Saturday, December 30, 2006

Brain damage
















Sometimes I get the feeling that grandmaster play leads to brain damage. Take for instance the book of Bent Larsen called Good move's guide. I mean, I pay money for a book to get help right? To save me time.
He has a chapter about positional chess with 48 positional problems.
I arrived at problem 13 and spend two hours without finding a clue. I don't want to give up too easy. When I looked up the answer, it said: I hope you haven't spend too much time to assess the remaining endgame since it is a mate in 3.
I looked again at the board and solved it in 20 seconds.

I really can't understand why an author does this. Why does he want me to spill two hours for nothing? If it is a joke, he will never notice the effect. If it is to make me look stupid, yeah, I already know that. That's why I bought a book in the first place. To HELP me because I'm stupid in chess. There is nothing in this for me nor for him so WHY on earth can he behave like this? Youth frustration? Brain damage?

Usually I take the bad things in a book for granted. I never complained about Rapid chess improvement for instance. Even the insults of Jeremy Silman didn't bother me. But now I feel free to tell you about BENT LARSEN Good move's guide.

The book is pretty bad. The writer ends every position with something like: every master would find this an easy win. Which means that he isn't able to explain WHY a position is won.
The book is filled with examples that are not verified. Sometimes they are plain wrong. Or the opponent makes just silly moves. It happens seldom that my computer agrees with him.

So that helps to get rid of my frustration a bit. What a silly man!

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