The chess world is flooded with good advice. During a game you have very little time to think, though. So everything that is not automated is going to hinder me. All those checklists and thinking models just confuse my mind.They eat up too many mental resources, and there is no time for that.
In 23 years I mainly have been busy to separate the weed from the chaff. It turned out that the knee deep good advice was for 90% just utterly nonsense. And the 10% that wasn't nonsense was totally inadequate. I had to find out myself under which precise conditions the advice works.
It has mainly been a process of elimination. That created a lot of room in my head, and since about a year I have been able to begin with adding some logical thinking to my chess. I consider my chess education to have begun a year ago.
Sofar, I focused on logic. Especially in two areas:
- between the openings I play and the ensuing attack on the king OR the ensuing endgame
- tactics, especially the tempo battle
For the first time, I obtained useful feedback from my games.
Yet, after about 9 months training with my new logic based training method, I couldn't shake off the nagging feeling that still something essential was missing. I started to know what to do, but I still failed in the execution of the how.
Despite all experimenting with every chess improvement method under the sun, I still had not found the method to educate system 1.
Yet I am convinced that I'm very close.
There is something odd about chess that is still confusing me. Only lately I have begun a precise scrutiny of the problem. I'm not easily to confuse in normal life. So what is so special about chess that I so easy lose my sense of direction?
I noticed the following. I remember from long ago the Tarrasch rule:
"In complicated Rook endings the most important rule is one laid down by the author: The Rook's place is behind the passed pawn; behind the enemy pawn in order to hold it up, behind one's own in order to support its advance"
I always struggled with the meaning of "behind". Where must my opponent place his rook relative to my pawn? Behind seen from his point of view or mine? Or must I use the point of view from the pawn?
I often have talked about the battle of the tempi. I noticed that there are all kinds of positive and negative tempi.
- When my opponent attacks my piece I need a tempo to save it
- When my piece trades off an attacker of my other piece, do I win a tempo?
- If my piece trades off an attacker that attacks my piece, do I win a tempo?
- If my opponent trades a defender that is under attack for an attacker of me with additional punch, how much tempi does he lose or win?
There are a few confusing parameters here. Is it a current threat? Is the threat executed? Is it a new threat in the ensuing position? Does the threat disappear due to an exchange? Does the threat disappear due to the movement of a piece? There is the change in point of view. Are we talking about my threats or his threats? Furthermore there is the value of the pieces. A queen that is protected by a pawn can be considered to be under threat when attacked by a rook but not when she is attacked by a queen.
Before you know it, there is a whole administration needed to keep track of the values, the tempi and the threats.
It is in fact system 2 that produces a word salad and is subsequently confused by it itself, because it runs out of free memory slots in its Short Term Memory.
The problem is not that system 2 needs to shut up, the problem is that it is allowed to confuse itself by its own word salads.
I suspect that the solution might be not so difficult as it may sound. What is wrong is that I halfway change my point of view from me to my opponent, that I mix up threats and values, and that I change my point of view when the timeline changes. Look at CCT. A check is a current problem. A capture describes a new situation in comparison to the old one, and a threat might be a current threat or a future threat.
I need a stable reference framework where I can refer everything to. Which does not change during consideration. When there is order in the logic, system 2 will cease to be confused.
Take for instance the tit-for-tat problem. I used to have great difficulty with that. Until I found out (with the help of you guys!) that I just had to obey to two rules: I must begin the sequence and I must end the sequence and the result will be beneficial. Since then I have no longer problems with tit-for-that problems.
This is going to be long.
ReplyDeletePART I:
I had somewhat of a personal epiphany last night. I was trying to work out parallels between Edwards' ideas and chess. As I was studying Chapter 11 - Using Your New Perceptual Skills for Creative Problem Solving, the section titled Computing and R-mode functions, pp. 244-245, triggered a blindingly obvious insight. First, here is the relevant excerpt.
