Getting into chess...

This blog is moving!

2006-09-14T19:24:00.000-04:00

This is the 53rd post on this blog and it will be the last under this address. I decided to move the Getting Into Chess blog to my new chess website, SquirrelChess.com. Originally, I used SquirrelChess.com only to host my small collection of annotated games and to experiment with content management systems (CMS). However, the more I learnt about CMS and particularly Joomla!, the more I liked it. CMSs are a bit like various blog services like Blogger: content is created and edited with simple web forms and not much knowledge about programming is needed to produce nicely formatted webpages, although the content is stored in a database and the webpages are dynamically generated. In contrast to pure blog platforms, however, Joomla! is extremely flexible and allows to create more complex websites. Therefore, I decided to take this experiment public and move this blog to its new home.

Please update your bookmarks to point to SquirrelChess.com, and if you are running a blog or website yourself and link here, I would appreciate if you could also change the links in your blogroll - thanks!. All old posts have been copied to the new site, but I will not delete the old blog posts here to avoid breaking links to old articles. New material will be posted exclusively at SquirrelChess.com, though. I assembled a link page with the links from the blogroll of this blog and a few more. I hope that I transferred everything correctly, if not, please get in touch with me and let me know.

The RSS feed hosted by Feedburner will continue to work. However, if you belong to one of the very few people who subscribed to my RSS feed before I started using Feedburner in April, you will have to update the feed's address by clicking here and following the instructions to subscribe to the new newsfeed.

Finally, I'd like to thank all visitors of this blog, particularly those who left all the insightful comments - I learnt a lot from you! (Unfortunately, I did not find a way [yet] to move the comments to the new site)

From the news: a brief history of cheating in chess

2006-09-08T12:00:00.000-04:00

After the cheating scandal at July's World Open in Philadelphia the chess blogosphere and even mainstream news media were full of reports on cheating in chess tournaments (too bad that bad news always gain more attention than good news). The Sun Star just published an interesting article on the topic giving a brief history of cheating and some pretty funny cheating accusations involving yogurt at chess tournaments.

Mystery chess position V: messing a perfectly good endgame up

2006-08-29T18:06:00.000-04:00

The position shown on the right with white (me) to move is from on eof my recent games at ChessWorld. White has the material advantage and a promising passed pawn on the g-file. The game started balanced until black made a tactical mistake on the 35th move and I was able to keep the advantage for 20 moves until I finally managed to come up with a series of really bad moves. It started with 55. g6 - passed pawns have to be pushed, right? As usual, rules do have exceptions. There is only one sensible move for white in the shown position. What is the correct move? (Hint: it is not 55. g6 ;-)

Lately, I have been playing mostly against players whose ratings are above mine (in this case, the difference is about 150 points). Therefore, I am loosing most of my games but I hope to improve faster by playing against stronger opponents. In the few games where I manage to obtain an advantage, I tend to make devastating mistakes in the endgame. It seems that there is some mental barrier making me look for "killer moves" instead of ensuring that all my pieces are safe (see also the interesting article "When You're Winning, It's a Whole Different Game" [pdf format] by Dan Heisman at chesscafe.com). Even after 55. g6, however, the game was not lost. Take a look at the full game with annotations for more hints on making bad moves in the endgame.

How important is repetition for acquiring pattern recognition skills?

2006-08-25T18:49:00.000-04:00

A bit more than one month ago, I decided to start to do some regular tactics training on the Chess Tactics Server (CTS). Using CTS to improve chess skills is still a hot topic in the chess blogosphere and a small but growing group of chess bloggers, most notably Temposchlucker, Transformation, and General Kaia, put a significant effort into solving tactics problems on the Chess Tactics Server. One attractive feature of CTS is the huge amount of available problems. On one hand, this guarantees variety. On the other hand, it (almost) prevents that problems have to be solved repetitively. Repetition, however, is considered as very important for transferring the knowledge of tactical positions to long-term memory. This raises the question, how useful is solving chess tactics problems with a very low repetition rate at CTS to improve chess skills?

Several scientific studies tried to address the difference between grandmasters and the common patzer. The huge skill differences between grandmasters and even good amateur players can be observed in simultaneous exhibitions. One grandmaster plays seemingly effortless against dozens of amateur chess players and wins most, if not all, of the games even though the grandmaster's thinking time is sometimes only few seconds per move! This immense difference in ability is attributed to the grandmaster pulling information about the positions out of his long-term memory, which is a very fast process, while amateurs have to analyze the position. The efficient use of long-term memory for a complex game like chess requires storage of a substantial amount of positions, or so-called "chunks", in the long-term memory. Many common techniques to memorize information base on spaced repetition: the information is memorized repeatedly until it is finally safely stored in long-term memory.

This method can be also applied to studying chess tactics. A set of tactics problems is solved over and over again until solving them becomes automatic - the solution is recognized on first sight without the need for analyzing the position. There is only one problem with chess: the number of possible chess positions is astronomical. Therefore, the brain has to rely on recognizing the most important features of the position instead of the position of each individual piece on the board. For instance, there are well-known tactical themes such as forks, skewers, etc. An individual position with a knight forking king and rook may be unique and may never repeat in any chessgame. The general characteristics of the position, for example that the forked pieces have to be on squares with the same color, are always the same. Therefore, it is not necessary to repeat individual positions to achieve the skill to play a knight fork. Playing through a large number of different problems where knight forks occur will also do the trick. But which approach is more efficient to develop chess tactics skills?

She short answer is: I don't know. People became chess grandmasters before the availability of databases or even books with large collections of tactical problems. Therefore, repetition of individual problems is definitely not necessary to acquire a high level of tactical skills. Individual problems are only rarely repeated during CTS sessions. Tactical pattern, such as the knight fork, however, are repeated. I speculate that the very low rate of repetition of individual positions together with repeated occurrence of specific patterns such as forks might actually be very effective for learning tactics because the brain is forced to learn recognizing the essential pattern instead of specific complete positions. Proving this, however, would require a long-term study with many players using a very controlled training regime, something that certainly collides with the pronounced individualism of chess players. For now, I can only say that I am making some progress with training on the Chess Tactics Server and I even see (or want to see) some positive influence of that in my games. But more about that in a later post.

Studying chess endgames: how important are pawnless positions?

2006-08-13T19:44:00.000-04:00

I finally started to study chess endgames and decided that it might be best to actually start at the beginning of the book (I am currently using Bruce Pandolfini's "Pandolfini's Endgame Course"). However, every endgame book I looked into starts with studies of elemental checkmates and other positions without pawns. However, positions without pawns rarely occur in chess games. This makes me wonder if it actually makes sense to spend a lot of time analyzing these positions.

First of all, one might say that pawnless positions are much less complex than positions with pawns. Therefore, it cannot possibly take that much time to go through these introduction(?) chapters. To my surprise, it turned out that even in clearly won positions it can require accurate play to actually execute the win. As Blue Devil Knight also reported recently, examples such as K+B+N vs. K are definitely won but can be tricky to execute even for good players. Therefore, it takes a lot of time to develop an understanding of even the most basic positions, the elementary mates.

This week I decided to "graduate" from the elementary mates and to move on to the battle between heavy pieces. In general, the queen (white) wins against a single rook (black). However, black has drawing chances if she/he manages to keep the rook next to the king. Among the chess positions analyzed by and named after the chess master Francois-Andres Danican Philidor (1726-1795) is also the queen vs. rook endgame position shown on the left. This is a zugzwang position. With black to move and forced to move her/his rook away from the king, white wins quickly. Regardless which move black chooses, white can either checkmate or capture the black rook with a queen fork. For instance, the only legal move for the black king, 1. ... Kh6 allows white to pin and capture the rook with 2. Qf8. Moving the rook by playing, e.g., 1. ... Ra7 enables white to capture it by 2. Qe4+ Kh8 3. Qh1+ Kg8 4. Qg1+ forking black's king and rook. However, it is white's move. White's goal is to get in the same position as shown above, but with black to move. This can be achieved by playing 1. Qe4 Ka8 2. Qa8 Kh7 and after 3. Qe8 the pieces are back on their original positions with black in zugzwang. White wins as described above.

As mentioned above, it took me quite a while to comprehend Philidor's position. One of the reasons for my troubles studying these seemingly simple chess positions is that I am still not able to analyze variations longer than, say, 2 moves. In chess endgame positions, the number of possible moves is typically much lower than in typical middlegame positions. However, it is often necessary to carefully analyze much longer variations to prevent the opponent from escaping or even forcing a draw. As a consequence, I came to the conclusion that studying very basic endgames will probably help me to improve my general ability to analyze positions.

