Christmas Vacation

Lots of good stuff to report, but it's Christmas Eve and I am thousands of miles from home with limited internet access--so for now, Merry Christmas and happy holidays and New Year's and all that. I just picked up Jeremy Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess (3d. ed) and I will be making this book the base for my ACIS plan.

Much more in a week or so!

Priceless Chess Training Video

Via Liz Vicary, who credits Jason Luchan, who I don't know...anyhow, only the creators of this priceless chess training video deserve the credit. And we get to see it for free. How cool is that Internet thingy?

ACIS of Caissa: Maybe It's Not What to Study, It's Whether We Need to Study at All?

The ACIS (Adult Chess Improvement Seekers) seems to have really taken off, from its modest beginning in some comments at Chess Confessions, through its modest viral development by Blunder Prone (part II, part III), and a cascade of Seekers.

(Mr. Duval aka Blunder Prone has a list on the top of his sidebar. More are to follow, I'm sure)

A.C.I.S of Caissa (so far)

• Back rank (Loomis)
• Banatt
• Blue Devil Knight
• Chess Tiger ( new and improved!)
• Chunky Rook
• Getting to 2000
• Harvey!
• Linuxguy
• Steve Learns Chess ( Mr. Eddins)
• Tacticus Maximus
• TempoSchlucker
• Wahrheit
• Wang's World
• You Are Here (BP)

Now that we have a title, a mission, a movement, so to speak, I would like to present the theoretical underpinnings of ACIS as I understand them, to make it more than just another acronym. I don't speak for anyone else, but look forward to hearing from you, Dear Reader, regarding whether I've captured some thing of value here.

Much of the chess blogging by non-professionals is about improvement. Certainly, there are history blogs, Grandmaster blogs, club blogs, etc., but even these sometimes touch on improvement. Scrolling down the list of blogs I've chosen to link to on the sidebar, the majority of posts on a majority of the sites are about general or personal chess improvement. The original Knights de la Maza were, of course chiefly about improvement using a certain, defined method as defined in de la Maza's articles (Part I, Part II) and book.

Very few of these thousands of chess improvement posts seem to ask the questions:

Why do you need to improve? Why do you want to improve? And how, exactly, is this improvement to be defined?

Let's go back even farther. Let's go back to First Principles. Why the hell do we play chess at all? That's worth an essay in itself, and people have already written it: Concentration, competition, achievement, healthy struggle; given that we do play, why try so hard to improve? I've referred back to my posts about Dr. Kenneth Mark Colby many times and I'll do so again:

Why should a patzer seek to become a grandpatzer? Because of the aristos (Greek: Aristos = best). Life is more than ham sandwiches and beer. Humans strive, not just to survive, but to enhance the quality, the excellence, of survival. Striving for excellence in any endeavor, developing yourself to become your best at what you do, is rewarding and fulfilling to aspirations higher than happiness. Merely happy people, without artistic goals, vegetate in incomplete, hobbled and impoverished lives...A grandpatzer is a strong chessplayer, a threat to anyone (including himself) in a given game.

Very philosophical, no? There is however, another take, another approach that one could find just as legitimate, indeed, more practical:

"Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly."

---G. K. Chesterton

"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)."

---Donnie, Liquid Egg Product

Let me state it this way: One could just play chess. In the days of yore, the olden days when there was smoking in chess clubs and all kind of dangerous stuff like that, quite a few people became experts or masters just by playing a lot of chess at a club with strong players. Reuben Fine, for example, had the best Americans of the 1920s and '30s New York chess clubs to school him, and played a great deal of blitz as a youngster. I believe he once wrote that he did very little formal study before reaching master level. So just as a base, using your chess time to play chess will bring you to certain level, your natural level of chess skill, so to speak.

After that, it gets murky.

"Improvement" is almost universally defined by us in the ACIS/chess blogging community as an improved rating, whether USCF, FIDE, ICC or other. Whether a higher rating is all we really should be striving for in our chess career is something well worth exploring, but I want to save that for another post. Let's accept that as given, for now. The big question (drum roll, please...)

Is studying chess really the best way to raise your rating???

I'm going to give you a few questions to ponder. Have you ever been kibbitzing a game and seen good moves that the players (sometimes much higher-rated than you) missed? Have you ever played a move in a (non-blitz) game and instantly seen, as soon as you took your hand off the piece, that it was a blunder? Have you ever seen a Grandmaster blunder? (if not, see my "Homer Nods" series). I'll wager a bundle you answered "Yes, yes and yes."