In light of computer superiority in left-hemisphere functions and the thus-far slow computer development of right-hemisphere visual functions, it is astounding that American education is putting more and more stress [emphasis] on teaching and testing children on the very skills that are growing more redundant every year, while nearly completely eliminating any attempt to nurture powerful human right-hemisphere skills. [Note the emphasis on SKILLS, not KNOWLEDGE.] Decades ago, Professor David Galin proposed that we revise education in the following ways:
→ First, teach children about their own brains and the difference between the major thinking modes of the brain.
→ Second, teach children to be able to look at a problem and decide if one or the other brain mode would be more appropriate, or both modes working alternatively or cooperatively.
→ Third, teach children how to access the appropriate mode or modes and how to prevent interference by the inappropriate mode.
Switching to Cliff Notes mode, she continues with a discussion of the five stages of creativity and the appropriate mode(s) to be employed in each stage:
1 → Problem Finding ----- R-mode leading
2 → Saturation ----- L-mode leading
3 → Incubation ----- R-mode leading
4 → Illumination (The AHA!) ----- R-mode and L-mode celebrate the solution
5 → Verification ----- L-mode guided by R-mode visualization
PART II:
ReplyDeleteAs I noted in a recent comment:
Children in the earlier stages of learning go DIRECTLY to the WHOLE picture WORDLESSLY. They do not even attempt to verbalize, categorize, abstract or any other activity based on words; they just “SEE”!
THIS IS THE PRODIGY “TRICK”!
Not quite.
The blindingly obvious insight is simple:
The prodigy “trick” is simply stepping outside the confining “box” of knowledge and “rules” at will, when needed, as guided by System 1/System 2.
I place “rules” in scare quotes because we must KNOW the formal rules in order to play chess, and we acquire informal “rules” (general principles, heuristics, and axiomatic statements [like “Put your Rook BEHIND a passed pawn, whether it is yours or the opponents” – with the attendant problem of determining what BEHIND means]). As you note, a large percentage of this accumulated KNOWLEDGE is utter nonsense in terms of enabling chess improvement. We adults “eat up” such knowledge, especially when it is served up in word salads! The chess prodigy does not seem to suffer indigestion from this ever-increasing knowledge gluttony.
What is it that insulates the child prodigy from this adverse effect?
“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”
― Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village
Analogically, the one thing about which we ADULTS (apparently) know exactly nothing is the KNOWLEDGE we each have acquired. We ASSUME that if a little knowledge is a good thing, then an even greater accumulation of knowledge must be a GREAT thing. That knowledge can act as a filter to keep us “inside the box,” without us ever becoming aware that we are in a box! As GM Rowson put it, we can’t figure out WHY adult chess improvement is so elusive because we continually strive to increase our knowledge, which IS the problem:
“To my mind, the problem can be distilled into two main parts:
1) Most players seek to increase their KNOWLEDGE by learning new positions, and tend to study by “reading and nodding” as GM Nigel Davies put it. What they should be doing more often is honing their skis, however meager, by forcing themselves to THINK through training and playing.
2) KNOWLEDGE OFTEN GETS IN THE WAY OF SKILL, because it is NOT ‘innocent’ — and has to be constructed. This means that there will be limits to what you can learn by passive absorption and that you are more likely to make progress by UNLEARNING some of your existing ideas primarily through the honest and rigorous analysis of your own games.”
"What they should be doing more often is honing their skis, however meager, by forcing themselves to THINK through training and playing."
Deleteshould read:
"What they should be doing more often is honing their SKILLS, however meager, by forcing themselves to THINK through training and playing."
Although I guess honing your skis might be something to do if you are completely 'snowed' by this word salad!
PART III:
ReplyDeleteGM Davies (in Rowson’s book) also said this:
“I recently saw a newsgroup discussion about tournament preparation. Everything under the sun was mentioned from openings to endings and strategy to tactics with everyone having their own idea about how it should be done. I just commented that ’the HOW is more important than the WHAT’, leaving everyone who read this guessing as to what I meant. In fact the comment was deliberately enigmatic … It really doesn’t matter what you study; THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO USE THIS AS A TRAINING GROUND FOR THINKING RATHER THAN TRYING TO ASSIMILATE A MIND-NUMBING AMOUNT OF INFORMATION. In these days of a zillion different chess products, this message seems to be quite lost, and indeed most people [ADULTS, in particular] seem to want books to tell them what to do. The REALITY is that YOU’VE GOT TO MOVE THE PIECES AROUND THE BOARD AND PLAY WITH THE POSITION. Who does that? Amateurs DON’T; GMs DO.”
