Thursday, September 17, 2020

Gameplan

 Chess prowess succumbs to good advice. This blog is a monument that tributes to that adage. I have been floundering knee deep in the good advice all along. Luckily is Logic destructive by its very nature. You can use it to chip off the nonsense from the useful. After 20 years of chiseling, I finally have found a few leftovers that are useful. My mind is freed from the tons of debris that continuously filled the few mental slots that form my Short Term Memory.

Finally I know where to start thinking. I'm very excited about that! I'm no longer overwhelmed by the myriads of possibilities which useless good advice forced me to reckon with.

Take for instance this little piece of silliness: "if you find a good move look for a better one". You don't want to know how many games I lost due to time trouble as a result of this idea. Chess is a fuzzy game for the human mind. We must abandon the idea of the best move. We are not able to find it, and when we have found something that looks like it, we have no ways to prove it. We should be looking for the first move that is good enough.

Actually, we shouldn't be looking for a move in the first place. We should look for a plan. Without a plan, we have no way to judge the aptness of a move. With a plan, we have pruned the tree of analysis already. Only the moves that support the plan, have to be taken into account. 

So what's the plan? I don't know yet. I just started to apply logical reasoning to the game.

Nimzowitsch wrote My System. Very few people seem to recognize the systematics in the book as a system, though. Nimzowitsch wanted to make a work of art, and he did! But pedagogically, that is a very poor choice. Yet I belief there really is a system in the book! We just have to decrypt it.

I'm looking for a few standard plans that can be applied to any chess game. Just to cut down on the pursuit of the best plan every time. I don't need the best plan, I'm happy with a good enough plan. I think Nimzowitsch has found just that. The investigation starts here and now!

4 comments:

  1. actually, we shouldn't be looking for a move in the first place. We should look for a plan. .. So what's the plan?

    1) Where to play? ( usually in the center, depends mainly on the pawn structure..)
    2) What to attack? ( a weakness, usually something immobile like a pawn or the king )
    3) how to play? ( according to the rules given by HTRYC , keep the position closed if you have a knight vs a bishop...)

    I did send you a set of very!! helpful texts about this last time

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    1. Yes you did. And I'm VERY grateful for that!! I read the material four times, so far. I made a summary of about 100 questions with answers based on the texts and put it in ANKI. Which I daily train. In fact, it is my main guide for my investigations. It is even the very reason why I no longer feel overwhelmed when I play.

      I consider it a good habit to reformulate the material in my own words. That helps me to digest the material. Which will be the subject of a lot future posts, I suspect.

      So thank you!!

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    2. There is some work left though; to write down the complete "pseodocode" which then shows.. its not quite thaaat simple. And i think its necessary to differ between the time , where the opponent is to move and when we are to move and if we are in time trouble or not.

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  2. I think you highlight an important practical insight for gaining chess strength: being able to consistently find and then execute a good plan, not necessarily always the best plan, at the board. This is a different situation than post-game "pure" analysis of a position, or the goal of always attempting to find the "best" move while playing, something which is often only knowable after the game (or maybe never). As you mention, this practice can also help greatly reduce unnecessary time-wasting calculations.

    When talking about pure tactics, the sit-on-your-hands advice, otherwise known as looking for a better move after you find a good one, I do think is helpful, if you take a relatively short amount of time to see if there are more effective moves. This especially matters when move sequence is important. If you find a mate in 4, though, it's silly to spend extra time trying for a mate in 3, there are no extra points in real life for winning more quickly.

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