Last Night's Draw Plus a Bit of FM Non-Silliness

As I usually like to do, I now give impressions from last night's tournament game and will post with analysis later, but not six weeks from now! I noted in A Clear-Eyed Analysis of My Shortcomings that I would be working through the backlog and will keep to my commitment to analyze and post all serious games here; it's good for learning and I especially appreciate it when the commentariat has suggestions and improvements. But I'm going to do them in chronological order.

So, last night in the Reno CC Ch. Swiss I drew with Edwin Simanis (1869) who is a pretty strong player and once touched 2000; he had drunknknite on the ropes in Round 2 but only drew with bishop and knight vs. lone king...anyway, I had White and it went 1. d4 d6 2. e4 g6 and at this point I usually play 3. Nc3, I have some lines against the Pirc/Modern that I enjoy, but this time I went 3. c4 as I had some premonition that he wouldn't be comfortable playing the King's Indian. I was right, he avoided playing Nf6 for awhile and I developed rapidly while he shuffled around on his side of the board a bit, I got a pretty good bind out of the opening. We both castled 0-0, we both pushed the f-pawn two squares, but because of my more aggressive pieces I was able to get an attack going and eventually he gave up a clear Exchange to stop it. There were great complications with a lot of pieces massed and attacking on a lot of open lines, but I couldn't find a clear crush and went into an "almost"ending (three pieces and a rook for me versus his four minors) and he found a shot that won a piece back, leaving him with two pieces for a rook.

Now I was bleary and getting short on time but I'm happy to report that I continued to try my best and managed to simplify to rook vs. bishop and knight with only a- and b-pawns left for each side--and he offered a draw. I only had 15 minutes to play it out versus his 40-plus, and I think it was a bit of a courtesy offer, but I took it!

Now, to tie this in with Wednesday's fun and games in the chess blogosphere...

Interestingly enough, after a fair budding flame war on the post at Elizabeth Vicary's blog, FM Jon Jacobs came back with something of an apology, BDK and I withdrew one or two of our most inflammatory remarks (but without letting him off on the "cult" remark) and things have proceeded quite civilly since. A unique occurrence in Internet history?!

Anyway, after the furor had died down Jacobs wrote this:

Above 1600, though, I've noticed that most players already have a pretty good grasp of the principles and skills they need to perform at a higher level. Above 1800, that's even more true. So I'd say anywhere from 1600 to 2300 or thereabouts, most players would get more "mileage" from striving to understand and control their own state of mind (and emotions – especially emotions) while engaged in competitive play – rather than pursuing any kind of chess study program per se.

This is the long version of what I meant when I coined my soon-to-be-famous slogan: "Fire your coach…Hire a shrink!" I believe that slogan formed the nub of the post I made some months ago on Blunderprone's blog … the same one that another amateur blogger called the best post he'd ever seen.

And this sums up something that I've written about before but was just emphasized again in last night's game; I believe I can make a BIG jump in effective playing strength and rating if I can just play as well late in the game as I do early in the game! I don't need more knowledge or even more skill, and it's not entirely a matter of fatigue either; even in games that don't last a really long time, my calculating and alertness to the opponent's threats dulls appreciably after I've been concentrating hard for a certain number of moves. Part of it is fatigue, but there's something more, I even know it's happening but things start to get a little fuzzy, I start to have a constriction of board vision, and the good positions I get almost every game don't get converted to maximum value. I know nobody's immune from this, but it's clearly my biggest weakness.

I don't know exactly how to train for this, but by god I'm going to find out and root out the problem. Googling now...will be back with results later.

A Bit of Fide Master Silliness

Over at Liz Vicary's place, FM Jon Jacobs goes off in the comments to this post:

They and their blogs carry colorful handles like Liquid Egg Product, blunderprone, Wahrheit, and even Man de la Maza.

(snip)

Less politely, they could be described as a "cult" - the word I used in my first post here. The clincher is, despite the painstaking effort they pour into both the MDLM puzzle "circles" and documenting their progress on their blogs .... few if any of them are actually showing any chess improvement!

Since Jon-Boy obviously doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, I make a comment with a whole paragraph of bold type. I don't need to repeat it here, go ahead and check it out if you like...

Anyhoo, I must say it was all in good fun, I can only hope he'll stop by here and share his response, if he's up to the challenge of explaining what the hell he was talking about.

A Clear-Eyed Analysis of My Shortcomings

The time has come for a reality check.

