Category: Chess

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Post-mortem game analysis

“Don’t be satisfied with just being able to pinpoint the exact mistakes. Always try to understand the underlying causes of your defeat.”

Martin Weteschink, “Chess Tactics from Scratch”

This quote is an example of one of the aspects of chess that is easier said than done. It is not the first time I come across this advice for making the most of your own game analysis. Finding the exact moment when your position turned into a disadvantage is relatively easy nowadays with the help of a computer engine. Even built-in tools of chess.com and other similar sites are capable of doing this. However, recognizing the cause for making the mistake is far from easy. Ultimately, it requires well-developed sensitivity to your personal triggers and psychological patterns, and at the very least one needs to have sufficient mental energy at the moment to even be willing to dig that deep into a game that has already been played.

The good thing is that this analytical ability seems to be a trainable skill, and therefore can improve with practice.

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On not giving up

Black king. Stll life with a chess piece.

“The hardest thing is to win a won game.”
— Frank Marshall

This is a popular quote in chess, and some internet sources also attribute it to Emanuel Lasker, who must have made a similar observation. It is not strictly true, of course. It is much easier to win if you have an objective advantage, either material or positional. But the point is that when you realize that you have a decisive advantage, it is easy to fall into a false sense of security and become complacent.

This is where it becomes very interesting from your opponent’s standpoint. It is useful to know about this tendency if it is your opponent who has an a superior position, and you are forced to defend. It becomes your advantage that can be exploited. If you have a losing position, it will lead to the actual loss of the game only provided that the opponent plays correctly. In practice, it is worth to put up resistance as long as possible in order to give him or her ample chances to make mistakes. The more difficult decisions the opponent is forced to make, the higher the chances of them getting something wrong.

The reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen is known for being exceptionally skilled in defending and turning around inferior positions. Of course, he is also exceptionally skilled in other aspects of the game, so he doesn’t get into inferior positions that often. But it does happen even at his level, which is what makes chess so fascinating. I remember reading (but cannot find the source) that Magnus mentioned distributing his effort of mental concentration in inverse proportion to the winning chances of the position. If he thinks that he has only 1% chance of winning, he would put 99% of energy into finding a way of doing so. Whether this is factually true or not, it is certainly an admirable goal to aspire to. It is also an illustration of warrior’s spirit, a concept that permeates chess as much as it does a martial art like kendo, which I find quite remarkable.

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How to read books

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

“I have never met a person I admired who did not read more books than I did.”
Kevin Kelly , “99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice“

It seems easy to suggest that one needs to read books in order to become more knowledgeable and, generally, a well-rounded person. But these days, “reading” can mean many things, from turning the pages of physical paper volumes to listening to audiobooks to watching instructional videos online. Of course, movies and books have coexisted for years, but nowadays the boundaries between the media become blurred. The amount of content available is also remarkably huge. It actually makes it difficult to digest the information effectively. The over-abundance of material in almost any field makes the experience of learning similar to drinking from a fire hose.

Take chess, for example. As far as hobbies go, there is an incredible amount of literature available for those who want to learn the finer points of the game or to teach it to others. Reading chess books, particularly collections of annotated games of masters has been traditionally viewed as a necessary, and perhaps the most efficient, training method. Anders Ericsson, the author of “Peak”, who introduced the proverbial 10,000-hour rule, identified reading and playing through annotated games as the common and defining practice method of top chess masters. But similar to other fields, chess books come in a variety of forms. As far as analyzing positions, reading from a paper book and setting them up on a physical board sounds like a horrendous waste of time, when interactive versions of the same books can be read and played through on any electronic device. E-versions of chess books not only save time, but also, perhaps more importantly, allow us to read and practice almost everywhere, in small chunks of time throughout the day, since we constantly carry our smartphones anyway.

Yet the physical aspect of the game still has value. For my nine-years-old daughter, for example, it is the the wooden pieces themselves, setting up and moving them on the board, what provides motivation to play. To my daughter, chess is not an intellectual practice or a philosophical model of human life. It is simply a board game. Of course, once you start doing anything, it is much easier to continue. She also enjoys solving “mate in one” puzzles from László Polgár’s enormous collection called “Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games“. It is a physical paper book, which  in combination with a physical board and pieces provides  just the right  pace that prevents information overload for someone, who takes her her first steps.

