgame. I did this after fifteen minutes thought, and felt almost silly about playing the sequence - especially because of the look it provoked on my opponent's face! Would I have found the same sequence without earplugs? Maybe not. The aloneness of silence frees us from such self-consciousness, reminding us there is no-one listening to our thoughts, however daft they might turn out to be. So we are free to consider ludicrous-looking moves, free to feel unselfconscious about being out of book on move three and thinking for ten minutes, free to play chess as best we can.

In conclusion, try earplugs. Or if you're not distracted by noise, try the Philosophy of Earplugs anyhow!


And finally . . .
A few other bits and bobs before I sign the series off.

Firstly, I'm not the first to advise the use of earplugs for playing chess. In an entertaining article that I recently discovered Nigel Davies praises earplugs here, writing about advantages they bring such as: filtering out the noise of spectators, filtering out the snores of room-mates or other sources of noise in hotels, that you might not hear draw-offers, and so on.

Secondly, I'm amazed that earplug companies don't sponsor chess events, providing say one free pair to each competitor in a tournament and setting up a stall to sell further in bulk. Or alternatively sponsoring a league team that uses them, that sort of thing. Why not?

Thirdly, aside from the Philosophy of Earplugs, pragmatics are important too. Most earplugs sold on UK highstreets - that I've encountered - are orange and chubby, like those to the right. They all seem to be the same, and the cheapest I found were at Tesco. These also usually come with an informative instruction booklet and a handy mini-carry-case. However - and whilst accompanied by no such niceties - I definitely prefer the slimmer, cheaper, softer, yellow "Worksafe Earplugs" sold at Travis Perkins under the code SEP403 - although they are harder to come by.

Finally, this article is the last in this series. I've appreciated the feedback, discussion and links the series has generated, and I hope my posts might have helped improve your own chess in some little way! The series also now has an index.

PS. Beware the dangers of earplugs!

Open The Door, Richard

[Richard James, well-known in English chess for his work teaching children, has written a book, Chess For Kids, published by Right Way towards the end of last year. I interviewed him, via Facebook, on 9 February.]

ejh: Hello Richard. On your website you describe yourself as "chess teacher": and then, under that, "tutor". Is there a difference?

RJ: Hi Justin. I would define a teacher as someone who teaches a class and a tutor as someone who teaches an individual pupil, so I guess I'm both, but at present more of a tutor than a teacher.

ejh: What actually do you do - in either capacity?

RJ: At present I'm based at Hampton Court House, a small independent school for children aged 3-16 in, amazingly enough, Hampton Court. I provide individual chess tuition there as well as running a chess club and organising other chess activities. I also do a small amount of non-chess teaching there.

Outside school, I have a few private pupils whom I teach after school, and at weekends and holidays. I was involved with a lot of lunchtime and after-school chess clubs between 1993 and 2008 but gradually wound them down.

I'm also working at the moment for Chess in Schools and Communities as their curriculum consultant, so I'm getting back into school chess clubs in a very small way in order to test my CSC materials.

ejh: If I understand what you've written on your site, you're somewhat sceptical as to the value of after-school chess clubs.

RJ: The way we're running after-school chess clubs in primary schools at the moment, yes, which is why I stopped doing them and went away to learn how to do things better.

I have no problem with after-school clubs in secondary schools except that it's often hard, especially in non-selective schools, to generate interest. I also have no problem with schools in which the after-school club is just one part of the chess culture within the school, which is what we're trying to do at Hampton Court House.

What I have a problem with, for many reasons, is when a primary school has no real interest in chess but decides that a chess club would be a Good Thing so employs a professional chess coach to run it. Up to a point it works because the children - or most of them - have a good time and enjoy their games, but this will only be a short-term interest and will not lead to continuing participation in chess.

What I'm also sceptical about is the whole issue of encouraging mass participation in competitive chess by very young children.

ejh: Is this because of the unpleasant aspects of competitiveness at an early age, or because to actually play well enough for competition to be meaningful, most children need to be a little older?

RJ: A bit of both, but more the latter than the former, I think. A recent German book (the title, translated into English, is "Help! My child plays chess") makes a big thing of not putting young children into competitions because they may not be able to cope emotionally.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this. In my experience over many years at Richmond Junior Club most children are able to cope, and a bad experience, if it is handled sympathetically by parents and teachers, could actually be something they could learn from.

My problem is more your second option. We're putting kids into national competitions when they hardly know how all the pieces move let alone all the rules. Then we expect them to play with clocks because they might play too slowly. The only kids who play too slowly are those who have to stop and think how the pieces move every time. Then we give them grades and tell them (and their parents and teachers) that they're real serious chess players. This really does them no favours at all, nor does it do any favours to the more serious players who have to waste their time playing them in the early rounds of tournaments.

ejh: What should we do? Is there a way to teach kids non-competitively? Teach them problems, puzzles?

