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The Q & A Way Bruce Pandolfini
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Notable Notes Question There are chess masters who are extremely talented and they work really hard. I have heard it said that Capablanca never worked, but I don’t believe it. He must have worked in order to get ahead. I do not think he would have become a master otherwise. But this is not the question I wanted to ask. The question I wanted to ask concerns what one does when reading through a gamescore. I have heard it said that you have to play over every single note and analyze every single variation in order to derive any value from reading through a game. Otherwise it is just wasting time. What do you think? I am a firm believer in the great principle that without any pain there is no gain. I’d rather work my brains to the bone if that is the way to get ahead. Thank you for your consideration on this question. Any suggestions (besides stopping to smell the roses)? Hopefully, you won’t be too mean. I don’t want to become a pawn in the game. Andrew Murphy (USA) Answer Mean? Let’s start by not being mean to Capablanca. It’s trivial, but he wasn’t just a master. He was a grandmaster and, better yet, an incredible world champion. As I say, however, this is a small point and not what your question’s ostensibly about. Of course you don’t have to play over every single note to derive benefit from a game. Many people enjoy playing through games without looking at any notes whatsoever. They let the game tell its own story, blemishes and all. Place too much emphasis on trying to fathom each nuance in the position, devouring every note to the extent that the process becomes laborious, and you might not grasp the overall art, or, for that matter, very much useful information. In some cases the art is more likely to come through by merely experiencing the game as a journey, which in the end explains and justifies itself. It’s called the final position. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your focus. Nor does it imply that you shouldn’t try to understand what’s going on. Indeed, you should. But to think that you can only gain from pain is a false principle that tells us more why we often hate our jobs than how a few of us happen to succeed. Even without endless toil, successful-type people might succeed anyway, undoubtedly enjoying the consequences exceedingly more. If you don’t want to be a pawn in the game, you can still appreciate a bit more the pawns on the board. There, that’s not too mean. Question I am a high school teacher, who on weekends and after-school runs a fairly active chess club. In the classes I often focus on the endgame because I think if you understand the endgame you can play quality chess regardless what you know about openings. Last year I emphasized pawn endings. I am a strong B to weak A player and I would say the students range in strength from 800 to 1500, but they all play in tournaments and are adolescents. I used the pawn ending section in a copy of Balashov and Prandsetter’s Basic Endgames as the basic text, which had to be photocopied, since I had the only copy. It did not have enough text in it and the students found it to be too hard to read. This year I am planning to examine rook endings. The book I am planning to use is Rook Endings by Smyslov and Levenfish. Unfortunately, the text is in the old descriptive notation, which makes it discouraging for most of the students. To help matters out, I gave one of the students the task of duplicating all the diagrams in the book. There are more than 300 diagrams printed out, without any text printed on the diagram pages. Can you suggest a plan for using this material as a kind of yearly project? I thought coming from you the students might have extra incentive to complete the project and do the best they could. I have my own ideas on how to use the material, but I was curious what you thought about it. But I would like to do what is right for the students. Please help, especially set me straight on which textbooks to use. Maybe it is merely about how I say it. If I say the right things, maybe I won’t have to worry about it. Terrence Masterson (USA) Answer You sound like a concerned and sincere teacher, but it appears you may be asking too much of your students. The two texts you’ve mentioned are way beyond the level of your students (800?). It’s too late to address last year, but perhaps you could make a few changes for the upcoming year and your plans of studying rook endings. No matter what, I’d get a few other titles better suited to instructional work. For rook endings, why don’t you get your hands on Nikolay Minev’s A Practical Guide to Rook Endgames and/or Chris Ward’s Starting Out: Rook Endgames. Both are excellent books, and the latter is particularly nice in the way things are laid out and spelled out. Undoubtedly, students will be able to use them with greater ease and convenience, and, accordingly, get more out of them. I would also add a few other titles to the arsenal, especially of a more general endgame nature. Surely it would be good to have out and about Silman’s Complete Endgame Course by Jeremy Silman, a very fine book with real students in mind. To be sure, you could probably use Silman’s course en toto, accomplishing far more. I would also make available Fundamental Chess Endings by Karsten Müller and Frank