When reading that passage previously (multiple times!), based on my knowledge I ASSUMED that he was referring to moving the pieces around the board while FOLLOWING THE RULES. I now think he was describing doing what Capablanca did: just rearrange the pieces (without moves or variations) to accomplish your purpose.
If we are clueless that we ‘swim’ in a sea of useless knowledge, how do we go about reducing that knowledge?
Let’s look at the way a prodigy “SEEs” things in a relatively “simple” position. GM Kotov, the inventor of perhaps the most widely touted “thinking process,” tells this story about Capablanca in his book Think Like A Grandmaster:
“Once in a lobby of the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union Centre in Moscow a group of masters were analyzing an ending. They could not find the right way to go about things and there was a lot of arguing about it. Suddenly Capablanca came into the room. He was always fond of walking about when it was his opponent’s turn to move. Learning of the reason for the dispute the Cuban bent down to look at the position, said, ‘Si, si,’ and suddenly redistributed the pieces all over the board to show what the correct formation was for the side that was trying to win. I haven’t exaggerated. Don Jose literally pushed the pieces round the board without making moves. He just put them in fresh positions where he thought they were needed.
Suddenly everything became clear. The correct scheme of things had been set up and now the win was easy.
I got the following idea from this story: Capablanca was a child prodigy, and he learned to think outside the knowledge “box” of the rules—even the formal rules! He “knew” the rules for making moves: only one move per player per turn, and turns alternate between the two opponents. HE SIMPLY IGNORED THE RULES!! Consequently, as an adult, he continued to “SEE” past the rules. In short, he was aware of the KNOWLEDGE that he possessed and that it could be limiting. None of the masters analyzing the position were capable of doing such an unthinkable thing.
PART IV:
ReplyDeleteI found confirmation in another tome by IM Silman, How to Reassess Your Chess. He writes, pp. 30-31 (excerpt):
Once we find an interesting path we go to our next step: the creation of fantasy positions. Note that we are still not calculating any variations!
. . .
Notice what was done [to come up with the illustrated fantasy position]: Black just placed his pieces and pawns in the desired positions…he didn’t move them there!,/b> He then decides if this leads anywhere. A glance at the diagram [of the fantasy position] shows that Black would have good play. However it must be admitted that the construction of this setup would take several moves.
. . .
The one problem is timing; White’s plan is faster than ours. If we decided that we wanted to play this way we would then look for candidate moves, e.g. all the moves that aid us in setting up the desired [fantasy] position.
Again, evidence that strong players (IM Silman was GM-level IM by rating) who learned as child prodigies are NOT constrained by the rules when imagining how things are going to happen n the board.
There is nothing ILLEGAL in violating the chess rules—in your head!!
PLAY LIKE A PRODIGY!
I missed an ending bold [,/b>] in that comment. Sorry about that.
ReplyDeletePART V:
ReplyDeleteA personal experience regarding the idea of ‘violating the rules’ when analyzing. I was in the US Air Force out in California USA (a hotbed of chess playing then and now) with Richard Bustamente, a strong young chess master (rated nearly 2400 USCF) who once placed third in the Monterey International Tournament (sometime between 1970 and 1973; I don’t remember the exact year). I was an improving Class B (1600-1800 USCF) at the time, I ran the local chess club on the air base and another one off-base. I won the base championship 3 years in a year – solely because Richard never entered it. I was the highest rated player (other than him) in the local area, and he had nothing to prove by stomping a bunch of lowly class players into the dirt. I suspect he would likely have lost ELO points merely by playing us.