RJ: I think there's a lot we could do - and this is something we're looking at in CSC. What I think we need is a three-pronged approach to junior chess.

Firstly, encourage the use of chess (and other games) as a learning tool in primary schools, with possibly some low-level competition like inter-school matches: this is something that could be taught by schoolteachers, not necessarily by professional chess teachers. Chess, by its very nature, and because kids are enthusiastic about playing, can be a very powerful learning tool. There are enormous possibilites for developing a wide range of cognitive skills through mini-games and puzzles as well as providing cross-curricular links to any other subject. Alexey Root has done a lot of work on this in the States, although much of her material is geared more to secondary school age rather than primary school age children.

A rabbit. And...

Secondly, set up a network of junior chess clubs along the lines of RJCC for those children who want to take chess seriously. Children who are doing chess at home with knowledgeable parents would come straight here and schools would also be encouraged to feed players through to their local junior chess club.

Thirdly, encourage competitive chess among children of secondary school age, possibly by setting up some sort of qualification which would be recognised by universities and employers, or by having attractive prizes for both individual players and schools.

ejh: Does the last of these strike you as optimistic?

RJ: All three of them strike me as being extremely optimistic. But we have to realise that the system we have in this country doesn't work. A simple statistic: there are 18 English players born in 1993 with an active FIDE rating, 7 of whom are over 2000. By comparison there are 202 French players born in 1993 with an active FIDE rating, 22 of whom are over 2000.

Yes, I know that much of our chess is not FIDE rated but even in the ECF grading list (I'm no longer a grader so I don't have access to the current master list) there are not many more than those 18 playing more than a handful of school games. While some of the reasons for this are beyond our control, others are not. And, despite what the ECF might have thought, throwing free chess sets at schools will have little or no effect.

The problem is not the numbers learning chess but the way we teach, organise and promote chess. Not so much in terms of strength at the top, but in strength in depth, we're a very long way behind the rest of Western Europe, not to mention the rest of the world.

ejh: Is part of the difference the way junior ches is organised elsewhere? Where I live in Spain, for instance, my club has a thriving junior section, but I'm pretty sure that to a large extent it's funded by the town hall, and is close to free for participants. I like this way of doing things, but it's not exactly the Anglo-American economic model...

RJ: Yes, from what I understand this is very similar in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Government funding clearly works in a very different way and local government receives a lot of money from central government for activities such as chess. I don't know about Spain, but in other countries inter-club matches take place at weekends and the midweek leagues we have here, which are too late for most juniors and often in unsuitable venues, are unknown. This was one of the things I had in mind when talking about reasons being out of our control.

ejh: Yes, we have matches at weekends, for all sorts of reasons.

I wanted to ask about something else you wrote on your site. You felt that kids in (if I understood right) primary schools will take up chess, enjoy it for a while, then pack it in. Why is this? And would it actually matter very much if they do pack it in, if opportunity were given for them to come back to it later?

RJ: Well, most of them will pack it in, and that is inevitable. Most parents use the primary school years to give their children a taster of a wide range of different activities. At secondary school age they will choose to concentrate on one or two of them. But most children become disillusioned with chess before that point.

My experience of primary school chess in Richmond (which admittedly is an atypical area) is that the kids who don't play chess at home will drop out pretty quickly because they just won't be able to cope with those who can play. The kids who are playing at home with their parents will improve quite fast for 18 months or so, then stop making progress and eventually get frustrated. The only kids who will continue are those who are doing serious chess outside the school: playing in tournaments, going to RJCC and so on. And because they give up out of frustration it's very rare that any of them do come back to it later.

They call him Mellow Yellow

My experience is that, with the exception of the really serious kids, those who start competitive chess in their teens are much more likely to continue playing as adults than those who start at 7 or 8.

If you look at educational theory you start to understand what's happening. To play 'real' chess requires complex cognitive skills which, according to Piaget, children only develop at about 11 or 12. Of course we now know that some children, under specific circumstances, can develop these skills much earlier, but his basic point still stands.

The number of children able to play 'real' chess at primary school age has also declined dramatically in the last 30 years or so. The research carried out by Michael Shayer's team at London University is interesting in this respect. While the Flynn effect demonstrates a gradual rise in IQ scores, Shayer and his team reported in 2006 that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 were "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.

