Chess of Grandmasters: June 2013

Thursday 20 June 2013

Chess Strategies

“It’s not a move, not even the best move that you must seek, but a realizable plan.” Eugene Znosko-Borovsky on Chess Strategies

CHESS STRATEGIES YOU HAVE TO KNOW
Chess strategies refers to the knowledge you apply to devise a plan for the position. How often in your chess games do you reach the point where you feel: “Now I am not sure what I should do next”? The plan you finally decide on, will reflect your understanding of the nature of the position. Thus the first step in deciding on your chess strategy, is to evaluate the position and find a suitable plan based on your understanding of chess strategies. In turn, finding a suitable plan gives you the key to identify candidate moves. Without a good plan your candidate moves will be guesswork at best. You cannot effectively use your calculation and visualization skills without finding the logical candidate moves first. In essence, the concrete outcome of your strategy skill is to find good candidate moves.

CHESS STRATEGIES: KING SAFETY
An unsafe king is generally the greatest weakness a position can have. Typical elements that weakens the king’s safety:
1) Any weakness or absence of the pawn shield in front of the king
2) Fewer defenders than opposing attackers in the area near the king
3) Lack of centre control gives attacking pieces easier access towards the unsafe king
4) A king that delayed castling for too long (unless the centre is blocked)

Since the safety of the king is so important, it is one of the main principles of chess strategy during the opening stage of the game. The other important principles of chess strategy during the opening is effective development of the pieces and your share of control in the centre.

CHESS STRATEGIES: PAWN STRUCTURE QUALITY
The quality of the pawn structure can usually be judged by these factors:
1) How it supports and affects the mobility of the pieces
2) How dynamic it is (how easily it can change)
3) The presence of weaknesses like some isolated pawns
4) The squares which have been permanently weakened by pawn moves

If possible, weaknesses in the pawn structure should be fixed before they become permanent. Weaknesses in the pawn structure is only relevant if the opponent can attack them. Often you can have some form of compensation for a weakness in the pawn-structure which might well outweigh the disadvantages thereof.

CHESS STRATEGIES: PIECE QUALITY
Piece quality refers to the quality of the role that a piece plays in the position as well as how well it co-ordinates with the other pieces. Some determinants of the quality of the role the piece plays:

Mobility: The amount of squares available for the piece to move to gives an indication of its mobility. The more squares it can go to, the higher the quality of the piece will be.

Flexibility: How easily can it change its role? Pieces near the centre are usually more flexible than pieces on the flanks and therefore have a higher quality in this regard.

Stability: How easy is it for the opponent to exchange or remove a piece from its square? Pieces that can’t be easily removed have a higher stability value.

Importance of the task: Ideally a piece would perform both an attacking as well as defending role simultaneously. In some cases a piece would perform a very important defensive task, freeing other pieces for more aggressive roles.

Piece quality refers to how well a piece is performing compared to its potential, but piece quantity refers to the amount of pieces on the board. Having an material quantity advantage is the most important advantage you can achieve if the opponent does not have sufficient compensation for the material deficit. While it is often hard to obtain a material advantage against stronger players, achieving superiority in the quality of your piece placements can give you something to work with. Space advantage refers to one side controlling more squares of the board than the other side. Since this extra space will naturally increase the mobility and flexibility of your pieces THEN their quality will increase. It follows that the space advantage is one of the most important chess strategy advantages you should play for.

Initiative refers to the ability to continually make threats against the opposing position. This implies that the opponent has to respond to the threats and cannot find time to make the improvements he/she would like to make to their position. The initiative could be only a temporary advantage and the player with the initiative must play very accurately in order to make the most of it.

All the strategic principles are essentially aimed at helping you achieve superior activity.

CHESS STRATEGIES: CENTRE CONTROL
The importance of the control of central squares lies predominantly in the fact that it enhances the quality of your pieces, enabling them to fulfill more diverse roles and increasing their mobility. This ultimately means that your position is more flexible when you control the centre and it will be easier to create or take advantage of weaknesses in the opponent’s position. The situation in the centre is often the greatest determinant of the chess strategies you should follow in a game. The typical strategies follow logically from your observation of the situation in the centre, for example:

Blocked centre: When the centre is blocked and cannot open easily, you have more time to organize your pieces. The play will occur on the flanks of the board. Your chess strategy would then be to optimize the placement of your pieces and prepare to occupy any file that may open up. In blocked positions, control of a open file is often a useful advantage.

Open centre: An open centre demands that your chess strategy is to have very active pieces. In a situation where the centre is open but your pieces are placed passively, you will lose quickly. Minor weaknesses are often not so important in open positions, since a well conducted attack would decide the outcome of the game before the weakness can be exploited by the opponent. Positions with an isolated centre pawn is one example where the player with the “weak” isolated pawn get compensation in the form of more open lines for his/her pieces. Most pawn sacrifices are also based on this same chess strategy principle.