From the news: play chess against the ocean's tides

2006-08-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, an unusual blitz chess tournament will happen on the North Sea's ground before the German island Baltrum. The tournament will start at between high and low tide when the water is running off and the rising water of the upcoming tide will add to the pressure on the participants of what is described as the "only lightning chess tournament on the bottom of the sea". See here for details and a photo of last year's event (in German, English translation here).

Just in time endgame study part II - nearly there!

2006-08-02T18:19:00.000-04:00

As discussed in this previous post, it should be possible to study endgames as they are coming up during correspondence chess games. If "just in time" deliveries help car manufacturers become more efficient, why not doing the same in chess? The slow pace and explicit encouragement of the use of chess books enables just in time studies during correspondence chess games. A week or so ago, I browsed through a used book store and found (surprise!) a small shelf filled with chess books. Not that I need another one - in fact, I promised myself not to buy more chess books before I work through the ones I already own, but well... After extensive browsing I finally grabbed a nearly new copy of Reuben Fine's "Basic Chess Endings". Good decision, because apparently, Fine's work is (was?) the chess endgame "bible", for more about the book see Anthony Saidy's insightful review at Jeremy Silman's web site (By the way, I learnt from the review that even grandmasters consult books during adjourned games. And I always thought grandmasters have everything in their memory...).

The diagram on the left shows the position from one of my recent games on ChessWorld after 45. ... Rh4 with me playing white to move. I figured with as few as two rooks and three pawns left on the board, it might be worth to take a look in "Basic Chess Endings". I have to admit that I was quite surprised to find out how complex rook and pawn endgames are (at least to a beginner like me who never seriously thought about them). Therefore, I decided to simplify it further by playing 46. b5. I was sure that black's response would be ...Rh5 to skewer my K and P and after playing 47. Ke4 Rxb5 48. Rxh7 only one pawn would be left over reducing the analysis in "Basic Chess Endings" to just slightly more than 20 pages of densely written variations. Of course, there are other possible replies for black such as 46. ... h6 but during the post-mortem computer analysis it seemed to me that all variations sooner or later lead to captures leaving only one black pawn on the board. White is then able to obtain a draw if he/she manages to maneuver the king in front of the black pawn. The full game with annotations can be found here.

The most surprising thing that I learned from this just-in-time study was how complex even these very simple endgames can become. On the other hand, I had fun analyzing the position, something I never really imagined since I started to do some basic endgame study. My previous lack of motivation to study endgames is probably due to the fact that I started and got stuck with elementary mates, which seem just much too far from reality to be interesting. This game, however, got me interested in learning more about endgames. Unfortunately, there is still one big limiter: time.

Mystery chess position IV: from a milestone game

2006-07-24T17:41:00.000-04:00

The position on the right (white to move) is from a game I just won at ChessWorld. The game represents a personal milestone for two reasons: firstly, even after a computer analysis, I did not find any serious mistakes among my (white's) moves except for missing a tactical opportunity at the end of the game, but more about this later. Secondly, this is one of the games where I tried to carry out an attack plan as mentioned in an earlier post. To my surprise, it worked!

But back to the position on the right after black played 22. ... Qd7. White now has the chance to play a winning move. Hint: it was not the 23. e4 I played here. My plan was to double the heavy pieces on the f-file after 23. ... fxe4 24. fxe4. Fortunately, I did realize two moves later that there is a better opportunity than that. The complete game with the solution to this problem can be found here.

Tactics training on the Chess Tactics Server

2006-07-22T13:31:00.000-04:00

This blog moved to SquirrelChess.com. Please click here for the current version of this article!

The evolution of my playing style and typical mistakes

2006-07-20T14:59:00.000-04:00

As time goes on my chess games evolve, too. At the beginning of my chess endeavors, I was happy if I managed not to loose too many pieces early in the game. Recently, I observed that I don't blunder as frequently as I used to. I hope doing tactics puzzles finally pays off a little. The ratings increase at ChessWorld that comes with that now lets me play in tournaments against stronger players than previously. Therefore, I also can't rely on them happily hanging pieces anymore. But of course chess ability is more complex than being able to solve a few one-move tactics problems. Therefore, I am running in some new (for me) problems.

First of all I think I exchange too many pieces too quickly without gaining anything. This means that many games are decided in a pawn (and rooks) endgame, assuming that neither me or my opponent blundered. This has two major disadvantages: Firstly, these games tend to be rather dull because less pieces on the board also means that there are less chances for an exciting attack. Secondly, I tend to play really bad in the endgame (see my previous post for an example of how to not play in the endgame).

If I want to improve further, I will have to do two things: 1) study endgames. For some reason, I seem to be like the majority of amateur chess players. Most of them realize that endgames are important, but for some reason (almost) nobody seems to like to study endgames. What is it that makes endgame study so much less desirable than, say, tactics? 2) Learn how to attack. In the best spirit of this, I tried to play more aggressive in my current games at ChessWorld. In two games, I sacrificed a knight, only to learn one move later that my ideas for the attacks were easily refutable by responses that I simply overlooked. Seems I have to do more tactics problems to improve my board vision... In the third game, however, things seem to work out - I won a piece and have the initiative, at least until now. That brings me to the real question: how does one learn to attack in chess games? I am not talking about gaining a piece or even winning by checkmate by using some tactics. Rather, how does one put positional pressure on the opponent until the opportunities for tactical moves come up? My current plan is to study a few master games with the openings I usually play to figure that out. Other ideas are of course welcome!

Update: one of the three tries to attack mentioned above worked out for me, see this post.

Mystery chess position III: my first endgame study

2006-07-16T18:57:00.000-04:00

The position on the left with black (me) to move is from one of my recent games at ChessWorld. I ended up loosing the game because of an outrageous blunder at move 47 that was followed by immediate checkmate (Congratulations to my opponent beartrostle). Anyway, I noticed that I tend to loose less material lately and as a consequence a larger fraction of my games is decided in the endgame. Unfortunately, I am utterly clueless on using my pawns properly. Here, for instance, I played 45. ... f5 with the idea to attack the lonely white b-pawn. This turned out to be a big mistake! As usual, click here for the fully annotated game.

Loosing the game motivated me to take a closer look at this endgame. During the game, I thought that black has better chances because the white rook is tied up defending the pawn on the h-file and black has 2 vs. 1 pawn on the other side of the board. After playing through several variations with the help of Shredder (see my recent review), however, it looks more like a draw to me. Black can check the white K in order to remove the defender from the white b-pawn but after move sequences like 45. ... Ra3+ 46.Kg2 Kg4 47.Rg8+ Kf5 48.Ra8 Ra2+ 49.Kh3 Kg5 50.Rg8+ things are basically back to the starting point (if black makes sure to prevent white from promoting the h-pawn, which I did not). Does anyone see a winning strategy for either side? As far as my understanding goes, the key defensive strategy for black is to prevent white from advancing the h-pawn. Once it is on the 7th rank, white can use the rook to check the black king and promote the pawn on the next move. After that, black is forced to capture the newly born queen with ... Rxa8 and white ends up winning a rook by recapturing with Rxa8.

The biggest problem for me is to learn how to analyze this kind of situation. Endgames consist of much more moves than standard tactical problems. I tried to learn from observing what the computer plays from the above starting position, but most moves simply did not make much sense to me. Therefore, I might be better off spending time playing through more simple situations from beginner-level endgame books than to look at my own games (at least for now). Speaking of that, see PE's chess cast blog for a nice movie explaining the principles behind "bad" bishops in endgames.

The life expectancy of chess players

2006-07-10T12:04:00.000-04:00

Many amateur players look with envy at the (nearly) perfect play of chess grandmasters. But it seems that chess grandmasters have to pay a price for their extraordinary ability. I browsed through a copy of "The psychology of chess skill" by Dennis H. Holding and found that the average life expectancy of outstanding chess players is almost one decade shorter than the life expectancy of minor masters (60.1 vs. 68.1 years, respectively. However, the cited study is from 1969, so today's GMs likely live longer). Dennis Holding attributes this to the stress of tournament play and points out that players "[...] who led professional lives outside chess survived a decade longer [...]". So don't worry if you don't find time to study chess or play many tournaments - may be it is better for you!