Periodically, he would invite me to analyze with him after he played in a tournament. For some reason, it seemed to help him clarify sticky points in his analysis of his own games if he had someone to raise questions, allowing him to demonstrate his ideas — and, WOW!, did I have questions! One of the most confusing things (to me) that he did while analyzing would be to shuffle the pieces around while he was trying to figure out what to do or how to do it better. Sometimes it would take the form of a sequence of moves, but many times, it would be just to move a piece to where it made sense to him. Just like Capablanca did with that endgame, he would just move each piece to a new square (without any regard for the rules) until he was satisfied that he understood what was going on in the position. My only positive contribution was an occasional question regarding WHY he moved that particular piece in that way. He never gave me a “word salad” to digest or ridiculed me for being so “stupid” (or “blind”) but would simply point out the enhancement in function of the piece in its new location.
It was thanks to watching him analyze that enabled me to finally reach 1810 USCF (just barely in Class A USCF). Unfortunately for me after a year or so, he transferred away, and I lost the best (and only) training “instructor” I ever had.
I never "connected the dots" between chess prodigies and what he was doing until now.
FEN: 8/8/8/8/5k2/1p3pR1/bK5P/8 b - - 0 1
ReplyDeleteI offered this position as a “test” position from Weteschnik back in a comment on 25 MAY 2016. The purpose then (as now) is to illustrate the idea of localization of vision and the need to find the relationship between the parts in order to “SEE” the whole (the solution).
The perception of edges (boundaries) begins by “SEEing” the logic contained within the local areas. Area 1 is the local battle between WRg3, WPh2, BKf4 and BPf3. Area 2 is the local battle between WKb2, BBa2 and BPb3. A potential relationship (if it exists) between the two areas is not obvious.
It does NOT matter which area is examined first (this holds true in general) – as long as both (all) areas are seen and analyzed. Think of this step as similar to deciding on what is to be in a drawing composition. The format (the boundary of the board) is established by the formal chess rules.
So let’s look for “lines” to draw. Starting with area 1, it appears that Black can simply advance the BPf2, queening the pawn. However, White has the capability to capture the newly minted Queen by checking from f8. This is an important LoA! It prevents Black from rushing the pawn forward.
Switching to area 2, it is obvious that White can stop any movement of the Black Bishop by simply capturing it. Consequently, White King can stop the Black Bishop AND the BPb3 from moving – but that in turn immobilizes the White King. In essence, this is a battle over the b2-square blockade square.
Another key point is that Black has the right to move first. That is a tempo advantage in itself!
Now we look at what has been found so far, looking for potential relationships. The White Rook can attack the BBf3 if it advances hastily along the LoA f8-f1. A pity there is no way to block that LoA!
Now let’s IGNORE the chess rules! We’re going to connect the two areas by a fantasy move. As (when) needed, we’ll simply pick up BBa2 and drop it to block the WRf8 LoA. Since we don’t want the White Rook to capture WITH CHECK, we’ll drop it on f5, where it is protected by the Black King.
Now the hard mental work begins of finding the connection between the two areas. How can we make sure that the Black Bishop can execute this maneuver?
Here is where the tempi come into play. Any move WITH CHECK gains a tempo. Is there any way to move the Black Bishop to b1 that enables a check?
Let’s see: if we play 1… f2 2. Rg8 we’ve already eliminated 2… f1(Q) 3. Rf8+ K moves 4. Rx
f1 as winning for White.
BUT – IF the White King is on b1, THEN promoting the Black pawn would occur WITH CHECK, giving that needed tempo to promote safely!
WHAT YOU “SEE” IS ALL THERE IS!
The resolution becomes “obvious”: 1… f2. 2. Rg8 Bb1 (threat to block the f8-f1 LoA) 3. Kxb1 (forced) f1(Q)+ 4. K moves and the Black Queen moves off the f8-f1 LoA.
Queen versus Rook and pawn should be a win, notwithstanding that we still have to finish “winning the game”.
This is a small sequence within the entire game. Other problems remain to be solved to conclude with a win, but this is as close to winning as we need to get in one series of moves.
Yeah, I remember that one!
Delete