In other words, children are getting better at tasks which require quick answers but correspondingly worse at problem solving, which is essentially what 'real' chess is. This ties in very much with what I and others have experienced during that period.

ejh: What do you think the purpose of teaching kids chess is? I think in the minds of much of the chess community, it probably involves "trying to produce new Nigel Shorts". Without neglecting that question - we'll get back to it - why do you teach chess? What are you trying to achieve?

I wonder what happened to him?

RJ: I guess the reason why all teachers work with children is essentially because they want to change children's lives for the better. I think I was doing that through RJCC and perhaps I'm doing it now, sometimes in ways other than through chess, at Hampton Court House. I didn't see that I was doing it through school chess clubs, though. I suppose it might have been different if I'd been working in a less affluent area than Richmond.

ejh: Why would you say so?

RJ: In Richmond most of the kids are doing lots of after-school activities and are probably playing in football teams, rugby teams, cricket teams, orchestras or whatever. Chess, for those who are not really serious about it is just another part of their lives: gym club on Mondays, violin lesson on Tuesdays, chess club on Wednesdays and so on.

If you're in a deprived area, and this is exactly what CSC is trying to do, and children don't have a lot of extra-curricular activities, chess could, I guess, be something special. But so could music, sport, art or anything else.

ejh: Ah, I see what you mean. Yes. That might very well be right. I don't know though whether poorer parents would actually have the disposable income to give their kids the support a promising junior wants.

I'm not thinking of the expense of coaching - I'm thinking of all the travel to tournaments, having to find accommodation and so on. It strikes me as an expensive business for what is, paradoxically, just about the cheapest of all games to play.

RJ: True - but a kid from a deprived area might get much more of a kick from playing in a chess match against another school than a kid from Richmond who is probably in lots of other teams.

I rather suspect, though, that kids would actually derive more benefit from games such as draughts, Connect 4 or Mancala. Because chess is so complex and there are so many choices each move they end up just playing random moves. While chess might be 'good for you' there is no research to demonstrate whether it is better for you than draughts, or Scrabble, or Monopoly, or bridge, or poker. I don't see why schools couldn't play matches against each other at other games than chess which might be more age appropriate.

As to your other point, yes the expense is also an issue for those who are serious about chess. A bigger problem for many families here in Richmond is when there are other children who don't play chess - they can't really spend every weekend going round chess tournaments just for the one child. What children don't understand (and I suspect many parents and teachers don't understand as well) is that how well you do is much more about how much you play seriously rather than how talented you are. Many of us are now aware of the concept of requiring 10,000 hours of deep practice over 10 years to excel at something like chess.

ejh: Yes, I saw Jonathan Rowson writing about this in New in Chess.

That reminds me - what about the encouragement of prodigies? How important is this? Is it actually a good idea, or is there a cost in blighted youths and disappointed ambitions that outweighs it? And is it a case of looking for those who develop their gifts very early, or more a case of the more young chessplayers you make, the higher your chances that some of them may go on to greatness?

RJ: First of all, I dislike very much the word 'prodigy'. It is important that our most talented players should be given every encouragement and support by the national federation, and there are many who think that this is not happening at the moment. These players, though, are produced by parents, not by schools.

I think we tend to go into schools looking for the next Nigel Short, but that is surely the wrong approach. If you have a good environment and infrastructure the really talented players will come through without your having to look for them, which is exactly what happened at RJCC. In Richmond we were very lucky with our parents, almost all of whom were extremely supportive to their children and to us.

We had two genuine 'prodigies' in the sense of children breaking many age-group records, at RJCC: Luke McShane and Murugan Thiruchelvam. Luke you know about, and I was thrilled to see how well he did at the London Chess Classic and the Tata Steel tournament (as I think we are now supposed to call Wijk Aan Zee).

Red and green...

Murugan decided to do other things with his life, but his parents always made it clear that it would be his choice whether or not he continued with chess, and they were also extremely grateful to us for helping him. The aforementioned Jonathan Rowson was also a member while he lived in London (200 yards down the road from me) for a couple of years between the ages of 10 and 12. He was strong but not outstanding: it was only when he returned to Scotland that he decided to take chess seriously.

ejh: What encouragement and support do you think they could receive that they presently don't?

RJ: I'm not involved in this side of things at the moment so I can't really comment very much. From some of the posts by parents on the English Chess Forum there are those who think that there should be more coaching sessions, perhaps more places available in the World and European Junior Championships, that the selection policy should be improved and so on. But all this costs money and the money probably isn't there.

ejh: Anyway, I gather you have written a book. To my eyes, the cover looks very Bott and Morrison. Is this my imagination?