Software review: Shredder Linux chess engine

2006-07-02T15:15:00.000-04:00

Please click here for the current version of the Shredder Linux chess software review. More reviews can be found in the reviews section at SquirrelChess.com.

Six months into chess - light at the end of the tunnel

2006-06-29T22:29:00.000-04:00

Time is always running faster than expected and now it is already 6 months ago since I got interested in chess. It would be nice if I would have a quantitative measure for my progress like a runner stopping the time for a one-mile run. Of course, there are all kinds of rating systems for chess. However, I still did not play enough rated games to be able to see a statistically significant trend. Nevertheless I feel that all the time I spend studying chess was not wasted. First of all, I still enjoy it (which is quite a surprise to myself, because I stick only to very few things). Secondly, I can see some light at the end of the tunnel: At the beginning, I tended to drop pieces even in the ultra-slow correspondence chess games I play. But lately I feel that the number of outright blunders in my games decreases slowly. I believe that this is due to the time I spend doing one-move tactical problems over and over again. At least I hope so, because I am still afraid that I will commit a series of terrible blunders as soon as I submit this article.

Three months ago, I set a few goals for the future. For instance, I vowed to spend less time surfing chess web sites. I am still wasting too much time searching the cyberspace for the "magic cure" that will transform me into a chess master. I do know that it is more about hard work and patience, but well...

On the positive side, I did more tactics puzzles and worked my way through a bunch of annotated master games, although I pretty much stopped this practice two weeks ago due to lack of time. I also started to use the same openings in all of my games. But so far I have only an opening for playing white (Colle System) and a defense against 1. e4 (Scandinavian). I chose these mainly because they are supposed to be relatively easy to learn and did not spend much time on playing these lines well enough and I am still learning the traps by trial and error. Just challenge me (sciurus) for a game at ChessWorld to set a few traps for me or just to have a fun game!

Chess blogging - truly international

2006-06-24T10:17:00.000-04:00

At some point, probably every blogger get curious and tries to find out if actually anybody is reading her/his articles. After looking at the visitor information provided by statcounter I got quite excited seeing that chess blog readers are coming from all over the world. This activated my ancient gathering instincts and I started to "collect" countries. Up to now, readers from 42 different countries (see below) visited "Getting Into Chess". The majority of my blog readers (about 35%) come from the USA followed by Canada, and I just noticed the first visitor from the arguably greatest chess nation - Russia (I thought all people there would be chess masters, so it is a mystery to me why somebody from Russia would read the thoughts of a beginner, must be some kind of accident).
Best wishes and many good chess games to all of you! Please let me now if I missed your home country. List of countries in alphabetical order: Argentina, Australia, Bahrein, Barbados, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, and Zambia.

What is a good way to improve in the endgame?

2006-06-21T11:28:00.000-04:00

Whenever my games at ChessWorld bring me to an endgame situation I start to struggle. It seems paradox that I have a harder time to develop valid ideas for playing in situations with less pieces on the board. It seems to me that fewer pieces on the board means also that it is necessary to calculate much deeper variations, a skill that I lack for sure.

From this experience I agree with the often heard opinion that studying chess endgames is one of the most important things for improving in chess (may be second after tactics?). But what is the most efficient way to improve in the endgame? In contrast to tactics, I found little information on good ways to improve playing endgames. Sure, there are plenty examples such as the weekly endgame study at chesscafe.com or the almost daily problems at Susan Polgar's blog. But in contrast to tactics, I got the impression that pattern recognition is less important in endgames than knowledge and techniques, for instance how to protect or block a passed pawn.

As chess novice, I feel overwhelmed by this. Should I simply go ahead and try to solve a few endgame problems a week or do I have to study rules that tell me if a particular situation such as "R vs. N+P" is a win or draw and try to get into the winning situations? What are good books or web resources on endgames that are suitable for beginners? All suggestions are welcome!

Learning how to exploit (big) weaknesses

2006-06-12T13:14:00.000-04:00

After working my way through Irving Chernev's "Logical Chess" (see my earlier review), I was up for another game collection. Most books focus on games played by chess masters. Not surprisingly, these games are very different from the games I play. The rules are of course the same, but in contrast to games played by masters, in my games sooner or later either my opponent or me make a (big) mistake. This can be a tactical mistake causing a material advantage for one side or some positional misbehavior that ultimately also leads to the loss of a piece or more. These things (almost) never happen when chess masters play against each other - the decisive factors are much more subtle than in amateur games. Therefore, these relatively big mistakes are not discussed in books like Chernev's "Logical Chess". Although I really enjoy playing through master games and think I gained chess knowledge from doing so, I feel that it may be more efficient for a chess beginner like me to learn exploiting not-that-subtle mistakes (avoiding them myself would be even better, but that is a different story).

If one can learn from re-playing and analyzing other people's chess games, then why not studying games played by a chess master facing an amateur? Therefore, I bought a copy of Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur, a collection of chess games with the world champion Max Euwe playing against the amateur Walter Meiden. However, I did not see many people recommending this approach (with the exception of one article in Dan Heisman's column at chesscafe.com, although the basic idea of studying games by players that make mistakes like me (and most of my opponents, because most of my games are against opponents that are around the same strength as myself) against (almost) perfect chess masters sounds reasonable to me. Is there something wrong with this idea? If not, why is it not more often recommended to chess beginners? For instance, I may pick up bad habits instead of avoiding them. Anyway, I will post more about this and a review of "Master vs. Amateur" once I finished playing through the games, but that will probably take a few months at the current rate of progress...

Are there any reasons to play moves like 2. ... h3 in the opening?

2006-06-07T23:36:00.000-04:00

I sometimes observe people playing moves like 1. e4 e5 2. Nc3 h3? or 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 h3? as black and I am wondering about the reasons behind this. Even as chess novice, I know from several sources that playing 2. ... h3 is almost always a bad idea. Nevertheless, I observed several players that always seem to play h3 or a3 or even both regardless of what their opponent does. A typical response of mine to moves like this is to think: "Bad move, I will win this one!" To my annoyance, however, it is not that easy. At the level I play chess, the decisive move is almost always some blunder like hanging pieces. On that scale, loosing a tempo by playing 2. ... h3 does not really matter. Furthermore, I simply do not have the experience to effectively exploit small advantages. Now I do not think that people always playing 2. ... h3 are stupid. In contrary: I do think that there is probably a reason for playing 2. ... h3 in beginner-level chess. So what are the potential advantages? First of all, it may confuse the opponent and get him/her out of the opening book. In correspondence chess games, for instance, it is perfectly OK to look up openings during the game. However, a database search in a collection of master games or opening manual will most likely give zero results after 2. ... h3. Therefore, white has to think for him/herself which is always "risky". Secondly, many novice chess players confronted with 2. ... h3 realize that this is less than optimal. Then they may become overconfident and go for a premature attack because they think they have to use this little advantage immediately instead of developing all pieces before starting an attack. Considering these reasons, playing 2. ... h3 against weak opponents may even turn out as an OK move, albeit playing more the opponent than the board. So, why not playing it? Of course it will be a serious disadvantage against any good player. But most importantly, it prevents learning of proper chess opening play and is therefore a roadblock to improvement.

Chess book review: "Logical chess: move by move" by Irving Chernev

2006-06-02T17:45:00.000-04:00

Please click here to get to the current version of the review of Irving Chernev's book "Logical chess: move by move". More book reviews can be found in the reviews section at SquirrelChess.com.

Mystery chess position II

2006-05-31T14:06:00.000-04:00

I took a look at this blog and noticed that I almost only post positions from games I lost. I do believe that analyzing the reasons behind loosing a game is more efficient for learning to play better chess than looking at won games. Nevertheless, I decided to brag a little and write a short post about a game I actually won (Yes, this happens every now and then!).

The game started with some pretty normal development moves with me playing white. The diagram on the right shows the position after black playing 4. ... e6. Being a correspondence chess game, I consulted a database and found that the most popular moves among master-level chess players in this situation is 5. Qb3. The games with this move looked interesting, so I decided to go with this (Sometimes, I spend a tremendous time to prepare a single move in a correspondence chess game, but more often I mess it up with a thoughtless move). Nevertheless, I felt a bit uncomfortable with this, because black may respond with 5. ... Bxf3 and I would have to recapture with gxf3, making my (future) castle a mess. I guess that the reasoning behind playing 5. Qb3 is the threat of winning a pawn with 6. Qxb7 (other opinions on this are appreciated). However, after some bad experiences I vowed to stop chasing pawns with my queen that early in the game.