Beyond hobbies or entertainment, e.g., in the area of academic learning, reading books have conventionally been the way to acquire new information. In my experience, recent forced transition to remote teaching resulted in an abundance of online material in the form of recorded lectures, examples, tutorials, course notes, etc. Like in chess, the  most effective type of practice is  the one you can sustain regularly. So if you are taking a university course and going through a textbook with a highlighter is not your thing, chances are there are video lectures that you can watch as a change of pace, if nothing else.

In the context of learning, an important thing is that reading needs to be active in order to be effective. This means taking notes. Ideally, you would paraphrase and summarize what you’ve read, but even copying passages verbatim is substantially better than doing nothing. This goes back to well-established concept in education that actively engaging with information is necessary for transforming it to knowledge. Interestingly, how exactly you do it doesn’t matter much, statistically speaking. So taking notes is an easy way of accomplishing that.

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Chess as an infinite game

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

Playing chess is stressful. Not just each individual game, but the activity as a whole. Many grandmasters noted that those who take chess seriously  typically end up less happy overall because of it. This aspect has even been documented and closely examined in the “Chess Improvement: It’s all in the mindset” book by  Barry Hymer and Peter Wells. Chess is highly competitive and aggressive. After all, the objet is to impose your will on the opponent and, figuratively speaking, destroy them.  Winning is riddled with psychological traps like impostor syndrome and attributing your successes to luck, and losing is simply devastating for the ego and motivation.

One way to side-step this pitfall is to consider chess not as a finite game (the object being to end the game as quickly as possibly by checkmating the opponent’s king), but as an infinite one (played to keep the game going indefinitely), to borrow the terminology from James P. Carse, the author of “Finite and Infinite Games“. So if you play to keep improving, rather than to win matches, you’ll feel better.

Research in education shows that In order to improve at anything (chess, mathematics, art, kendo, etc.) it is important to engage with the activity on a regular basis. The good news is that it doesn’t matter how exactly you engage with it, at least at the beginning and intermediate levels. In other words, if you do anything related to chess – solve puzzles, read books, watch instructional videos and even lose some games – you will be getting better by improving your understanding of strategic principles and tactical sense. Whatever you do – it will lead to improvement, even though it might not be the most efficient route. Of course, quality od practice matters too, not just quantity. Nut nobody really knows what the most efficient route is, so it is all fine anyway – almost anything you do would be better than nothing.

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On puzzles

I’ve been solving chess puzzles as an exercise to improve my tactical intuition (read: stop blundering away pieces). The method comes from a highly influential book by Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, aptly named “The Woodpecker Method” (“tikkanen” means “little woodpecker” in Finnish, and the repetitiveness of the approach also fits the name very well.)

I find it somewhat difficult to work on the puzzles, though. Not because of their complexity, but because of my default result-oriented mindset. I see puzzles purely as training, rather like lifting weights to build muscles, without any potential for creative content. I feel similarly about solving the Rubik’s cube – it is a nice way to spend time and practice concentration but ultimately, the solution is already known, and it has been done many time before.

But it is the process itself that is valuable in puzzles, not so much the final result. Somewhat unexpectedly this fundamental insight comes from the same chess tactics book. I’ll let he quote speak for itself:

“‘Life puzzle’ is a Swedish expression which originates from a political campaign and points out the difficulty of organizing work, social media, household work, ‘quality time’ with family, and ‘time-when-you-do-things-for-yourself’ – another common expression which is shorter in Swedish (just seven letters). The essence is the core of the Swedish mentality: life is a puzzle to be solved, rather than chaos to be endured.”

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Practice strategies for adults

One particularly neat thing about being a parent to a nine-year-old is that it gives me an excuse opportunity to try various activities alongside her without an expectation of accomplishment. Theoretically, it’s a license to be a beginner without any pressure to improve performance. Still, having this mindset is easier in theory than in practice. Realistically, one still needs to make some progress to maintain motivation. This raises the question: should adult beginners practice differently from children? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is a ‘yes, but only after they’ve acquired the basic skills’.