Liquid Egg Product had a thought-provoking post a few days ago, How bad do I want it?:

Right now, I’m 1600-ish, the same as 10 years ago without putting effort into improvement. What would happen if I tried? Does the thought of “maybe there’s an Expert somewhere in here” motivate me enough to work?

More likely, the “I’m sufficiently skilled so most people can’t dismiss me; that’s good enough” win out (again).

This is something to be considered seriously; I'm pretty confident I could just play a tournament game most weeks at the Reno Chess Club, play a few blitz games at FICS when I have the time, and still have a lot of fun with chess while maintaining my rating at approximately its current level. Hell, I have a 1600 USCF floor, so I could go to the club and play gambits and weird, wild openings all the time, move fast and get the game over with in a couple of hours and go home to a good night's rest. As everyone who's tried it knows, to maximize your score in tournament play you've got to be willing to sit and sit and sit, grinding out tiny edges for a win or grimly defending lost positions with chances, you've got to use most or all of your clock time and be willing to play out the full five hours (at my club) if necessary.

Sometimes, it's a lot more like work than playing a game.

Drunknknite makes some great points:

I am REALLY tired of players who will blame a loss on one move or even worse, the opening. Sentences like "Well I blundered and then the game's pretty much over." really mean 'and then I pretty much stopped playing'. "I messed up the opening" means 'He surprised me and I stopped playing chess and watched him beat me'. A won position does not equal a win. No one loses when they deserve to win. Every point is earned. If you are not willing to own up to mistakes then you will never correct them and your development as a player will be severely stunted. Everyone makes mistakes, that's part of the game.

Okay, accept the fact that if you really enjoy playing tournament chess (and I do) then it's a titanic struggle, with yourself and your fatigue and your personal weaknesses as well as with an opponent that would like to (symbolically) chop off your head. I believe I've improved that part of the equation lately, in that I'm trying hard, I'm not being lazy at the board, never saying "The hell with it, let's just get this over with!" after a long, grinding struggle (admit it, you've said this to yourself at least once in your life if you play long games!).

Away from the board, I've fallen down on the job.

For the last two months of 2007 I had a Plan (thanks dk, for the gentle prodding), I was posting weekly on my working of the Plan, then I fell down on the job once I got back to playing in tournaments every week. Besides the sins of omission, there have also been sins of commission; I have gone back to playing occasional blitz sessions at FICS (the horror, the horror). I've been scattershotting around, solving occasional tactical diagrams sitting on the john, playing over the games of my rivals on their blogs and worst of all, for the last six weeks not analyzing and posting each tournament game as promised.

Making a plan and sticking to it has never been one of my strong points, which is too bad since it is probably the most important factor in long-term success; "studies prove" and all that. I've fallen back into old habit-patterns.

So, this is a decision point, right here, right now--do I just go "chess for fun" and play around and enjoy it and not worry too much about improvement? Or do I get back to writing down and posting my plan, staying with it, striving to rise through the ranks despite any and all challenges, setbacks and disappointments?

Ad astra per aspera!

Despite my laziness, my other failings and shortcomings, the weaknesses of the flesh, I'm still up for having written goals and plans, and reporting progress here. Look for an update every Tuesday.

Improvement (to the stars!) is a long (rough) road. There's probably nothing I can do to drastically increase my chances to win my game this Thursday except to get physically prepared, play over a few games and do some tactical exercises just to get in the flow. It's how much better I can get six months, a year, two years out that will pay off the steady, consistent work.

I have 3-5 hours, most weeks, to study and a game at the Reno Chess Club to put it into practice. This 8-10 hours of chess a week is a precious resource, not to be squandered.

After careful consideration, I'm going to (with an average of four hours/week) spend:

1) Two hours of analyzing my own games, getting into the backlog of the last six weeks and posting them here, then once caught up, analyzing the current week's game or an older one I never looked at when it was played.

2) One hour looking at two master games (30 minutes each) in openings I play, trying to "guess the move." As little as it is, this at least touches on all phases of the game.

3) One hour of tactics study, starting with the 203 positions not grouped by theme (in other words, no clues) in Neishtadt's Test Your Tactical Ability. I'm going to go through them, writing the lines in pencil, not looking at the answers in the back until I've worked through all 203. Besides tactics, this will train patience, perseverance and "backbone." I need all three.

I'm also going to use a board and pieces rather than the computer where possible--at this point, I'm still playing my serious games the old fashioned way, and I've rarely studied without the computer recently. Seeing and feeling the pieces can only help when real game time comes. I rarely have a chance to use them at home, but I'm going to devote two lunch hours to study per week, and that is a nice opportunity to find peace and quiet and work with the "real thing."