The game continued pretty well for me winning a rook for a knight with a fork. The diagram on the left shows the position after 31. ... Ne4. I continued with 32. Qf7 which I though would be a pretty good move. To my dismay, however, my trusty computer chess engine Crafty found an even better one in the post-mortem computer analysis. Does anyone see the winning combination? The complete annotated game can be found here.

From the news: everybody can become a chessmaster!

2006-05-29T12:18:00.000-04:00

Chessplayers often wonder what it takes to play like a grandmaster - does it require talent or can everybody achieve mastery if he/she just trains hard enough. And if talent is not necessary, is it important how the training is done or is it enough to just play a huge number of chess games? The article "Anyone can have his shot" in the St. Petersburg Times describes some recent work of Florida State University's psychology professor Anders Ericsson. I mentioned his work on talent vs. training already in a previous post. Here, I will summarize only a few remarks he made on chess improvement in the St. Petersburg Times interview.

First of all, Anders Ericsson stresses the importance of studying chess master games:
"If you can beat everyone very easily, how can you become a better chess player? People who become very successful chess players, they re-create games played by experts to see why these other players were picking these moves. If you find you pick the same move as they did, then you’re playing as well as them. If not, then it’s a clue that you’re not doing something right."

Secondly, he describes that the way how training is done matters a lot and uses amateur golf players as example: many players play golf for decades but do not improve much. This shows that experience alone does not necessarily lead to mastery. More important is the way training is done. The golf player (I assume that this applies to chess players in the same way) has to determine her/his weak spots and work on them. If the weak spot situation occurs only seldomly in real play, then improvement requires training that repeats this situation over and over until it is mastered. Conscious and repeated work is necessary to improve. In my opinion, this implies several consequences for chess training. First of all, it is necessary to analyze games after they are over to determine weak spots. Secondly, if this weak spot is, e.g., not recognizing a tactical pattern such as a fork, then it is necessary to practice forks until perfection.

Last but not least, motivation is important. Anders Ericsson says "If everyone has a shot, then it’s up to them to decide. If they don’t have the motivation and the drive, then they’re not going to reach the higher levels. It’s not so much that someone put in thousands of hours to be good at something. It’s that someone else gave up after an hour and a half. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy." After all, being a chess master only means that you are better than most other players. Therefore, all it needs to become a chess master is to train harder and to be more persistent than most others, even if it may take some of us more than 40 years to get there.

Why do people play chess?

2006-05-26T18:26:00.000-04:00

I've been asking myself lately why people play chess. I am not talking about the few professional players who actually make a living with that. I am more wondering about the average player - most of them even paying for playing chess online or at the local chess club.

Just for fun. Playing chess "for fun" is something probably every amateur chess player agrees with - if it is not enjoyable and doesn't pay for the rent, why then would anyone do it? However, if playing "just for fun" would be the main motivation, why do so many people take chess so seriously?

To relieve stress. Chess is sometimes recommended to relieve stress and at the time I started to get into chess five months ago I believed that myself. I am not sure about this any more. Just looking at the training goals of many chess players and the desperation that overcomes myself when I realize that another day went by without giving me the opportunity to tackle dozens of chess tactics problems and analyze the positions of all my games at ChessWorld, I start doubting that chess relieves stress.

For distraction - a personal favorite. Playing chess requires both concentration an dedication, an unbeatable combination for getting unpleasant things out of the mind. A nice side effect is also that chess playing is supposed to improve the ability to concentrate. However, I start to doubt that, too. Lately I often catch myself at work thinking about some chess position. That is certainly not a great improvement of my ablity to concentrate on one subject.

It is addictive. Looking at my own chess habits and other people's chess blogs, I get the impression that playing chess can become quite addictive. If you are not sure about yourself, take the chess addiction test at chessville.com. Welcome to the not-so-anonymous chessaholics!

It allows to satisfy the killer instincts. Chess is considered to be an abstract wargame. It practically forces players to ruthlessly exploit the smallest weaknesses of the opponent.

Chess is good for your health. Now, honestly, who really plays chess to stay fit? Nevertheless, mental activity such as chess reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease by 75%, a sizable effect (the scary estimate that roughly 10% of the population above age 65 have Alzheimer's disease make all these repetitive chess tactics problems seem to be even more worthwhile).

Other reasons. Playing chess for blood is fortunately a the motivation of a minority, or are there vampires at your local chess club? There are many reasons to play chess, what are yours?

On the web: how chess programs "think"

2006-05-20T15:53:00.000-04:00

The computing power of modern PCs enables chess programs to beat nearly every human chess player. A good example is the famous match between the human world champion Kasparov and the machine Deep Blue (admittedly a bit more than your average PC). If you are one of the players who always gets beaten by his computer, then you might be interested in learning how computer programs actually decide their moves. Francois-Dominic Laramee wrote a series of articles that not only describes how chess programs work, but also published the code for a java chess engine that demonstrates the concepts described in the series. The series is well written and avoids programming jargon as much as possible and explains the basics as needed. It gives not only people without programming knowledge the opportunity to learn how chess programs "think" but also a good deal of information on the basics of writing a chess playing engine from scratch.

Mystery chess position

2006-05-17T19:07:00.000-04:00

The position on the left is from one of my recent chess games against ChessSmith at ChessWorld after Black played 24. Rc7. A computer analysis with Crafty showed that up to this point the game was pretty balanced. This is actually pretty good for me (playing White) because my opponents can usually rely on me making some pretty bad decisions between move 15 and 20 (If anyone reading this has an idea why this happens to me most often between the 15th and 20th move, please leave me a comment. Suggestions on how to avoid this are of course even more welcome!). In the game, I played 24. ... g6 because I felt it would be a good idea to give my King some space. However, this defensive idea turned out to be the move that got me into trouble, and I ultimately failed to prevent a simple checkmate a few moves later. Any suggestions what to play here (and most importantly why)? The complete game can be found here.

Still doing chess tactics problems: stagnation or progress?

2006-05-15T18:53:00.000-04:00

I finished another round through the one-move chess tactics problems. I lost count, but I am probably approaching the magic number of 7 repetitions. I noticed that I certainly recognize more pattern than before, but overall I am still pretty slow. A post at Patzer's Mind linked to an interesting review of a chess tactics training software written by Kjell Arne Brekke. The interesting part of this review is not so much the information on the software (Intensive Tactics Course 2) but the general comments on the psychology of playing chess well.

The article discusses the merits of doing a few hard problems vs. many simple problems. I have been concentrating on the latter approach by solving mostly one-move tactics problems (so far). Kjell Arne Brekke cites several psychological studies of chess players in the review. The main conclusion is, that the number of memory chunks with chess positions seems to be the biggest difference between chess masters and everyday patzers. The average grandmaster memory seems to hold 50000 of these chunks. The article concludes that doing many simple tactical problems is more efficient than a few hard ones because of the higher number of memorized positions.

I estimate that I learned roughly 500 positional chunks in the 5 months I am now playing chess. If I continue at the same rate, it will take me approximately 41 years to obtain the pattern recognition of a grandmaster. This means that I will won't the zenith of my playing strength before I am well into retirement age. But that should be a good time to play chess anyway. The positive consequence of this simple estimate is also that I really shouldn't feel too badly about the blunders I commit nearly every day - learning to play chess well simply takes a much longer time than the 5 months of experience I have!

Chess popularity: a quick and dirty Google Trends study

2006-05-11T13:51:00.000-04:00

A quick search for the keyword "chess" on Google.com's new trend search page gives some interesting results. Google trends provides information not only on how often a keyword was used in internet searches on Google.com but also from which counties these searches originated and even correlates the results with the number of news articles on the same topic.

Both India and the Philippines share the top spot for the most searches for "chess" between 2004 and 2006 (unfortunately, the data does not go further back). India is a country with a huge population with internet access becoming more and more available in recent years. However, most of the other top spots in the popularity of chess searches are taken by countries with a much smaller population: the Philippines, Norway, South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Romania occupy ranks 2 to 8. The United States, a developed nation with a population of close to 300 million people is only on the 9th place.

I have to admit that I am a bit surprised by these results. I am aware that even though the US has a large population with abundant internet access it is not exactly considered as a chess country. However, the nation that dominated competitive chess for decades, Russia, does not show up in the top 10 (Singapore is no. 10). A speculative explanation for the rankings is the age distribution of the population. Developing countries tend to have a higher percentage of young people which tend to use the internet more than older people. This theory would indirectly imply that US chess is an "old man's game". Opinions on the reason behind the Google trends data on chess are very welcome!

