THOUGHTS OF A CHESS ADDICT

Sometimes I wonder to myself what would be the most satisfying moment for a chess trainer? Is it the huge amounts of money that he can get from dishing out lessons, or rather, just the joy of the students' faces when they have achieved their goals? So far, 2010 has been a good year for me. Most of the students that were with me for more than a year have achieved mostly 50-60 rating point increases. The ones that joined me this year, some for just 5 months or less, have also performed well. I would rather not mention their names (mainly to protect the innocent) but display their photos. S has been with me for more than 2 years now, he has seen steady improvement from the days of scoring 3 to 3.5 pts out of 7 back in 2008.  His latest  SCF rating stands 1358 as compared to 1008 when he started. 350 pts in 2 years. He has just scored 5.5/7 and finished 6th place out of 120 registered players at the recent Toa Payoh West CC Primary School section.  The chief factor that prope...

Apart from the books that I have recommended, there's some works that the aspiring chess-player should at least read, once, in his career: This is the pioneering work by GM Alexander Kotov that explores the idea of how one should conduct his game in terms of thinking. Though a little dated in approach perhaps, one should at least attempt to start thinking systematically first before branching out into other methods. The Tree of Analysis indeed gives one a structure to organise a player's thoughts. So I highly recommend this book as a starting treatise before venturing to other books. It is indeed puzzling to see some marvel about joint analysis of positions as a possible training method. Kotov has explained that he embarked on this discipline, filling his notebooks with variations he calculated (without moving the pieces of course) over complex positions derived from actual games. It is propelled him from a finalist in the Russian Championships to GM. So honestly, deep analysi...

It is indeed hard for a non-chess player to write about chess if he does not speak the lingo of chess-players. Little wonder then that all of us chess-players will tend to misconstrue his intentions. Analysing why an outcome has occurred after the event, piecing the pieces of evidence that led to the outcome is called post-mortem analysis, not technical evaluation. All good chess players do that at the end of each game for it is rare that both players would arrive at the same conclusions at every juncture after each move, maybe except for the 1st few moves of the opening where it is accepted conventional wisdom. Aided by a reasonable thought process, it is mainly the evaluation of the position after analysis to determine if the move or idea is playable. Through analysis, one learns a great deal about his/her strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the area of chess study and character shortcomings which need to be addressed. Any amount of analysis will reveal, for the loser, errors i...

I've just come across an interesting remark made by a supposedly non-competitive chess player in that you will need "need the tools of developed judgement, understanding and advanced thinking skills " to come up with possibilities to save yourself when you are in trouble in a game.  This is under the scope of Technical Evaluation. Highly interesting because I am still trying to fathom the author's intent in the previous statement, as he has often renounced the importance of having the technical knowledge but rather the need of maintaining the right emotional balance to solve problems on the chessboard. What I find issue here is that much of the emotional stress that is generated is often in the player not having found the solution to his problem at hand in the first place. This can be address through good preparation in the realm of analysis of the players own games by discovering his faults and actively correcting them. After following the TV series "House"...

Chess maxims are abound, especially from acclaimed players like Siegbert Tarrasch who was the authority in explaining the importance of chess rules in his time. Today we have a summarised guide of these bits of advice in the form of the 2 books below:  This is the principles book for the intermediate player rated perhaps 1500 and above. The 17 chapters offer a wide range of advice from Attack, Move Selection, Calculation, Defence, Tactics and even Tournament tactics. I like #137:   "The most important novelties are hidden in the games of the old masters" That's why the study of the games of Alekhine, Nimzowitsch and Capablanca will gain you valuable insights on some of the plans they've used and are likely to spin off in positions of current theory.                                         ...

When one talks about confidence, a quiet knowing, what exactly does that mean?  I can only deduce that this confidence comes with fore-knowledge of a particular course of action leading to a predictable outcome. In chess, this translates to knowledge - in fact, GMs have about 100,000 bits of this knowledge in the form of principles of the 3 phases of the game, plus other patterns of chess tactics such as mating patterns, even endgame patterns where 1 look at the arrangement of pawns can determine the course of action to take. It is this knowledge that players need to seek, whether through the study of games, or by deduction in the course of analysing his/her own game. There will always be some positions where it will be impossible to calculate owing to the many ramifications of the variations pending on the player's understanding of the game. In fact, some of the correct moves may not even be discovered during the course of the game as that possibility may not have existed owing to...