I've got my score sheets, board and set and books with me today.

Reports here next Tuesday.

Excelsior!

King in a Cage, With Correction

GM James Plaskett points out that in a post from last year, A Beautiful Win by GM Plaskett, I had linked to the wrong entry on his very interesting blog.

Because it has a Chess Publisher game embedded it's very difficult to edit the old post, and because the game itself is well worth seeing again, I reprint the post here with the right link where you'll be able to peruse the series of coincidences surrounding the game.
_________________________________________________________________

(March 30, 2007)

As mentioned below I recently added GM James Plaskett's Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary to my links. While his blog is primarily about coincidence and synchronicity, it does have a good deal of chess content, including a beautiful miniature contained within this post:

Hastings Challengers, 1988
White: Lopez
Black: Plaskett

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nc6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be3 Qc7 7. Be2 b5 8. f4 Bb7 9. Bf3 Na5 10. Qe2 Nc4 11. 0-0-0



Nxb2! 12. Kxb2 Ba3+! 13. Kxa3 Qxc3+ 14. Nb3 Bc6 15. Bc5 a5 0-1

Every Sicilian player's dream game!

Losing Streak Over (Barely)

A quick report on last night's game in Round 5 of the Reno CC Ch. Swiss: I drew with Chris Harrington, the ChargingKing (though I see he has name on his profile now--it's still a cool handle).

As Black in a Center-Counter, as I like to call it (why the heck should I use Eurospeak? They also call the Ruy Lopez the "Spanish"), I unleashed a speculative gambit after 1. e4 d5 2. exd4 Nf6 3. Bb5+ Bd7 4. Bc4 Bg5 5. f3 Bf5 6. Nc3 c6!?; the Shredder database has only two examples. For the pawn I did get what I felt was sufficient compensation, and it was a tense battle right up to the first time control (30/90), when, still with four or five minutes for the last two moves, I turned down a slightly inferior ending and allowed a lightning attack on my king! Bad choice, dude! In turn, however, he missed the killing shot and we went in to a rook ending where he had an extra pawn but I had more active pieces, and I was pleased with the choices I made in this phase that ensured the draw.

After the game I was remembering yesterday's post and its consideration of falsifying our own moves and plans, and it struck me how I'd done a pretty good job of this through most of the game, but as I got more tired and a little rushed there was a breakdown. Not like that hasn't happened before, but having just posted about it it occurred to me that not only do I need to train in calculation, vision, etc., I need to train these things to stay at a high level during the more stressful and/or later parts of the game when I'm excited, fatigued and under stress.

I do have a few ideas which I'll post soon. Meanwhile, whatever the circumstances, it was a pleasure to go home with something other than a zero in the score table.

While I Was Out

Occasional breaks from chess and blogging have a refreshing effect; if you're open to it, you can sometimes see things "with new eyes," the way you see a place you've never been when you arrive there for the very first time. If you work at it and pay attention, you can partially attain this "refreshment" without actually going anywhere, by actively remembering that first time, the way it looked then, the feelings you had, the kinesthetics and the smells and the sounds.

I've read and digested a good number of fine posts in the last few days, and combined with my vacation and a week without playing (a full-point bye in the Reno CC Ch. Swiss) I have some new insights about what I'd like to do, what I need to do, and what I'm actually going to do to learn, grow, improve and have fun in chess.

Originally I planned to put a whole bunch of stuff into one megapost, but after hacking away at that it seemed to me much better to break up this Epic of Our Times into more manageable bites. So first, let have a look some recent work by the chess blogosphere's resident neuroscientist.

Blue Devil Knight, during his extended retirement farewell tour, unleashes some of his best-ever posts, a real feat considering that he has one of the best-ever chess blogs. Check out:

Part the Last (8) of his book reviews.

Chess memorization and seed planting--let the neurons do their job!

Two academic papers of great interest to chess players--as far as learning 10,000 pictures, and why it might be much more difficult to learn 10,000 chess positions, well that's my next post. Perhaps most directly related to our favorite subject (winning more!), Chess Masters' Hypothesis Testing; if you've never heard of "confirmation bias" you really need to get out more often.

I thought I'd posted about this somewhere previously, but for the life of me I can't find it right now; anyway, the important point is that stronger players usually make the successful effort to "falsify" their own plans, finding the opponent's best responses, while weaker players see a lot of variations that are good for themselves, often missing good moves for "the other guy." While this isn't a brand-new insight that's never been noted before in the history of chess, it is one of the main reasons for the differences in strength between players, and it's not exactly an ability to calculate better or to "find" winning combinations, it's in a different category; it's what we mean when we say we don't "see" a one-mover that loses a piece, in a certain way it might be said that this is the basis for almost all blunders, this failure to seek and find the opponent's best reply to the move we want to play.