Another interesting point is the ongoing dominance of Bobby Fischer in chess, even more than three decades after his famous world championship match against Boris Spassky in 1972. The two biggest spikes in the amount of chess news from 2004-2006 coincide with his detention in Japan and his move to Ireland. Only Kasparov's retirement in March 2005 had a similar impact. However, there was also a significantly increased amount of chess news during the successful showing of the Delphian School Chess Club at the Whitford Middle School Tournament...

The end of the endgame that was no endgame

2006-05-09T14:07:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an "endgame" in one of my correspondence chess games at ChessWorld. From the comments to that post, I learned that my position at that time should have been filed under middlegame and not endgame. The game just finished with a loss for me: I gave my opponent the chance to play a mate-in-three combination. This did not stop me from winning the tournament, though. The image on the left shows the position before my final mistake. White to move, what is the correct way to avoid mate? See the annotated game for the move I played and the mate in three.

I wrote in the previous post on "endgame" study that I should start some kind of basic endgame study. I actually started reading "Pandolfini's Endgame Course" by Bruce Pandolfini. Right now, I am working through the chapter on minor pieces vs. a lone king. The problems such as mates in four are not very complicated. In fact, I would probably resign if I would have only the king left, so I don't expect to encounter these situations very often. However, I try to solve the problems without a chess board which brings me to the limits of my current chess visualization abilities: everything beyond the next move still feels troublesome. But by not moving pieces during analysis I hope not only to improve my chess endgame skills but also my board vision. And soon I will move on to things like rook and bishop vs. rook endgames, a situation that is actually similar to another correspondence chess game I am playing right now, which gets me back to the question of just-in-time engame study...

From the news: Why do some people achieve mastery?

2006-05-07T13:24:00.000-04:00

In "A star is made", the New York Times discusses the reason, why people become good at something. The article describes results from a new study on an old topic: talent vs. practice using elite soccer players as example. The majority of "good" soccer players is born in the first three months of the year. The simple conclusion from this fact would be that the birthdate determines the chances to play professional soccer. The study by Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, however, comes to a different conclusion: Practice is more important than raw talent.

From the viewpoint of the chess beginner who wants to learn play chess, the most interesting part of the study is, that the way practice is done also matters. Training methods that give immediate feedback are considered as most effective. What is the consequence for chess training? Studying tactics by solving tactical puzzles, should be good because feedback is provided after every tactics problem. But what about playing chess? The study results make me wonder, if correspondence chess is really good for learning chess strategy. Learning strategic thinking surely requires more than just looking at one combination like in tactical problems. Playing many complete games is necessary to acquire chess strategy skills and the ability to correctly evaluate chess positions. In correspondence chess games, however, games stretch out over many weeks, giving no immediate feedback. Taking the results of above cited study seriously, playing slow over-the-board games is therefore a more efficient way to improve in chess than correspondence chess.

When is it appropriate to resign in amateur chess?

2006-05-05T13:14:00.000-04:00

I am planning to start again playing "live" chess games on FICS since a few weeks. Tuesday night I finally found some time for a reasonable slow (20 30) game. After about one hour, I found myself playing white with the position shown here and about 1 minute left on my clock (take a look at the annotated game if you are curious how the game started). I came to the decision that my chances for getting one of my pawns promoted are practically zero and resigned.

I frequently read phrases like "she/he did the honorable thing and resigned" or complains about somebody who did not resign in a position that was hopeless (at least from the opponent's point of view) and forced the game to continue. On the other hand, I also see opinions like "nobody ever won by resigning". A quick internet search found 13 ways of the uneasy art of resigning and good "advice" on how to resign gracefully. I can understand that most chess masters resign quickly when they loose material. But when should amateurs resign? I think that it is rather impolite to force somebody to play through a long ending when it is pretty much clear who won. However, players on my level make mistakes, and in most games not only one. Therefore, I could always fight on and hope that my opponent messes up. For sure I won't resign right after loosing a minor piece. In the particular case shown here, though, I did not see much of a chance to win, not to mention the fact that I was getting hungry... But I'd like to learn how other people decide when to resign and why, so please leave a comment about your experience with this topic!

Motivation for chess tactics study

2006-05-03T13:50:00.000-04:00

I just finished another round through my favorite set of one-move tactics problems and wondered if doing these problems repetitively actually pays off in terms of chess improvement. On the first thought, I am spending a significant amount of time on studying tactical pattern such as forks and pins that almost never seem to appear in the games I play. This got me rather frustrated. Nevertheless, solving chess tactics puzzles is widely considered as the most efficient study area for beginners.

Let's take a look at the few cases where these tactics pattern actually showed up in my games. In most cases, I lost a piece by not realizing that my opponent can fork some pieces of mine. I know that simple tactics (almost) never occur in the games of chess masters. Masters simply do not give their opponents the chance to apply these simple tricks. Although I was always aware of this fact, I never really thought about the consequences of this for my personal quest for chess improvement. The most important thing for me to learn is to apply the visualization skills that get acquired by solving hundreds of chess tactics puzzles to avoid giving my opponent any chance to use discovered attacks, pins, etc. against me. In fact, one of the reasons why I like the tactics problems by John Coffey so much is, that they contain also "black to move" problems where you look at the board from white's perspective.

Therefore, I still see no alternative to solving tactics problems. However, this defensive view of tactics also requires the discipline to evaluate the opponent's opportunities each and every move. And with that, we are back to the often discussed thinking process, but that is another, may be even harder to learn, issue.

Chess visualization training

2006-04-30T15:35:00.000-04:00

Most people agree that studying tactics is probably the single most important task for the aspiring chess novice. Regularly solving tactics problems is the usual prescription for this, and there are both computer programs and websites such as the Chess Tactics Server to help with that. Tactics puzzles usually show a position and either black or white can gain a piece or mate by playing the correct combination. Solving many of these problems is said to improve board vision. A comment on an earlier post about free chess software for Linux made me aware of a java program with a different approach. The Chess Visualization Trainer (CVT) written by Dietrich Kappe gives problems without actually showing the board. For instance, it lets you decide if "e6" is a dark square or asks you if the position "White: K c6, R h3, P f3, and g4; black: K h5, N g6, P g5, and h6" with black to move is a mate.

In addition to the mate problems, it provides training material for the visualization of knight moves, and board diagonals. The probably most interesting feature, however, is the builtin chess engine that allows to play against the computer with the display lagging by a number of moves or not showing a part of the board. Therefore, this program might be a good thing to try for people who always wanted to learn to play blindfold chess.

I don't think that this kind of training is suitable for chess beginners like me, because I still have problems to visualize "combinations" with more than one move even when I see the starting position right in front of me. However, this might be interesting for more advanced players. The program is written in java and will work on most computers and operating systems. It can be started by clicking here without having to install anything. Of course, you can also download it to be able to use it without an internet connection.

Blunder day - cheap pieces for all!

2006-04-27T13:18:00.000-04:00

Sciurus proudly announces that yesterday's "Blunder Day" at ChessWorld was a great success! After leaving a few pieces en prise in the best spirit of hiding Easter eggs, the day culminated in giving a won game away in the great match chess blogger vs. chess reader. After building up a nice material advantage (see position), I decided to keep it simple; the basic idea was to win the game by forcing exchanges. But instead, I gave my honorable opponent the opportunity for a mate in three, which he promptly used (See the annotated game for the continuation).

Looking for some distraction to soothe my soul, I started browsing over the list of my favorite chess blogs and stumbled upon the artice "No justice" - the topic? Of course blundering. Learning to avoid blunders is probably the most important thing for chess novices. Therefore, many chess blogs contain articles either ranting about last night's blunders or discussing cures. In fact, I vowed to get into the habit of a clear thinking process not too long ago. What happened to that? In short, my plan was to go over a short checklist, before making a move. In contrast to over the board play, having a checklist would be even legal in correspondence chess games. However, it is always so much more exciting to analyze what I can do to my opponents then to figure out how they can beat me. Conclusion: setting goals is not enough to improve. From time to time one has to look back and figure out what is going wrong. It is time to get back to the discarded checklist!

Is correspondence chess ideal for beginners to learn strategic thinking?

