I don’t know about Lib, but the pressure of an intense game makes me play better. It brings me to full alert, sharpens me. Eventually, of course, it begins to have the opposite effect.
I am nowhere near the chess player he must be from the analysis I’m reading in this thread. I can sometimes hold my own against erl – who may have had me in mind when he asked about trying to force the king not to castle. I’ve been known to do that (often). I’m impetuous.
Now my question: Lib, you mentioned earlier that when you play black you like to see white play the English Opening and hate to see him play the King’s Gambit. Could you elaborate on the why of both?
Pressure in an important game can be enormous. Your blood pressure and heart rate can soar. Your respiration can become eratic, and you can sweat profusely, almost like you’re boxing the man rather than playing chess with him. It isn’t just the money, the trophy, and the prestige. It’s the challenge and competition of matching wits in a game of almost pure mental skill with someone else who has proved by their rating that they have beaten players like you before and can do so again. You can’t help but think about the post-mortem when your peers will be gathered around the board for a look-see at what happened. You very much want to be the one who is filling the room with bubbly chatter about this line and that line, rather than the one who is in the unfortunate position of listening to it all.
For me, the greatest pressure is when I am winning and am playing out an attack. It is common knowledge that a failed attack will almost always result in a successful counter-attack, given that your opponent is adequately skillful. Waiting for him to move can be, for me, excruciating. I watch his eyes. I want to see if I can tell what lines he’s analyzing. What part of the board is he concentrating on? Is he looking up and down the long diagonals and back and forth across files and ranks? Does he seem stuck on a single line of moves, examining it over and over? (Sometimes, that’s a sign that he has found something you missed.) I’ve actually had some opponents complain about this to officials. “He keeps staring at me.” Opponents who knew me often cupped their hands around their faces like Tiger Woods on the green.
The way I dealt with the pressure, normally, was to get up and walk around. Look at some other games or post-mortems in progress. Walk outside and take a break. Or go into another room and play a quick game of speed chess with someone.
There is a famous story (I don’t know how true it is) about GM George Koltanowski, a renouned blindfold player. He used to play several games — as many as twenty — simultaneously without benefit of a chess board. He would sit in a room separate from the other players, and moves would be messengered back and forth to him. There have been many grandmasters who could play blindfold, but none quite so proficient and notable as he.
In one tournament, it is said, his opponent complained vigorously when Koltanowski excused himself to go to the bathroom. The complainer told the official that if Koltanowski were going to the bathroom, he should be required to take the board with him. It would be unfair for him to use his blindfold prowess to examine the game in his stall!
As black, I like playing King’s Indian and Gruenfeld type games. Pawn on g6. Bishop on g7. Knight on f6. Queenside activity with pawn tension in the center. That sort of thing. The English Opening and the tame d4 openings in general afford me that opportunity. As Black, I really don’t like getting into tactical complications early, with one notable exception being the lines that come out of the Latvian Gambit. I like them because they so often take White completely by surprise, and it is easier for him to stumble than for me.
I think that Fischer’s game against Byrne — a sort of English versus KI/Gruenfeld game by transposition — which I linked to above, had a tremendous influence on me. Black seemed to equalize fairly easily (albeit in part, due to a bit of wasted time by White). The middlegame emerged fairly quickly, and the tactical possibilities from Fischer’s position were simply amazing. His queen sacrifice still stands as one of the most profound and impressive chess moves ever made. Masters in the analysis hall were cheering on the young Fischer until he “lost” his queen, at which time they all sighed and said that too much had been expected of him, and that maybe his skills had been over-hyped. But then, ten or so moves later, when White’s queen was hog-tied in the corner and Black was pushing White’s king around like a cat playing with a mouse, the masters suddenly realized that they were witnessing a talent like they had never seen before.