Have you ever asked yourself how these things are possible?

If you are a person who has played a reasonable amount of serious chess, "lost at least 500 games" as Capablanca is said to have formulated it, you already know enough about tactics to avoid major blunders, and to take tactical advantage of your opponents' mistakes. You already know that "Loose pieces drop off" and the pattern of a knight fork and a back-rank mate.

So, why do you, (and me too!) still make these kinds of mistakes, mistakes that are usually the main reason that our rating is static? Why can't we call up this knowledge on (almost) every move and avoid blunders and climb the ladder to the rating we so richly deserve? Why do tactical exercises, even thousands of them, sometimes help, but often in a very limited way--that is, why have some people done 10,000 or more of them and not become masters?

Questions, questions...these are questions for human performance psychology, rather than arguments about whether MDLM is the best study method. And like a good old-fashioned movie serial, for now I'll leave you hanging. In the next installment, we'll survey the field and see what we can glean that will help us ACISers out.

Until then, let us ROCK

Diving Into ACIS: "I Would Like, If I May, To Take You On a Strange Journey"

Okay boys and girls, this is going to take a lot of preparation...do not proceed any farther in this post unless you have an hour or two. Or take it in small bites, whatever, but I'm not going to put up the run-of-the mill fluff, this time.

First, in order to understand the title of this post, go watch the fabulous Blunderprone production Rocky Errant Picture Show.

Three years ago I published a little piece called The Crowley-Parsons-Heinlein-Hubbard-Cruise Connection. Please read Part I, Part II. At the time I wrote it, I had not yet seen this article--Whence Came the Stranger: Tracking the Megapattern of Stranger in a Strange Land. And this, about the author of that--"Adam Rostoker: Walking Between Worlds, Not of this World (any longer)."

Ain't the Internet a blast?

And by now, you may ask yourself, what's the point of these seemingly unconnected peregrinations? Quo vadis?

Well...Crowley was a chess player, apparently of master strength, but see at the link how a "mystical experience" put him off pursuit of serious chess. Heinlein certainly appreciated chess, as it appears in a number of his works, including the first move of a "blindfold" game between Captain King and Lazarus Long in Methuselah's Children (Lazarus plays 1. Nf3) and in Time Enough for Love where Lazarus plays his Grandfather and allows Grandpa to recapitulate an entire Steinitz brilliancy (Lazarus foregoes using a computer-generated improvement).

UPDATE 11/14/09: Francis W. Porretto, Proprietor of the great Eternity Road, points out:

"...including the first move of a "blindfold" game between Captain King and Lazarus Long in Methuselah's Children (Lazarus plays 1. Nf3)..."

Uh, no. The game was between Captain Rufus "Ruthless" King and Andrew Jackson Libby, Heinlein's mathematical genius. King, who had White, opened 1. e4; Libby answered 1...Nf6.

Unfortunately, we never learn how the game ended. However, an earlier paragraph notes that Libby had "long ago given up the game for lack of adequate competition," so we can guess.

(Thanks for the correction, Fran. My ed. had the day off...)

I am intensely interested in chess, also in "human potential," self-actualization, self-improvement and all of that jazz. As the ACIS begins to rise, Bold as Love and Wangalicious, I think my love is to concentrate on the mental aspects of chess and improvement, the qualities of mind and spirit that might make for chess success and life success, the joy that can be from more than just winning games.

More, soon. And now, let us ROCK:

Memorable Game 7: King Hunt! (Unfortunately Mine), RLP - R. Campbell 10.14.2000 0-1

My previous "Memorable Games" posted here were memorable for me in that they were some of my best games. This game is memorable because I forget a little thing called "development" and my whole king side stays at home for an entire game, just like in some of those 1850's clashes "Anderssen-NN" or "Morphy-Allies." Also, one of the few times in my career that my king made it out to the fifth rank with a bunch of pieces still on the board; hardly ever a good sign. Yes, I willl officially call it a King Hunt.

Ron Campbell, my opponent in this game, was a regular around the Anchorage chess scene in the early 2000s, and improved his rating into the high 1600s within a couple years of this game. At the 2002 Alaska State Championship I won a good game from him in the last round to tie for third, win the state Class B Championship and even, I recall, some fraction of a Grand Prix point. Unfortunately, I haven't located that game. This time, the fun is all Ron's as he reminds us (me) to DEVELOP the pieces, fool.

(show chess board)(hide chess board)