RJ: That hadn't occurred to me, but now you say so, perhaps yes. My copies of the Bott and Morrison books are, along with the rest of my library, packed away in boxes while the painting of the new Chess Palace is being completed so I can't compare them at the moment.

I tested the cover and the cartoons in the book with the kids at HCH before publication and they were all very positive about them. The cartoonist was a guy my publishers knew because he'd written a book about how to draw cartoons for them.

ejh: So tell us about the book. Who in particular does it seek to teach, and how does it seek to do so?

RJ: It's a book for young beginners, written as a story about Sam and Alice, a boy and girl who join the army to fight the aliens in a battle of living chess. Lots of cartoons and subversive humour. It will be hard for most young children to read on their own, deliberately so to make sure the parents are part of the learning process.

It uses essentially the same material as in the new version of my website chessKIDS academy and the course I'm writing for CSC. The idea is that children learn one piece at a time, and, at the same time one specific cognitive skill, and only move onto the next piece when they are fluent with that piece.

The second part of the book uses very short games to demonstrate basic tactics. The book focuses in particular on the three things you need to do every move: look for good moves for yourself, look for good moves for your opponent and make sure your move is safe before playing it. (My own chess would be a lot better if I could remember to do these myself!)

Most chess books for beginners just provide chess information without really touching on the cognitive skills you need to process that information efficiently. I found, both with the original chessKIDS academy and through school chess clubs, that children can pick up the basics quickly but cannot improve beyond a certain point because they are unable to put into practice what they've learnt: the neural connections just haven't been made at that point, which is, I suspect, Piaget again. In addition, the narrative structure of the book enables children to learn life lessons from the adventures of Sam and Alice as well as chess lessons.

ejh: So does it differ significantly from other learn-chess books for children, do you think?

(And what's a Chess Palace? Is that like a Pioneers Palace?)

RJ: I think it's very different from other books. Firstly, the narrative format is unusual, but not unknown, but the subversive humour is certainly different. Secondly, it attempts, as I mentioned in my previous answer, to teach cognitive and life skills as well as chess skills. I think this is how we should be approaching chess in primary schools. The reactions I've had so far from both parents and children has been highly favourable.

It probably is like a Pioneers Palace, yes. The Chess Palace is a large outbuilding at the bottom of my garden which houses my chess library and equipment. The original structure was wooden and built by the previous occupants over 30 years ago, but it had developed dry rot, so, as part of a major renovation programme, it has been replaced by a brick and concrete structure. It's got lots of kings and queens in it, so it must be a palace! (It was also used as my office and for chess and other lessons but since my mother's death in November these functions are now carried out in the house itself.)

ejh: I wanted to deal with one last subject area before we finish. You mention specifically that you're interested in autism-spectrum people, high AQ scores, Asperger's and so on. Do you think chess helps those of us who are in that category in any way, or is it something we do because we're not very good at other things?

RJ: In answer to your question, in my case, both. But first, while some autistic spectrum people are good at chess, others have problems in terms of learning or executive function or elsewhere that make chess very difficult for them.

And while some chess players have strong autistic traits, others do not. A few years ago I ran the AQ test through some of the older chess pupils at Hampton Court House. One had an AS diagnosis and scored appropriately: the others scored in the 20s, above average but below the diagnostic point. I suspect this would be a fairly average score for chess players.

I got obsessed with chess in my teens, I suppose because I was no good at anything else. Not that I'm very good at chess, though. I was always completely useless at anything involving any sort of physical skill and being the worst in the school at every possible sport is not a lot of fun! Through chess, and more through organizing and teaching than through playing, I was put in a position where I had to communicate with other people and they had to communicate with me. I also discovered skills (teaching and writing) which I had no idea I possessed.

Going back to what we were discussing earlier, I think that one of the ways we could be using chess in primary schools is to work with SENCOs to identify children who might have problems elsewhere but be particularly suited to chess. These could be Autistic Spectrum children who have communication problems but may excel at maths and logic, but also dyslexic children whose strong visual awareness might help them do well at chess, dyspraxic children who are eager to compete but have problems with sports, or even ADHD children who are capable of intense focus on something that interests them. All of these might think, or their parents might think, that chess isn't for them. In many primary schools the football team and the chess team comprise very much the same kids, but it could well be the non-joiners who will get the most benefit from chess in the long run. There's a short article on this on chessKIDS.com.

I mentioned in answer to an earlier question that most of us go into teaching because we want to change children's lives, and by taking this approach we might do just that.

[Nosher photo: Chessbase]
[Richard James photo: Adam Raoof]
[Alexey Root photo: University of Dallas in Texas, School of Interdisciplinary Studies]

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