2006-04-25T17:00:00.000-04:00

Most chess games played on the internet are blitz games with fast time controls, although there are also players preferring slow time control games. The other extreme are correspondence chess games that allow players several days or even weeks to make one move. Before internet connections became common, postcards were used to communicate between opponents. Nowadays, this is mostly done by email or by playing on one of the correspondence, or turn-based chess servers (reviews of several correspondence chess servers).

I started playing correspondence chess on ChessWorld simply because it was hard for me to find time for a slow "live" game. After playing correspondence chess games for a couple of weeks, however, I found that being able to spend as little/much time on chess as my schedule permits and still be able to actually analyze a position is not the only advantage. Being a chess novice often means loosing pieces by simply leaving them en prise. Having as much time as I want to make a move (a time limit of one week or more allows more analysis then I would want, but I will come back to this later) reduces the number of outright blunders to a minimum. I have to admit, however, that I sometimes drop pieces even in correspondence chess games. The lack of time pressure makes this even more embarrassing.

In fact, I believe that some of my victories in correspondence chess games are less due to me being a better player than my opponents (who frequently have the experience of several hundred completed games) but more due to the fact that I play a lower number of simultaneous games and put more time into analyzing the positions then they do. In fact, as another chess blogger wrote recently, this intense analyzing can become quite addictive! However, I've won also a few games so far where my opponents simply did not recognize a simple mate-in-one patters so studying tactics pays also off in correspondence games.

Granted, I did not suddenly become a chess master by playing slower. But at least the slow pace of correspondence chess allows me to form plans that go beyond the next move and to try to apply some of the strategic principles I learned from playing through annotated master games. In over-the-board games I am still too busy to just prevent my pieces from disappearing to actually care about strategy. But as recently noted in Edwin's review of the "Basics of winning chess middlegames" DVD, I also believe that forming plans while playing chess will lead to chess improvement, even if the plans initially lead to nowhere more often than not.

I believe that I learned the most from the games I lost. Therefore, I am happy that after finishing my tenth game on ChessWorld a few days ago, I am now qualified to play in tournaments that are categorized according to the players ratings. My current rating barely qualifies me for the second lowest bracket, so I expect a superior opposition and hope to quickly improve my chess play (ironically by loosing games, but of course I will do my best!).

Kasparov vs. Klitschko - chess but no boxing

2006-04-22T18:30:00.000-04:00

Since it was mentioned recently on NPR, Chessboxing seems to keep several chess bloggers occupied, see for instance an older post at the Boylston Chess Club Blog, a recent post by myself, and another one on Chess for Blood (quite natural for a blog with that title). Now the Boylston Chess Club Blog cites The Sweet Science Blog that caught the boxer Dominick Guinn comparing the upcoming box fight Klitschko vs. Byrd with a chess match. Well, what if the box champion Vladimir Klitschko would play chess against the chess heavyweight Kasparov?

Turns out that both Klitschko brothers actually like to play chess! Even better, both of them played chess against Kasparov during a simul chess match in Leipzig/Germany where they became friends after "kidnapping" the chess champion to rescue him from his fans. The full story can be read on the official Klitschko Brothers Website (the story is actually quite fun to read, so take a look yourself!)

Just-in-time endgame study

2006-04-20T14:03:00.000-04:00

The last game from my second correspondence chess tournament
got me into a - from my point of view - rather complex endgame (After posting this, several people commented that this position should not be called endgame, see comments to this post. No comments on the position itself, please, we are still playing!). This made me think that I should really start some kind of endgame study as planned. Will the long time scale of the games on turn-based chess servers give me enough time for a just-in-time study program?

"Pandolfini's Endgame Course" by Bruce Pandolfini contains 239 problems. If I manage to do 10 of them each day from now, I only have to "survive" the next 3 or 4 moves, assuming that I use the full week I have per move and that my opponent responds fast. But would studying basic endgames really help a beginner like me in a position like this one? I believe it will in the long term but it would probably not help much to win one particular non-trivial endgame such as this one. Therefore, I will simply give in to my chess curiosity (I really do want to know if I can win this one) and continue moving without extra delays for just-in-time-study. Nevertheless, it motivates me to finally study some basic endgames. I will post the game result when it is over.

Correction: seems that this position shouldn't be called endgame, see comments to this post.

From the news: chessboxing

2006-04-19T11:25:00.000-04:00

I couldn't believe what I heard on NPR this morning: the "latest" sports trend combines chess with boxing! According to the World Chess Boxing organization, "The basic idea in chessboxing is to combine the no.1 thinking sport and the no.1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors both mentally and physically." The events basically consist of alternating rounds of boxing and blitz chess games and the winner is determined by checkmate or knockout. See also this article in the LA Times and the interesting reference at Wikipedia.

Is burnout preventable?

2006-04-18T13:23:00.000-04:00

Everything good can be overdone. If it is sports, solving crosswords, whatever comes in your mind that you were really passionate about for a while. Even work! The fact, that I am feeling burned out at work, something that I used to be very passionate about, is probably one of the reasons why I got into chess the first place. If something, anything, is overdone, the burnout syndrome hits hard and brings the excitement to a sudden stop.

Fortunately, I am still feeling enthusiastic about chess. I am even wondering if chess can become as addictive as gambling. Nevertheless, I am asking myself how to prevent a possible burnout. Loosing interest in chess, even temporarily, may negate all my efforts to improve - who knows what of the little board vision I acquired by now will be left after not playing for a month or two? Would it be advisable to restrict the time spend on chess to prevent burnout to occur as mentioned on Jeff Ashton's blog or is it simply unavoidable? What is the experience of the other players out there?

On a side note, the situation is not hopeless even when the burnout syndrome hits hard and a period of chess abstinence is needed: As Bruce Pandolfini wrote about getting back to chess "Once chess is in your blood, your mind and spirit will let you know when the vacation is up."

Play chess on your mp3 player!

2006-04-15T12:20:00.000-04:00

Please click here for the current version of this article on playing chess on mp3 players using Rockbox.

From a recent game: white to move

2006-04-13T12:47:00.000-04:00

Here is a position (top) from one of my recent games with me playing white. Too bad that I not only missed this chance but blundered with Bxf3??.

Nevertheless, I still managed to win this due to a blunder by black a few moves later exploiting a simple mate-in-3 pattern (2nd position). It seems that even tough doing tactics puzzles almost daily does not prevent me from making blunders, it still lets me recognize some opportunities every now and then.

A rant on timeouts

2006-04-11T21:12:00.000-04:00

My first correspondence chess tournament ended. Although I placed second out of four, I am not happy with it. This is not because I lost two of the six games (in fact, I am happy that I won a few games at all in my first tournament), but because one player lost all his games by timeouts. I can perfectly understand that people get over the time limit in "live" games, where you have only minutes or even seconds to make a move. I can also understand, that something can happen within the multiple weeks that are needed to complete a correspondence chess game. Nevertheless, I think that people who sign up for a tournament should take their commitment seriously. ChessWorld even offers the opportunity to mark time slots as vacation, to prevent timeouts when people are unable to move for one reason or another. If someone does not intend to finish a game, the person could at least contact his/her opponents and tell them about it. But simply not responding anymore is like leaving for a smoke in an over-the-board game and never coming back - it is simply inpolite and makes me, as the winner of these games feel bad about the winning these games - I'd rather loose an exciting battle than to win by timeout!

Monday morning tactics blues...

2006-04-10T11:14:00.000-04:00

Usually I do tactics puzzles only on work days and use the longer time slots during weekends for things such as going over an annotated master game. When I restart my tactics efforts on Mondays, it often feels like starting from scratch again - I fail to see the most obvious pattern and everything takes so much longer than it did on the previous Friday. Can one really loose significant board vision by skipping puzzles for only two days??? Or is it just because I should have gone to bed earlier Sunday night? Anyway, I have to get back to the tactics puzzles because I won't give up that easy!

After the first three months - a look ahead

2006-04-06T16:18:00.000-04:00

After reviewing my progress so far, it is time to set some goals for the next three months. So, here are the things I hope to accomplish, aside from the most important thing: having fun! In general, I'd like to gather some basic knowledge on tactics, strategy, endgames, and openings until June.