Lamprecht, a truly up-to-date, outstanding endgame encyclopedia, as well the fun volume Van Perlo’s Endgame Tactics. The latter provides a thorough and delightfully presented collection of endgame stratagems, which students will probably find more palatable and, therefore, easier to learn, grasp, and possibly apply to their own games. There are many other things you could do, but one that’s been effective before is to have students analyze the final positions of resigned games between strong players, explaining how they would go about winning. As a test, the students could play out those positions against software (such as Fritz). You could even make a tournament out of it, to see which students do the best. And if you really want to pursue a project with the 300 diagrams, you could try the following. Select twenty or so of the diagrams thought to be most representative of the concepts covered. Scramble them so that they are out of order and then photocopy them as a disordered group (this photocopying should be legal, as opposed to what you may have done with the Balashov book). Give that packet to each student, asking him or her to arrange the examples in logical order. Finally, have the students analyze the positions as if they were teaching the class or writing a treatise on rook endings. This will either force the students to take a broader overview of the material, thereby understanding it better, or compel them to give up chess altogether. Drawing from your own commentary, maybe if you say the right things you won’t have to worry about it. Question I know the Manhattan Chess Club has moved a number of times through the years, and last I heard it was in Carnegie Hall. But when I went there recently, having come in from St. Louis, where I live, the club was no longer there. There also wasn’t a listing for it in the phone book. Where is the club now, and is it possible to become a distant member, at a reduced membership fee? Nathan Davis (USA) Answer You’re right: The Manhattan Chess Club is no longer at Carnegie Hall. It moved from there maybe twenty years ago. To be sure, it moved several times since the Carnegie Hall days. And I do know that the club used to give discounted memberships to those living outside the metropolitan area. But it might be somewhat difficult to obtain such a membership these days, particularly since the club no longer exists. But its long-time rival, the Marshall Chess Club (23 West 10th Street) is extant, and it’s thriving. I’m sure they’d be happy to consider taking you on as some kind of member. You can reach them online if you want to find out specifics. It’s a great club, and you won’t be disappointed. Question Tactics and more tactics: that’s what chess masters, writers and teachers always say about chess, and of course they recommend solving many tactical problems often. But suppose you had to teach chess to students in coaching them. What would you tell them to do to improve their tactical thinking, right from the start? What things would you recommend doing? I have the big Polgar book Chess with more than 5,000 problems in it. You introduced the book and thought it was pretty good and said a whole bunch of good things about it and Mr. Polgar. But what would you say to students in the final analysis? W.D. Holmes (USA) Answer I don’t know what I would say in the final analysis. I don’t even know what I’m going to say now. I suppose I have to say something. I’ve certainly said something before. I may yet say something in the future. Let me see if I can remember any of the tidbits I’ve offered in the past, since it occurs to me I’ve encountered questions not dissimilar from yours throughout the past history of this column. I’d tell them to start with the board itself. That is, they should learn lots of stuff about it. Students should familiarize themselves with the name and color of every square. In the process, they should try to visualize the beginning and end of all the chessboard’s lines – the ranks, files, and diagonals. It’s also a good idea to point out to themselves various and typical connections between these points. This initial set of tasks lays the groundwork and shouldn’t be ignored, even if students find it simplistic. Having done the commencement exercises, students should also be encouraged to look for patterns. That is, they should try to think thematically. In their mental reference files they should note standard combinations of winning forces and how those units integrate and cooperate. These motifs should be recognized every time they appear and students should seek them out in their own games, if not during play, certainly afterward in analysis and review. The same ideas can be reinforced by suggesting they read through tactical books that group by concept and/or certain combinations of force. There are many titles that would do. You can explore the possibilities in a decent online catalog such as that at the ChessCafe.com. Students might approach their opening studies a little more specifically, hoping to find related shots in stratagems in the variations they are likely to play. Again, as they do this, they should take especial interest in key squares that are prone or attractive and emblazon in their consciousness the avenues of transfer leading to those squares, so that they have at their fingertips the ways pieces get to exploiting positions. As a helpful reminder, it might be a good idea