Take kendo as an example (which my daughter never practiced, by the way, although I had observed other kids’ training). Physical training aimed at improving speed and endurance is a huge aspect of children’s keiko (practice sessions). It is unavoidable for adults  too, but beyond a certain level of  physical ability, the adults are typically directed to shift their focus to other elements of practice, e.g., technique, strategy, psychology, philosophy. It seems that even though there is no hope for an adult beginner to reach a level of mastery that is hypothetically available to children (provided that the kids don’t quit their practice), a better use of an adult’s time would be to concentrate on other, arguably more advance elements of the art, that are beyond pure physical skills.

If we consider violin-playing (which I started studying together with my daughter), an analogue to suburi (empty strike) practice in kendo would be playing scales. The physical skill, i.e. a combination of manual dexterity and sensory perception, which is required for extracting other-than-horrendous sounds from a violin is considerable, and it makes the learning curve very steep. As expected, my daughter leaves me in the dust in terms of the progress. As much as I would like to play the ‘adult beginner’ card and shift my focus to some of the more exciting practice elements, like dynamics of the phrases, etc., the required threshold of the physical skill remains elusive.

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

Chess is another example, where adults often strive to improve, but find it difficult. It is a bit different from both kendo and music in that all these activities are difficult to master, but chess is relatively easy to learn. This accessibility is deceptive. It makes people believe that there is no limit to how much they’d be able to improve. While this “everything is possible if you try” attitude is generally admirable, chess is perhaps the most striking example where innate ability (i.e. talent) is dominant over hard work, perseverance and training methodology. Still, there is an analogy to the practice of musical scales and suburi sword swings in chess. The limiting skill there appears to be visualization – the ability to literally see the position of pieces in your mind, without physically setting them up on the board. This ability not only enable the accomplished players do party tricks like playing simultaneous blindfold games, but more fundamentally, to calculate the possible variations several moves ahead.

So it appears that working on the basics, in other words, practicing like a children, is a good strategy for adult beginners too, even if they they are not aiming to achieve great heights in a particular activity. And if they are aiming high, then it is even more critical, because without mastery of the fundamental skills, their progress will always be limited.

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Bishop’s search for love

Black bishop. Stll life with a chess piece.

I’ve recently discovered for myself a body of writings on chess by a Scottish Grandmaster and philosopher Jonathan Rowson. He is an exceptionally deep thinker, and his books are less about making one a better chess player and more about the metaphors about human life that are contained in the game of chess. I am particularly enjoying the prose he uses and the colourful characteristics that he attributes to various chess pieces, positions and concepts.

Here is an example from “The Seven Deadly Chess Sins” that is so brilliantly funny that I cannot resist capturing it here as a note for myself. The idea is that a bishop pair (the light- and the dark-squared bishops) are more powerful together than their individual point values (~3.5 points per bishop, one point being equal to the material value of one pawn) added together. It is intuitive, of course, because the strength of the piece, and therefore its relative value, changes depending on the position on the board). Still, in the case of the bishop pair in particular, there is an inherent power of the two of them being able to control all the squares, while one of them is capable of only controlling the squares of one colour. To illustrate the point, Rowson evokes Plato’s book Symposium, which describes a banquet attended by Socrates, a philosopher, Alcibiades, the politician, and a comic playwright Aristophanes. In the book these characters give speeches in the praise of Eros, the god of love and desire (strange enough for a chess textbook yet?) I am pretty sure that this classic text would not be able to stand against the modern tides of political correctness and such, but in it Aristophanes argues that men and women were originally not separate beings but hermaphrodites – creatures joined back-to-back and having eight limbs. They perfectly complemented each other and were so powerful, that Zeus feared that they would challenge the gods. So he bisected them and thus created men and women. Since then, they have been searching for each other in order to re-unite, according to the legend. The chess-related metaphor is that the light- and the dark-squared bishops should also be thought of as originally being one exceptionally powerful piece. In this poetic sense, the bishops are in love for each other and need to find a way to be together.

Stll life with chess pieces. Denker vs. Botvinnik. United States vs. Soviet Union, Radio Match, 1945. Move 16.