I dread seeing the King’s Gambit because it requires exact precision on the part of Black, and the players who play it as White have spent years studying every frigging sub-variation. White gets to decide the course of play, and the opening has been the source of so many spectacular and swashbuckling attacks that it is legendary. It forces me to play against my style. I have to dance the dance that he dances. My king is under siege early, and I don’t like that. The only consolation to it, for me, is that if I withstand his attacks, I have a considerable endgame advantage, with a majority of pawns on the king-side and my king already active and prepared to help advance them.
I used to play a lot of chess when I was in high school, generally two or three hours every day after school. I was able to digest some strategy books and became fairly proficient.
But I always felt encumbered by my sheer lack of real talent. Given my mind and personality, many assume that I must be a fantastic chess player, but after I had forgotten all of my knowledge, I fell back to rank mediocrity.
Which do you think is accounts for more success? Some kind of innate talent or learned craft?
There is a campaign to have chess recognized as a sport, and included in the Olympic games. Do you think it is a sport and would you like to see it in the Olympics?Official campaign site.
I think that whichever way you go about it, the idea is to “get it”. Players with natural talent are those who sort of get it right away. But I do believe that it is possible to learn to get it.
In my early exposure to serious chess, I was talking to a master (not the same guy who taught me the pass-plus technique) as we played an informal game. He was a really gracious fellow who took time out to nurture those of us who joined the local club. Naturally, he was trouncing me left and right, but giving me some pointers along the way. In the course of play, I asked him, “What is it that you see when you look at a position that I don’t see?”
“Tell me what you see now,” he said.
I looked at the board. “I see that I’m a whole knight down. I see that you have a pretty strong looking wedge of pawns there. I see that your queen is active and mine is passive, I guess. And I see that your king is well protected, and mine is pretty badly exposed.”
“Well, that’s it, then,” he said with his patented smile. “When I look at a position, I see squares. When you look at a position, you see pieces.”
It took some time before it really dawned on me what he meant, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Players with natural talent, like him, saw the board itself in spite of the pieces being on it. I maybe had a little bit of natural acumen, but it was when I started to get what he was saying that my rating began to climb very quickly.
I sort of trained myself to blur out the pieces as much as I could and to look at the board itself. You, or anyone, can do this with practice. Try to visualize a sort of varying intensity of color in accordance with squares that are under control. No matter what the pieces are that control it, just think about the control itself and picture the square being more or less saturated with red according to how much it is controlled. You can use any color, and something else for your opponent, like blue.
Say the square is controlled by 1 of your pieces. Nevermind what kind of piece it is, just picture it (the square) as a light pink. If it is controlled by 2 of your pieces, picture a darker pink, and so on until if it is controlled by 4 of your pieces, say, then picture a deep, rich burgandy. Some sort of system along those lines. Now, for everytime your opponent challenges your control, it lightens the square by a single shade. So, if you control it with 2 pieces and he controls it with 1, you picture the same light pink that you would picture if you controlled it with 1 and he controlled it with none at all. Use your alternate color when the opponent has control of the square.
Over time, you develop a knack for zooming in on things fairly readily because they pop out at you as concentrations of dark or intense color. I guess it’s sort of like looking at the board through an infrared filter or something. You can see where the heat really is.
Anyway, I think that’s what people with enormous natural talent see anyway — a chessboard with all its intensity and distribution of power. We who have to struggle tend to see chess pieces, and oh yeah, it so happens they move around a board.
Does that make any sense at all? Reading it over, I’m not sure whether I’ve explained it very well.
Yes, I do. At the grandmaster level, the physical symptoms of players resemble those in any sport. They experience heart rates, blood pressure, and respiration akin to professionals playing tennis. I’d love to see Olympic chess.
I think Alice in wonderland is pretty funny, and I’m sure that some grandmasters get crazy laid. I liked Searching for Bobby Fischer, and I think that Josh Waitzkin is a perfect example of a player heavily endowed with natural ability. He fits pretty much with what I was saying to Maeglin. Josh sees the board rather than the pieces. In fact, I can recall a scene from the movie where Pandolfini tried to assist Waitzkin in finding a forced mate by sweeping all the pieces off the board.