for students to make written and mental lists of these notions for quick reference. And when studying openings and defense, students should find original ways to bring lines together based on typical paradigms that occur in the various lines. This could add to the value derived by mere allegiance to studying by system. You might generally speaking require students to get into the habit of classifying every example they encounter and saving the more useful ones in programmed files. Along those lines, once a tactic has been added to the saved repertoire, students should try to connect it to other problems and positions in the file. They might even construct mini-lessons, let’s say, grouping problems in blocks of four as if they were posing them to a classroom. Let them play teacher for a bit. They’ll take the matter more seriously, and that’s likely to bear better and greater results. Naturally, all these tactical themes should be diagrammed to make them more indelible. Also, be sure in your teaching to distinguish between composed problems and studies and positions that have occurred in real or are likely to occur in real play. Furthermore, it’s expected that you present material initially in organized fashion, so that students more quickly become acquainted with the concepts. To that end, you’ll choose some books and sections within books that do that organizing for you. But never forget that real life isn’t so convenient. When you’re playing, you don’t necessarily know that a particular theme is hidden in the position, waiting for you to find it. Furthermore, the teacher isn’t standing behind the student offering a cue at the appropriate moment. So make sure to have the students look at random presentations as well, where the themes aren’t automatically obvious. As an extension on that idea, you might mix into your presentations positions without any obvious tactical themes. Students then have to determine what’s happening anyway. By blending it all together, without any particular discrimination, you may help students learn to fall back on their technique of analysis, which is really what you want to impart to them anyway. That is, how to analyze positions. An aspect of this is to get students to always analyze in their heads, without moving the pieces. This is not so easy to do, but is fairly necessary for individual students, if they are to become stronger chess players. Since the tendency is to reach out and grab the pieces in front of them, I don’t even let students have chess sets in some classes. All the problems are given to them on diagrammed sheets. They have to write out their analyses either individually, or in groups of two or three working in teams and competing against other teams. By doing it in teams an additional benefit may arise, and that is that students learn the value of delegating tasks and assigning responsibilities for the good of the whole. I would also tell them to always take their efforts seriously, trying to simulate game conditions at all times. Students should learn to see their practice for real, and by doing that, they’ll get far more out of it, just in terms of the applied intensity and focus. As far as their openings go, I would encourage them to take chances. When you take chances, whether in actual play or in training, you tend to learn a lot more than when you play it safe. Indeed, even when an enterprise fails, the failure is likely to teach much more than success. Failure is painful and memorable. Success discourages critical thinking. To be sure, after winning, the tendency is to think that you did the right things. Yet winning may have had much more to do with your opponent’s erroneous play, rather than anything noteworthy you actually did. So I would motivate students to try to play sharp variations, such as gambits and reasonable sacrifices, especially during their developmental period. To make those lines work students will be compelled to be more resourceful and creative, traits at the heart of tactical play. And while I wouldn’t want students to engage in blitz chess just prior to serious games, at other times I would recommend speed play, which by its very nature is more tactical. As a final recommendation (I’m sure I could find more if I wanted to think and write about it), you should have students study the games of players known for their tactics and attacking play. Kasparov, Tal, Alekhine, among others, provide countless tactical themes in their execution and analysis. But hey, let’s not be too tactical about all this. I know they say chess is 90, 95, or 99 percent tactics. Somehow I have a feeling there’s more to the game than that. At least, that’s what I tell people. So maybe you want to throw a few other ideas in their too. You know – strategy, the endgame, and all that. But that’s your call. Question Emanuel Lasker is considered to be the first official chess champion of the world. Lasker was a great player, and I know he was friends with Einstein, but wasn’t Paul Morphy champion ahead of Lasker? I just do not understand why Morphy is slighted so. Max Schultz (USA) Answer Morphy is seldom slighted as a player. His importance to the development of chess theory is assured. Still, while it’s true that Morphy (1836-84) did come before Lasker (1868-1941), the American never won the world championship. The man who held the title in those days was Howard Staunton, and Morphy never got the opportunity