Dynamic centre: This simply means the situation in the centre is not yet clarified. In this case, your chess strategy should firstly be to clarify the situation in the centre. Taking offensive actions on either of the flanks whilst the centre situation is not yet clarified is often a mistake. If you attack on one of the flanks before the centre situation is clarified, a well timed counterattack in the centre could well prove your pieces to be offside and unable to sufficiently defend the weaknesses you created in your own position.

Well now this post was a mouthful. However, even if you studied all of it you still need to learn how to apply this knowledge. The information on this post should become second nature to you.

Secret Chess Strategies

Want to improve your chess game?

Chess is one of the most complex of board games. It takes a little time to learn the patterns of how each piece moves, but once you’ve got that down, all you need is a partner to engage in this superior game of strategy. It’s good to practice with someone who’s at about your level of skill (2100+ for 2100+ and 2500+ for 2500+), as you’ll both have an opportunity to learn without getting trashed every time in a few moves.

On the other hand, once you’ve reached a certain level of proficiency, you’ll want to confront more formidable opponents. If you lose, you’ll certainly know why and be better prepared for the next game. Here is a conceptual overview of chess strategies, why they work and when they might not prove to be be such an easy play.

You have sixteen pieces, with the traditional value of each piece listed in descending order: the King, Queen, two each of rooks, bishops and knights, along with eight pawns. That said, experience will teach you that different individuals always develop favored pieces. While one person will do anything to protect the Queen, another player may have no such loyalty to a given piece. Basic to a good chess strategy is knowing your opponent.

For example, you find a new chess pal and invite that person for a game. With a little careful observation, you’ll see which pieces they value over others. The chess player who adheres to the slash-and-burn philosophy may give up the Queen and trounce you in the process. Another player may be adept with the Knight, which incidentally, can land you in some untenable positions. Knowing the pieces your opponent values can shape your own effective chess strategies, based on his preferences.

The person who values all their pieces may be a dangerous opponent. Such people may be accomplished chess strategists who plan a couple of dozen moves in advance. That rook, laying in the weeds until the battle is fully engaged, can spell a terminal end for you. The knight, languishing in the center of the board in an apparently useless position, can prove disastrous to you in the end game.

No matter who you’re playing, take the time to question and analyze why your opponent made that last move (as always grandamster do). What board spaces does that move protect? Which spaces are made vulnerable? What move might your opponent have in mind to enhance the last move? Is it a sneak attack? If one of your pieces are thus placed in jeopardy, think beyond. Can you move a knight, such that you get a ’split’, a situation where you have your pick of two of your opponent’s pieces?

More than any other single factor, effective chess strategies require that you understand your opponent’s mind set. There are books on the subject, but in truth, there are thousands of chess strategies you might encounter. That’s what makes the game so much fun. Being a grandmaster is not funny.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

Bullet Chess

The utterly incompetent fools who play this online have to seen to be believed. Many a game just ends just that one player moved faster than the other. Even worse than blitz, there is absolutely no chess involved here, it is played predominantly by bored teenagers.

Note on GM bullet chess: High rated players do dabble in this, mostly to improve their reflexes and show off their ability to finish the game in the time allotted. Most GMs could defeat an average club player even if they just had 1 minute total for the whole game while the other player had say 40 minutes!

So you would expect that the majority of the players playing bullet chess to be great players, right? Wrong. They are morons, complete frigging morons. Do not just depend on bullet chess online. You would be a fool for thinking it will help you. So the best advice to those who want to improve their skills: do not play bullet only.

Playing too much blitz, especially online, programs your brain through repetition to play superficial chess. It's impossible to play practical real chess reliably during blitz. The psychology behind this is like rats pushing a button for a treat, or a couch potato constantly flipping channels with the remote. You perform an action, you get some stimulus as a reward and then you perform the action, you get the stimulus. So the best advice to those who want to improve their skills: do not play blitz only.

Regarding a comment below:

1) Playing speed chess might improve your time management skills and help you to think faster for a given situation, but it is a poor substitute for longer games.

2) Playing blitz should be supplemented by longer games. Carlsen and Nakamura play longer games too.

3) In any case, this post was mostly a rant about players "stuck" at some rating unable to improve and whose games are made up entirely of 1/0 2/0 timed atrocities won on time. All they do is play fast that they actually feel they are better than the player they beat on time even if the opponent is up by a queen. In reality they are just better at beating the clock than their opponent. Many of the players they beat on time will demolish them in a longer game. That was my point, obviously it does not apply to players in the caliber of Carlsen.

ONLINE BLITZ CRAP (or Chess for idiots)

The best way to learn chess is to play a lot: practice, practice and practice.