There were a couple of things that were a bit irksome. For example, the players weren’t recording their moves, and that’s required by the rules. Also, you don’t actually say “check” in a tournament game, and you certainly don’t chit-chat. You aren’t supposed to say anything at all, except the words “J’adoube” (or “I adjust”) and “Draw”. Of course, I understand that movies modify reality a bit to try to add drama or interest or whatever.
I hope it’s OK to join in, because I love chess (and it’s my job!)
I recommend ‘The Complete Chess Addict’ by Fox and James for an idiosyncratic look at the game covering everything from historical anecdotes through cheating to computers and ‘who was the greatest ever?’
Fischer was 13 when he beat Donald Byrne. He was 20 when he beat Robert Byrne in 21 moves - also an astounding game.
It’s pretty rare for a player to have a patron. (Fischer was notorious for refusing such deals.)
Kramnik had a French sponsor, but they’ve parted company.
Irina Krush has a team behind her, and a few English players like McShane got some backing.
It’susually a computer company that helps a talented junior.
Most GM’s simply earn money from the circuit at tournaments like Linares, Dortmund and Wijk-aan-Zee. They get paid appearance fees, plus travel and accomodation. Any prize money is a bonus.
But only the top players get this treatment. There are loads of Eastern European players struggling to make a living in European tournaments.
Several European Leagues have clubs who pay their top players (Holland, UK, Germany, France etc.).
Yasser Seirawan has produced the excellent Seattle initiative, which includes good conditions for the US Championships.
The Russians don’t have much money for chess now, but Aeroflot stages an annual tournament with lots of prize money (by Russian standards anyway!).
Of course you’re welcome to join in! It’s an honor!
Speaking of Yasser Seirawan, I once assisted in hosting the North Carolina Open, and Yasser came. He was much younger then, of course, but already famous and well on his way to becoming a US champion. He was a terrific guy, very friendly, and a real joy just to be around.
Naturally, he was paired at the top board in the first round, and one of my responsibilities was to set up the tables in the room. What I did was take Yasser into the empty room when he was visiting our club, and asked him where he would prefer to play, and how he would like to have his own and other tables arranged. Maybe he was just being nice, but he seemed to be astounded, and told me that that was the most accomodating thing any tournament organizer had ever done for him. That made me feel really good.
Anyway, thanks for joining in. And feel free to correct anything that I might say wrong.
The computer thing is a real problem. Many on-line sites identify computer programs, but there’s no way to stop someone simply copying moves over from his computer.
This has affected postal chess as well.
There were claims recently that Bobby Fischer beat English GM Nigel Short at quick chess (after playing silly openings), but I think that was just a computer too. See:
Online sites usually have a simple rating system. They usually give you a fixed rating number to start with, and it alters based on your results (and sometimes your opponents grading).
The USCF have a complicated mathematical formula for US ratings.
These are not the same as the FIDE (World Chess Federation) ELO ratings, which are named after Professor Elo, their inventor.
Already started.
Ken Thompson has created an endgame database, Belle, that plays all endings with 5 or less pieces perfectly. Here’s an access:
You type in a position using Forsyth notation (explained on the site), and will instantly be told the correct result with best play, plus which move to play next to achieve it (and so on till the finish).
Thompson is currently working on 6 piece endings. If he ever reaches 32 pieces, the mystery of chess will be solved!
I used to play a lot with my dad. He has loads of natural talent, but since he hadn’t played seriously in decades, he had forgotten most of the craft. I had little talent, but there was a period where I spent a shameful amount of just memorizing openings and other strategies, thinking that every game must come down to some combination of previously analyzed sequences of moves. This was fine against weaker players, but I still got torn apart by people with real and technique.
I remember about eight years ago my dad explained it similarly to you. He said he cared less about the pieces and more about control. They seemed to be inextricably linked, so I didn’t really know what he was talking about.
I have to say, this makes me want to break out my board again and find some victims.
And by the way, one of my favorite beginning chess books was written by Seirawan. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in playing with a little more knowledge.