Don't waste so much time surfing the chessic internet anymore!
Do more tactics problems. I just failed to prevent a simple knight fork of my rook, queen, and king in a correspondence game... The goal is to (1) get fast enough to solve a reasonable number of problems (say 40) in less than 10 minutes, and then to go through tactics problems until this doesn't happen any more. Why 10 minutes? - I can always squeeze 10min somewhere in my daily schedule, so I wouldn't have any reason to skip studying anymore!
Start some endgame study. I got already a copy of Bruce Pandolfini's "Endgame course", which contains problems that are supposedly well suited for beginners.
For chess strategy, I will stick with going over well annotated games for now.
Start playing "live" against humans again. Up to now I mostly played against the computer and in correspondence chess tournaments on ChessWorld. I guess it is time for some (slow) games on FICS.
Use the same openings in all games and try to get familiar with them.
And finally again: don't waste so much time surfing the internet!!!

Three months playing chess - a look back

2006-04-02T16:05:00.000-04:00

It's now three months ago that I started playing chess. Looking back, what would I do differently if I had the chance of going back in time? And what are the things that worked well?

The most important thing that I did wrong is wasting time. With a job and some social life there is always too less time for chess. I definitely spent way too much time surfing the internet to look for "the" way to learn chess. First of all, there is no single best way to learn a game as complex as this. Aside from that, reading articles on how to improve does not get you any better - only practice does. Therefore, I should have spend more time studying and playing. But of course it is much more stressful to solve tactics puzzles than to consume other people's thoughts (This applies also to blogging, so I should stop this and go back to studying tactics. And, yes, if anyone reads this: you'd better study or play a game, too).

The improvement I enjoy most did not come through solving tactics puzzles, though. In contrast to the very beginnings, I have now a plan for almost every move I play. However, most of these ideas don't work out as planned, or, even worse, backfire. For instance, I just captured a lone pawn with my queen in one of my correspondence chess games with the plan to go on exchanging queens two moves later. The outcome: now I do know why one shouldn't chase pawns with the queen... I think most of my progress in coming up with plans is due to playing through Irving Chernev's wonderfully annotated game collection "Logical chess: move by move". Not getting lost while calculating moves, however, will require more experience and of course studying tactics, tactics, tactics!

How much opening knowledge does a novice need?

2006-03-28T15:01:00.000-05:00

While playing against the computer, I often mess up badly in the opening. Most articles about learning to play chess say that beginners should not spend too much time on openings, but rather study tactics and endgames. I agree with the general idea of this and think it really does not matter to know the fine points of one opening line or another at the level I play. However, running into serious trouble during the opening phase isn't fun either.

Up to know, I tried to follow some advice I read somewhere: after the game, I would look up the opening and see what went wrong (I just bought a copy of MCO-14 for this, which will certainly cover more ground than Reuben Fine's "Ideas Behind the Chess Openings" that I grabbed from a local library a few weeks ago. However, for a beginner like me the more wordy style of Fine's book comes in handy). This certainly gave me some experience, but even if I wouldn't have such a terrible memory there are simply too many opening moves around! Therefore, I continue to get into messed up games regularly.

One reason why I am (still) hesitating to study openings is that if I look up an opening line I always see comments like "gives white an advantage". In most cases, however, I don't understand what the fuss is about because I simply do not have the knowledge/experience to see this "advantage". Nevertheless, I feel that I need to improve my opening play. Therefore, I decided to simply pick one opening move and stick with it for the foreseeable future. Starting out with the same move will hopefully cut down on the number of traps I can fall for and if I continue to look into MCO-14 after each game I will hopefully learn something. The only problem is, which opening should I choose? Every opinion I saw on which one is good for beginners seemed to attract others stating the opposite. Therefore, I will go with the best advice I found so far: at the beginner level, all openings are sound. The biggest obstacle for me will to not waste time browsing through websites and books any more but simply to stick with one of them!

One of my best games so far

2006-03-25T10:42:00.000-05:00

Here is one of the best games I played so far. It is from my first correspondence chess tournament. Incidently, I lost it. So why do I think it is one of my best games? I did some post-mortem computer analysis using Crafty. To my surprise, I saw that I actually managed to play the first 25 moves without messing anything up too badly (see scoregraph).

Anyway, here is the game with me playing white against "mike1970":

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 h6?! 4.c3 Bc5 5.d4 exd4 6.cxd4 Bb4+ 7.Nc3

The alternative 7.Bd2 would have been better: 7.Bd2 Nf6 8.e5 Ne4 9.Bxf7+ Kxf7 10.Bxb4 Nxb4 11.Qb3+

7...Nf6 8.e5 Nh7?!

Retreating the N to the corner renders it much less useful; better: 8...Ng4

9.O-O d6 10.exd6?

I clearly did not have enough foresight to see this: 10.d5 Bxc3 11.dxc6 Bxe5 12.Nxe5 dxe5 13.Qf3 O-O 14.cxb7

10...Bxd6 11.Qe2+ Ne7 12.Bd2 O-O 13.Nb5 Nf5 14.Bd3 a6 15.Nxd6 Nxd6 16.Rac1 c6
17.Rfe1 Bf5 18.Bb4 Bxd3 19.Qxd3 a5 20.Bxd6 Qxd6 21.Rc5 b6 22.Rh5 Nf6 23.Rhe5 Ng4
24.Rh5 Nf6 25.Rhe5 26.Qc4 cxd4

See diagram 1.

27.Nxd4?

27.Qxd4 would have been better: 27.Qxd4 Rfd8 28.Qxd6 Rxd6

27...Rac8 28.Nf5?

Fortunately, black missed the reply 28...Qxe5 29.Rxe5 Rxc4 which would have cost me a rook

28...Rxc4? 29.Nxd6 Rc2 30.f3?

I wanted to give my K with some space and prevent ...Ne4 and ...Ng4. In reality, I lost the pawn that I desparately missed in the endgame. 30.R5e2 Rxe2 31.Rxe2 would have been the prudent choice.

30...Rxb2 31.Rb5 Rxa2 32.Rxb6 a4 33.Ra6 Nh5 34.Nc4 Nf4 35.g3 Nh3+ 36.Kh1 Ng5 37.Ne5 Re8
38.h4?

See diagram 2. 38.f4 would have been better as the original move apparently gives black the chance to mate with the combination 38...Rxe5 39.Rxe5 Nxf3 40.Ra8+ Kh7 41.Rh8+ Kxh8
42.Re8+ Kh7 43.Rh8+ Kxh8 44.h5 Rh2#, although I don't really understand Crafty's analysis here.

38...Nh7 39.Kg1 Nf6 40.f4 Ng4 41.Kf1 Nxe5 42.Rxe5 Rxe5 43.fxe5 Kf8 44.e6 fxe6 45.Rxe6 a3 46.Re2 Rxe2 47.Kxe2

White resigns 0-1. Right after clicking the confirm button for move 46 it occured to me that exchanging rooks is not exactly a good idea when there are no other pieces left and one is a pawn behind in the endgame. Hopefully, I will learn from my mistakes.

Tactics study: the first plateau

2006-03-24T09:15:00.000-05:00

I just finished my third round through the set of one-move tactics puzzles I use for training and get the strong feeling that I reached a plateau: At the beginning roughly 10 weeks ago, progress was fast, but now I barely notice any progress. If at all, it takes me slightly longer to solve the problems (probably because recently I spent more time working). I know that regardless of what you are training/studying for, performance is never going straight up. Therefore, I will go for the fourth round and also include working on some more complicated problems.

The first victory is always the best!

2006-03-21T18:28:00.000-05:00

I finally managed to win a game in my first correspondence chess tournament. Well, make it two, because I got my second win shortly after the first. I hope it was not only luck but also my tactics training paying off. In both won games, I managed to win some material early on and managed not to loose it again. So far, I won 2 out of 3 finished games. That feels not too bad for my very first tournament!

The value of a pawn

2006-03-14T11:58:00.000-05:00

I just finished my first correspondence chess game - with a loss. While studying annotated games of grandmaster-level players, I realized that every pawn is important to them. But so far, I was not too concerned about the safety of my pawns and would sacrify them unnecessarily to "improve" my position or simply by careless moves. In fact, I am usually happy not to loose my pieces. My new (and limited) experience with very slow games, however, taught me, that every pawn is important, particularly when games reach the endgame with only few pieces around. In the game below I play black against mike1970 at ChessWorld and resign after giving away my rook, although I've been down a few pawns before that, anyway. In the future, I will try to care for all members of my "army"!