There are two common mistakes that beginners make regarding chess:

1) Memorizing Opening Moves - This is the single most asinine thing you could do if you want to improve your skills. Not only is it not going to improve your chess, it will probably make you hate chess. The majority of chess haters are those that tried this approach. The key is obviously to read up on strategy and tactics. Concentrate more on tactics, by the way. With practice you can easily develop tactical combinations and the rudimentary beginnings of sound opening practice, which you can finally supplement with basic opening theory.

2) The second biggest mistake would be to join an internet site and start playing blitz or bullet games. There is no way in hell that you would improve your skills in playing blitz or bullet. Blitz or bullet is all about thinking fast in much less time than you are normally allotted. Additionally, blitz and bullet games though thoroughly addictive do NOT improve your chess. In fact the opposite is true that your skills deteriorate. Online chess has not followed the time honored tradition of Chess. Many chess games on the internet are 5 minute 0 increment crapfests played between idiots who think that the objective of the game is to move the pieces in less time without being checkmated.

The online morons practically invented this chess variant, the Crappy Blitz, not to be confused with the blitz chess played by good players. (Note too that good players would be ashamed of winning on time with a severe material deficit) They might take the win, but this is the reason for the popularity of incremental clocks that would prevent this from happening..

These kids have a perverse mastery of moving pieces in less time, yet display a complete lack of rudimentary chess skill. Unfortunately, it is simply not enough of a chess deficit to let you checkmate them in 5 minutes. These are the same morons who excel at 5/0 but cannot play a 1 minute 6second inc game (it is much faster than 5/0 if less than 40 moves).

The reason being if they are down in material in the latter they will lose because the opp will always have 6 seconds to make a move. And if he is almost out of time, he can resort to checking to get some extra time. IN a 5/0 time you cannot do this and will lose no matter what despite being the superior player.

But, the most serious problem in online chess is the cheating and abusing of engines.

Tuesday 18 June 2013

How To Think Like a GM

Chess experts gain the edge over opponents by falsifying their own ideas.

For all you budding Kasparovs out there, a team of cognitive scientists has worked out how to think like a chess grandmaster. The secret is to try to knock down your pet theory rather than finding ways to support it - exactly as scientists are supposed to do.

"This is a new result in the psychology of chess, as far as I know," says Mark Orr, a chess enthusiast and Ireland's first international master. The research could help developing chess players to hone their skills, he adds.

In deciding which move to make, chess players mentally map out the future consequences of each possible move, often looking about eight moves ahead. So Michelle Cowley, a cognitive scientist and keen chess player from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, decided to study how different chess players decide whether their move strategies will be winners or losers.

Along with her colleague Ruth Byrne, she recruited 20 chess players, ranging from regular tournament players to a grandmaster. She presented each participant with six different chessboard positions from halfway through a game, where Black and White had equal chances of winning and there was no immediately obvious next move.

Each player had to speak their thoughts aloud as they decided what move to make. Cowley scored the quality of the move sequences by comparing them with Fritz 8, one of the most powerful chess computer programs available at that time.

She found that novices were more likely to convince themselves that bad moves would work out in their favour, because they focused more on the countermoves that would benefit their strategy while ignoring those that led to the downfall of their cherished hypotheses.

Conversely, masters tended to correctly predict when the eventual outcome of a move would weaken their position. "Grandmasters think about what their opponents will do much more," says Byrne. "They tend to falsify their own hypotheses."

"We probably all intuitively know this is true," says Orr. "But it's never a bad thing to prove it like this."

STRATEGIC THINKING

The philosopher Karl Popper called this process of hypothesis testing 'falsification', and thought that it was the best way to describe how science constantly questions and refines itself. It is often held up as the principle that separates scientific and non-scientific thinking, and the best way to test a hypothesis.

But cognitive research has shown that, in reality, many people find falsification difficult. Until the latest study, scientists were the only group of experts that had been shown to use falsification. And sociological studies of scientists in action have revealed that even they spend a great deal of their time searching for results that would bolster their theories. Some philosophers of science have suggested that since there is so much rivalry within science, individuals often rely on their peers to falsify their theories for them.

Byrne speculates that the behaviour may actually be widespread, but that it could be limited to those who are expert in their field. She thinks the ability to falsify is somehow linked to the vast database of knowledge that experts such as grandmasters or scientists accumulate. "People who know their area are more likely to look for ways that things can go wrong for them," she says.

Byrne and Cowley now hope to study developing chess players to find out how and when they develop falsification strategies. They also want to test chess masters in other activities that involve testing hypotheses - such as logic problems - to discover if their falsification skill is transferable. On this point Orr is more sceptical: "I've never felt that chess skills cross over like that, it's a very specific skill."