So if it's that important, how do we go about working on it? It occurs to me that first of all, solving "White to move and win" positions, where we know a crusher is there, might almost be counterproductive in this regard! We're given that Black has no good defense, so all we have to look for is the "shot." As much as I enjoy, for example, Chess Tempo, this is the only kind of problem provided there, and I'm wondering if it's not doing me that much good to find all those wins...

Seems to me that what's needed here are exercises of the type, "White has three plausible moves, Nb5, Bb3 and Qxd4. Find Black's best response to each." I don't know if I've ever seen a set of exercises in precisely this form, though GMs Hort and Jansa had a book out many years ago called The Best Move that might have been close. Currently Ray Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises has gotten a lot of great reviews, and though I don't own it (yet) it might suit the bill as well as anything out there.

Otherwise, we're just going to have to do it ourselves, Dear Readers, playing through games, whether our own or masters', and looking at everything with a critical and "falsifying" eye. Almost all of us, even masters, do have this weakness to some degree, always on the lookout for what we can do to the opponent; it seems we'd be better off spending a lot more time and effort finding out what the opponent can do to us!

I'm Still Alive

I hate those "Don't have time for a real post so I'm throwing up a big nothing just to have something new up" posts.

I'm doing one anyway.

I was in Alaska for awhile, got me a new mindset, looks like I'll be playing ChargingKing this Thursday in the Reno Club Championship Swiss, and I'm working on a real post that will actually be of some use to you, the reader, and not just filler, like this one.

Bye for now.

The PNP Method

I've been reading a pretty cool book on parenting entitled 1-2-3 magic (3rd ed.) and one of the things that struck me in the chapter on "Homework and Practicing" was what's called "The PNP Method." "PNP" stands for Positive-Negative-Positive , a method for helping with, for example, your child's homework.

Say they got 9 out of 10 right on the spelling practice test. Instead of immediately saying, "I see you spelled 'incontrovertible' wrong," which is the natural parental reaction, you say something like "You really worked hard on this! I see that you spelled 'intracellular' correctly. Great, that's quite a long word for a first-grader!" Then, you help correct the mistake. Then you finish on a positive note, like "Nine out of 10. Good job!"

Right now I don't need the method for my son, who is three; practicing piano and chess lessons can wait until he's four (heh).

However, like some other things in the book, the PNP Method also has application for adults. Specifically, when talking about my game last night with Ernie Hong (2006 USCF) in the Reno Chess Club Ch. Swiss.

I will start with the first positive: I felt good going into the game. For the first time in the last few weeks I had a decent night's rest and felt like I was really ready to play a good, hard game of chess.

The negative: I lost in 30 moves.

The second positive: I had fun. I enjoyed playing chess again, the process, unlike the last couple of weeks where I had an attitude problem and blew some good positions. This time I played all right in the opening, missed a chance for a tricky tactic that was pointed out after the game by Club Champ Bill Case, and made a move instead that allowed my opponent a tactic which led to material loss for me. Instead of getting pissed off, I tried my best to squirm out, did everything I could but in the end he nailed it down. I enjoyed the game, and the postmortem.

I feel like I'm back on track, I'm having fun. That's what it's all about, that and the chance to test yourself, work and improve. Now I need to get that part back on track!

Some Points to Ponder

Can Testosterone Make You Rich? (a small study of London stock traders)

***

The hormone testosterone (T) has a central role in recent theories about allocation of status ranks during face-to-face competition. It has been methodologically convenient to test the hypothesized T mechanism in physically taxing athletic contests, where results have been supportive, although their generalizability to normal social competition is questionable. Competition among chess players is a step closer to normal social competition because it does not require physical struggle, and it is the arena for tests of the T mechanism which are reported here. We find that winners of chess tournaments show higher T levels than do losers. Also, in certain circumstances, competitors show rises in T before their games, as if in preparation for the contests. These results generally support recent theories about the role of T in the allocation of status ranks.

(Courtesy of Elizabeth Vicary's cool blog [original post here])

***

Representative of a number of articles, this one says that to raise testosterone levels naturally:

• Eat eggs, whey, meat and nuts, especially peanuts.
• Lower body fat percentage.
• Weight-bearing exercises, especially low-reps with max weight.
• Limit alcohol consumption.
• Get sufficient sleep.