1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nf6 3.d3 c6 4.Nf3 d5 5.exd5 cxd5 6.Bb5+ Bd7 7.Bxd7+ Nbxd7 8.Bg5 Bc5 9.O-O O-O 10.a3 Qb6 11.b4 Bd6 12.c4 e4 13.dxe4 dxc4 14.Nc3 Ne5 15.Bxf6 gxf6 16.Nxe5 Bxe5 17.Rc1 Rfd8 18.Qg4+ Kf8 19.h3 Qd6 20.Nd5 Qe6 21.Qxe6 fxe6 22.Ne3 Bb2 23.Rxc4 Bxa3 24.Rc7 b6 25.b5 h5 26.Rh7 Rac8 27.Rxh5 Ke7 28.e5 Rc1 29.Rh7+ Ke8 30.exf6 Rxf1+ 31.Kxf1 Rd7 32.Rh8+ Kf7 33.Rh7+ Kxf6 34.Rxd7 a5 35.bxa6 1-0

Think, think, think, ...

2006-03-13T15:50:00.000-05:00

For a while I have been trying to improve my play by making a short check list to work through before making a move. I won't write about the "thinking process" here, because much has been written about this before (see for instance the articles by Dan Heisman and the chessplanner of a fellow blogger).Unfortunately, I had to realize that making a plan (for every move decisions, not strategy) is easier than sticking to it. Usually I realize that I drifted off my plan after making some terrible blunder. How can I get myself to plan every move carefully?

I started an experiment playing chess against the computer because this gives me whatever time I need to go through each step on my check list assuming that speed will be less of an issue once the process is "hardwired" in the brain. Next to the window with the game I keep my check list in a text editor and go through it for every move I make.

I feel that this improves my play against the computer significantly. However, it also takes me a long time to make a move. Thus it remains to be seen if the perceived improvement is only due to spending more time for each move or due to more organized thinking.

Linux and chess training

2006-03-12T22:27:00.000-05:00

Computers can be very useful for both studying and playing chess. This is reflected in the large number of chess programs that are available. Most commercial programs, however, are written for a certain operating system from Redmond. Here, I will provide a brief introduction free chess software available for Linux. This is by no means meant to be a complete list of free chess programs for Linux but just a few personal suggestions.

The probably most popular chess programs are for playing chess against the computer, the so-called chess engines. A good chess program and the computing power of even a several years old PC is enough to beat the vast majority of amateur chess players. My personal favorite is therefore phalanx, which can be easily configured to play weaker using the "easy" settings.

Like many other chess engines, phalanx does not provide a graphical user interface. If you do not want to enter moves with your keyboard and visualize the position in your mind, you need an interface program. One common choice here is xboard. It not only lets you play against phalanx, but also provides an interface to play on internet chess servers such as FICS or ICC. People playing on FICS may want to take a look at eboard, which provides more features than xboard but works with FICS only.

Finally, if you are seriously into chess, you may want to save your games in a chess database to analyze your mistakes and to learn from games played by others. Scid is such a database program. It doesn't seem to be actively maintained any more, though. In addition to build your personal game collection, it provides numerous features to analyze games and to study openings.

No time to play?

2006-03-10T10:57:00.000-05:00

Recently, I found myself to play much less. It is not that I lost interest in playing chess. However, it is simply hard to find 40+ minutes of uninterrupted time to play a game on the internet. It is relatively easy to find 10 min even on the busiest days to do some tactical exercises, but on most days, I simply do not find the time for a slow game. This leads to the question how much one can improve in chess without actually playing chess. The answer probably does not look favorably for me. Granted, I could get online quickly to play a blitz game. This would get me some practice, but I think it would also get me into some bad habits that would ruin my efforts to work on a thinking process. Therefore, I decided not to play blitz until I significantly improved my slow chess.

What are alternatives to slow chess games that do not require a big chunk of quiet, uninterrupted time? One thing would be to play against some computer program. In contrast to humans, programs do not mind being put on hold for a few hours. The drawback is that I am not sure how much this would prepare me to play against humans, which is more exciting, too. Another alternative is playing really slow chess games. About two weeks ago, I registered at ChessWorld and started my first correspondence chess tournament. With a time control of one full week per move I can play (or rather make moves) whenever I have time. Playing games that last weeks or even months, however, also requires a great deal of patience. I will write more about this once I have more experience with this form of chess. In the mean time, I guess that there is no way around trying to free up some time to play a few "live" games on the net.

No (visible) tactics, and now?

2006-03-07T11:20:00.000-05:00

Let's assume that doing all these tactical exercises transformed you into a tactical genius (lucky you, I am certainly a far cry from that). But what if there are no winning tactics for the next move? That is a point when strategy comes into play, although one could argue that strategy is just 10+ moves tactics...

Starting to play chess, I ran into many situations where I was not able to see any tactical opportunity and simply had no idea what to do next. This happened most often after the first opening moves. There are two reasons for this: Firstly, with nearly all pieces still on the board the position is often seemingly complex and therefore overwhelming to novices. Secondly, after one or more pretty stupid moves I am usually pretty busy just trying to survive in the later phases of the game.

What can a newbie do about these problems? I felt that I would profit from studying how other people play and decided to go through a collection of annotated games. A good start is provided by the book "Logical Chess: Move By Move" by Irving Chernev, a classic in the field. The author really comments on every move.

The first part of the book has only games starting with 1. e4 e5 and, yes, even 1. e4 is annotated every time it occurs. This may seem annoying, but it also serves the purpose to "burn" certain basic princiles in the reader's mind. Furthermore, not only the actual moves are annotated, but the reason why other moves, that sometimes simply looked so much more attractive to me, are really not a good idea. The text reads pretty well, too, and to my surprise it is not boring at all to sit down with the book and a chess set to play through a game. In contrary, it is a lot of fun to follow the various ideas throughout the games.

Does it really help to study games that were played a long time ago? For my part I think it helped me a lot. I can now look at position and actually get some ideas on how to win the game in a timescale that is beyond the 1 or occasionally 2 move tactics that (may) come to my mind. It is not that these plans become reality very often - after all there is somebody on the other side of the board who also wants to win. But al the very least playing with a plan in mind is much more fun, even when it has to be changed right after the opponent's response.

Up to now I worked my way through roughly half of the book. I like to think that me playing worse in games starting out with 1. d4 compared to 1. e4 is due to the fact that all games I studied so far started with the latter. This gives hope and motivation to play through the rest of the games in the collection. So far, the only thing I do not like about Irvin Chernev's book is that white seems to win all the time. This feels a bit like reading a murder mystery while already knowing the end.

Tactics, tactics, tactics, ...

2006-02-27T13:52:00.000-05:00

Pretty much every article I've read states that studying tactics is the most important thing for novices. Looking at the blunders I am making at every single game (even the few I've won so far), I can only agree with this. So, how does one learn tactics?

I simply love books, so I started with a book on chess tactics: "Learn Chess Tactics" by John Nunn. However, the exercises in this particular book were a bit too hard for me. Back to the internet, I've found the "How to get to 1900" webpages by John Coffey. The tactics chart gives many problems ranging from easy mates in one to quite tricky combinations. At the beginning, it took me a long time to figure even the simple ones out, but after solving all the one move prolems at least once I am getting better. As for now, solving "win in 2 moves" problems still takes a lot of time.

That doesn't keep me from committing the wildest blunders, though. I somehow have to find a technique to avoid giving away pieces for free, but how? Dan Heisman published his view on this problem in this article on "real" chess. I also found an interesting exercise idea on learning to avoid blunders in another chess blog. Guess I should give it a try.

The beginning

2006-02-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

This blog is about my journey into the world of chess. It is a rather long trip, although I am a total beginner (I guess it is called "novice"). The journey started more than 20 years ago - I was a teenager then. A friend talked me into going to the local chess club where he played competitively. I was interested in the game so I went along and ended up playing against a 7 or 8 year old kid. We were both clueless but not being able to beat a much younger player is embarrassing for teenagers. At some point, the kid's father came to watch, as did my friend, and of course the game ended with them playing against each other. From this experience, I decided that chess is interesting, but not "my thing".

10 years later, I discovered a beautiful hand-crafted limestone chess set on a vacation in Italy. I simply had to have it, and my interest in chess showed a (rather short lived) peak. However, once again I gave up playing - this time after two or three quick losses against a computer.

Early this year, I got interested in chess again. I don't even know why exactly. In any case it seems to keep my mind off some work-related problems that hound me lately. This time, however, I took the time to find out how to actually improve my miserable play. Fortunately, there are many good websites about chess. To my surprise, after nearly two months I am still trying to improve my play and I am more fascinated by the game than ever. Therefore, I started this blog to keep notes on my chess journey. Comments and hints on how to do things better are always welcome!