to play a title match with Staunton. That title didn’t have the same distinction as the one created in 1886, when the first officially recognized championship match was won by Wilhelm Steinitz against Johannes Zukertort. Steinitz was the first official world champion, not Lasker. Steinitz held the tile for eight years, until he was defeated by Lasker in 1894, who in turn held the title for twenty-seven years, until he lost to Jose Raul Capablanca in 1921. So you see, Lasker was the second official world champion, not the first. But your calling Lasker the first official world champion, to my knowledge, is a first. That I’ve never heard before. Question of the Month In years to come what chess rules, if any, will change? Reader’s Responses from Last Month Is chess the world’s best game? Among the many interesting replies were the following: Zak Smith (USA) writes: A year ago, and stretching back into my seventh grade year – from whence my infatuation with chess began – I would have answered an unequivical and enthusiastic “Yes!” to this question. There is a slight disappointment in my soul – but also a new energy and passion for games – that is spurred on by my inability to give this same answer today “Is chess the best game of its kind?” “Yes!” “Is chess the best game in the world?” “Sadly, and yet not so much, no ... and happily yes.” There is a new game I have been playing, studying, and loving. It is called Go, or Wei Chi, and I’m very sure you’ve heard of it. I want to clarify first of all that while I no longer consider chess the best game, I now give it equal first status. It shares that position with this old, venerable, and brilliantly simply complex new game; a game that has captured my attention and heart in such a short time. I am a gamesman, and love all games. However, chess stands alone in its relationship to life, war, battle, conflict, and the story of two kingdoms, ever opposed, ever dependent on each other for their story of conflict. Without one, the other would have no purpose, and as they fight their everlasting duel, they find themselves renewed again in the starting position of a game un-played, the next conquest. Who will win? Will they exhaust their forces in the merciless throes of no quarter, and draw? But Go is a different game, and so in a way cannot compete. It is through this lack of competition that I cannot choose between them. For Go is like water, a flowing attempt to surround the surrounder, and a battle wherein all exchanges will lead to one thing for one, and another for the other. Who has the most? Who is the surrounder, and who is surrounded? The rules of Go are simple: Capture territory by placing stones on the board one at a time. But the stones themselves are alive, and can be killed if they are surrounded. From this simplicity comes a game that can be learned faster than chess, and the first game played in minutes. Yet within this simplicity comes such complexity that it is said the perfect game of Go has never been played, and no game of Go has ever been repeated. There also exist several mundane reasons for my choice. Chess is not “played out,” and there is always more for us mortals to learn; only Garry Kasparov need cry. But there are computers that can defeat all but the best in chess, and it seems that soon we humans will be unable to compete. This is sad, and adds a slight note of sterility to the game. It is also amazing, and brings its own unique flavor. All in all, however, I much prefer the old contests, with Botvinnik disappearing for months at a time, only to reappear with a new choice of opening system, deeply studied, again to crush his competition. The fact that this study is now “aided” makes it that much more sharp, yet seeing a game wherein the first novelty occurs at move twenty-five is for my part rather depressing. Go is a game with so many positions, it cannot be played well by computers, and in fact an above-average player can beat the most sophisticated machine. In this, Go has life, and does not threaten to be “solved” in any complete way soon. Chess may be solved in the next decades. In addition, the handicap system in Go allows me (a definite amateur) to play an equal game against anyone up to master level, simply by adding stones to the starting position. The more the player towers over me in strength, the more stones I get. And it does create an equal game. To remove a knight in chess is to change the nature of the starting position, and really changes the contest. To add even nine stones will change the game far less in Go, allowing players of all levels to easily connect on the board. In conclusion, chess has by no means left my heart, and will remain there. It captured me as a child, and will continue to fascinate me into my old age. But there is a new sheriff in town, and in this town, there are no deputies. In a contest between incomparables, there can be no second. There are two best games in this world, and chess happens to be one of them. Bart Spencer (Japan) writes: NO. QED. The Q & A Way is based in large part on readers’ questions. Do you have a question about preparation, strategy or tactics? Submit your questions (with you full name and country of residence please) and perhaps Bruce will reply in his next ChessCafe.com column... Yes, I have a question for Bruce! © 2009 Bruce Pandolfini. All Rights Reserved. |
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