All of which sound intriguing on their own merits, as methods of feeling good AND possibly raising your USCF rating through means other than tactical training.

Change of Pace

The inimitable and unconquerable chessloser riffs on drunken monkey kung fu chess. Inspiring stuff.

Though not directly related, his post made me wonder if I might try to get out of my recent run of losses by doing something different, maybe just playing the opening freely, without preconception from the very first move...supposedly below master the opening isn't where the game is won or lost, right?

Instead of my usual tried and true set of variations, I'll go Dutch, or Reversed Dutch, or get really nutty and go Englund Gambit like BDK. Or maybe 1. Nf3 2. b3, or maybe 1. c4. All stuff I haven't played in a serious game for a long time, if ever.

Danish Gambit, Evans Gambit, King's Gambit anyone?

Changing openings isn't an end in itself, but I need to have more fun playing, loosen up and let it fly. My next opponent should be quaking in his boots or laughing his ass off.

Either way, I'll have 'im right where I want 'im!

And Yet Another Loss (Updated)

(UPDATE: Reading over the post below, a few hours later...what a whiner. Who wrote this anyway? Boo f-ing hoo, you lost another chess game and some of your precious rating points! Well you can mew about how tough it all is, you little baby, or you can get out there and compete. And after the game, win or lose, and if you lost, no matter how, don't act like it's a personal affront that the other player kicked your ass!

Apologies to Kevin Gafni and Robert Bennett for the way I slam-packed up my pieces and went home the last two weeks. The good players stick around, even after the most disappointing losses, and do a postmortem if the opponent is up for it. And now, on to my pathetic post which will be left up for all time to remind me not to act like my losing a freakin' game of chess is of World-Historical importance...)

I lost yet again last night in the Reno CC Ch. Swiss, to Robert Bennett, a guy who hangs around 1500 in the ratings but sure seems to be a pretty good tactician when I play him (see our previous encounter).

I outplayed him in the opening (or at least I thought so at the time) and won his queen pawn by move 10, but he tacked around with his queen to prevent me from castling so it was just a pure calculation game all the way through, and just before move 30 and the time control I blew it. And sheesh, the guy took like 38 minutes for the whole game to my 90!

So now I'm 0-2 in this event and have lost my last four tournament games. Eight months of painfully building up my rating from 1600 to 1667 is mostly up in smoke in a few weeks, which kind of pisses me off.

Yeah, there are lots of games left in the tournament, but hear me out.

It's funny, but last night I had an interesting game of chess, my opponent played better and deserved to win, but for the second week in a row I shook hands after the game, I was correct in my behavior I guess, but when my opponent and others tried to say something about the game I wasn't interested at all. I didn't give a damn to look at the game, find interesting variations or anything, I just slammed my pieces back in the bag while muttering about what an idiot I was, and went home.

At one time not so long ago it wasn't like this, not at all--I used to enjoy the playing and then looking over the game, win or lose.

It occurred to me as I was driving home--do I really like chess right now, or do I only like winning? Everybody loses in chess sometimes, so if I'm not enjoying the process, the game, and feel like every single solitary tournament loss is another wasted evening when I could have been doing something useful like making money, I'd better take a rest from it, I guess.

I think I'll do the smart thing, give it a couple of days and see if my attitude has undergone some positive adjustment by then.

Read for Yourself

On reading the excellent dk-transformation's post at Chess Improvement titled Raming GM-Ram I was directed to a series of articles by GM-Ram author Rashid Ziyadinov over at Jeremy Silman's site. Apart from the merits of GM-Ram as outlined by dk, I recommend you too peruse these articles; they have some different and unorthodox views on chess and chess improvement compared to most, and whether you agree with any or all of the author's contentions I think you'll be stimulated and look at things in a new light.

Here's one statement that really struck me (see Part 3, "Concrete Chess):

Students sometimes lament that they cannot apply their knowledge during a game. They cannot apply their "knowledge" because they really don't have any knowledge! What they have instead are shortcuts to chess language, what I call "chess magic spelling" (like "open the position if you are more developed", "the two bishop advantage", "don't move the queen out too early", etc.). These shortcuts are useless generalities. Chess can only be expressed with concrete variations. This often-ignored concept is so crucial to mastering chess that it bears repeating with emphasis: chess can only be expressed with concrete variations!

To sum up, I note that my game annotations here often have some pleasing verbal description, but only a modest amount of "concrete variations," while the stronger the player, it seems, the more the annotations consist mostly of variations. Which is cause, and which effect? Any opinions, Dear Reader?