Temposchlucker

 This might well be the most important post from the last years. So what's the trick then? Understanding and scenarios are closely related. You can't learn the trick without scenarios. But scenarios are not the essence of the trick. The trick is to see what a move does. You can find out what a move does by fiddling around with standard scenarios. Take for instance the following scenario: White to move r1b2rk1/p1qn1ppp/1p1bpn2/2ppN3/3P1P2/1P1BP3/PBPN2PP/R2QK2R w KQ - 0 3  In this diagram, you are close to a standard scenario in the Colle Zukertort. It is not winning yet, although Stockfish gives it about 0.5. Black must do a few things wrong and white must do a few things right before you can count a point. The idea is to open the long diagonal by two tempo moves (Nxd7 and dxc5), then throw the two bishops to the king position to get rid of Nf6 and h7 (again, with tempo) and mate the black king with Queen, Rook and / or Knight. I was fiddling around and asked myself the questi...

 Learning chess by investigating how the scenarios emerge from the variations is a daunting task. The logical way is of course the other way around. When you know the scenario, you should be able to propose a possible variation. In practice, you will always have to work with what a chess author provides you with. A chess author has a few reasons to withhold information from you. Usually with the best intentions: he doesn't want to overload you his publisher doesn't want the book to be too thick he wants to protect you from too complicated matter he wants to be complete so he floods you with irrelevant details to give it a scientific impression he makes choices for you he leaves out what is obvious for him Personally I suffered a lot from some books of GM Euwe about the opening and the endgame, which I experienced as quite boring. Even to the extent that I quit chess for 14 years. Only when I found the books of GM Joe Gallagher about the King's Gambit, I rediscovered my joy ...

Of the past 26 years I spent 23 years on how to learn chess. Only the last 3 years I have begun  to think about the game itself. I happen to play the French defense these 3 years. The French revolves around two main ideas: get rid of the French bishop on c8 nibble on the pawns of the opponent's center until it dissolves White has usually a lot of space behind his pawns. He must use this to attack the black king. Without his light squared bishop it is close to impossible to make this attack work.  Once the white center dissolves, the white position is vulnerable for invasion because the pieces cannot protect so much space. Furthermore, when black has two center pawns and white has not, you can use your center pawns as a mobile steamroller to invade white's territory. Instead of telling you this simple story, chess authors have a tendency to flood you with 600 variations. Because they themselves are addicted to concrete calculation. They use writing a book as an excuse to indulg...

 This morning I had a long chat with Gemini about language learning for adults. The similarity with my findings in chess learning is striking: Understanding . 95% of the learning should be based on understanding Shadowing . Only lately I learned to appreciate the learning based on a close observation of titled commentators who are playing or watching other players play. Frequency of occurrence. A long term pet subject of me. Focus on what happens in each and every game. Preferably every few moves. Spaced repetition. A necessary hack of the forgetting brain. Interest in certain aspects of the game. Only lately I am starting to develop a specific interest in the Vukovic gap of the game. Hence I put endgames on the backburner. Prof. Elan Barenholz has an interesting hypothesis about how certain parts of our brain have a lot in common with LLM's (Large Language Models). As a child, our mind is filled with all kinds of knowledge. That starts before we can even speak. That is why west...

 Now the dust has settled around the scope of the trick, it's time to have a fresh look at the implications. For those who haven't followed, the trick is what John Watson describes as "concrete calculation" and what I describe as "understanding". It is exactly the same. The only difference is that it didn't speak for itself for me until now. The reason that I call it understanding is because I have to understand it yet, while the titled player already understands it. So he doesn't realize that that is the problem. Before you call it understanding, after you call it concrete calculation. Knowledge is superficial. Because you can construct what knowledge does we are inclined to think that we understand the matter. But construction is done by system 2. Hence it is slow and error prone. Understanding is about the same knowledge, but now you have absorbed it. You know what it does without the need to construct it by system 2. It is ready for immediate use...

 Due to the work of prof. Adriaan the Groot, we nowadays mainly think of patterns when we think of calculation. The more patterns we have collected the better. Some of us (me) will add the frequency of occurrence to that. The transfer problem is how to teleport the knowledge from one position to the other. We solved it by focusing on conceptualization of the solution. Pruning of the tree of analysis is done by logic. Logic is destructive by nature, and it shows which variations are not worth calculating. And the latest finding is understanding. In understanding, logic and patterns are combined, while system 1 and system 2 look over the shoulder of attention. How does this work in practice? Black to move 2r5/4k1pp/p2p4/BpnPp3/4q3/5Q2/PP1K1bPP/3R1R2 b - - 5 28 The pattern at hand is the following killbox: From this pattern we can build the following logical narrative: To get the rook from c8 to c2 we need to clear the c-file with tempo Nb3+ does the job White is now looking for a mov...

 Citation from an interview with Sindarov in El País "Like Gukesh, the rival he’ll be thinking about night and day from now until the end of the year, and almost all the other chess stars born in the 21st century, Sindarov has not studied the classical masters. He has not read the My Great Predecessors series, where Garry Kasparov, the world champion from 1985 to 2005, meticulously analyzes the best games of the great champions since the 19th century. That book was considered the “Bible of chess,” at the very least essential reading, even for the Norwegian player Magnus Carlsen, the current undisputed number one at 35.   But not for geniuses in their twenties or younger: “It’s very rare that I read books. My coach insists on it, but I prefer that he teach me things at the board. For example, I’ve never looked up games of great champions of the past on my own, like [Cuban player José Raúl] Capablanca [who was champion a hundred years ago] or [Soviet player Mikhail] Bo...