inside the mind of a grandmaster

i recently came across Maxim Dlugy's web page (www.dlugy.com). if you follow the link to his 'game center' you can play through some important games in Maxim's chess career (which included winning the world junior championship ahead of Anand and Ivanchuk).



the nice thing about this page, is that Maxim explains the plans during his games in simple verbal form. you can 'click' through the moves with the interactive chessboard and even explore alternative variations that Maxim considers important. i think this is a great resource for the improving player. i hope Maxim adds more games to this collection.

that magic book

we can't afford everything we want. this is the premise of the working world. when it comes to hobbies, we are often particularly hesitant to put our hands in our pockets.

in my efforts to improve in chess i have sometimes spent money. was it worth it? well, let's see. i have bought a few books:
1) Nunn's chess openings by John Nunn et al.
2) The seven deadly chess sins by Jonathan Rowson
3) Think like a grandmaster by Alexander Kotov
4) Play the open games as black by John Emms
5) Chess for zebras by Jonathan Rowson
6) Endgame tactics by G.C. van Perlo
7) A spanish repertoire for black by Mihail Marin



Ok, here's a very fast and quite superficial review:
1) i think that intermediate strength players don't need this. it's essentially a list of opening variations with symbolic notation. i'm sure it's useful for many chess players - but at our level, i suggest to pick some openings you like and learn them in-depth.
2) this was an ambitious book, very different to others that we can buy. i really enjoy Jonathan Rowson's style of writing and his approach to the game of chess. for example, he devotes some time to talking about the situation when you have a promising position, then you go and play a bad move and are grovelling for a draw. come on! tell me you haven't been in this situation! rather, than getting all grouchy and annoyed (my instinct), Jonathan says that now is a time to draw a line between the moves played and the moves that will be played. there is a new objective: "draw the game". achieving this goal should bring rewards because it shows that we can adjust to, and achieve, new aims. this is just an example of the ideas in his book - but it made a lasting impression on me. i don't know whether it's connected to his endevours outside of chess (e.g. chess teacher and academic philosopher) but i think he has a very positive approach to the concept of competition.
3) i think i bought this book too early. i honestly thought that if i read it then i would think like a grandmaster. ok, i should sue the publisher! but life isn't like that. i struggle to find words for this book. in parts it is superb, it is always gritty, but if you are rated 1500-1800 then there is much of it that will remain mysterious.
4) i've already mentioned this in a previous post. it's opening specific. if you plan to play 1.e4 or to counter it with 1...e5 then i recommend it.
5) Rowson gives us another endearing book touching on our prejudice about having the black vs. white pieces and (of particular interest to me) why it's difficult for adults to improve. He combines chess examples with an overall view to chess psychology and aspirations. until you read one of his books you might be mistaken for thinking that you're not supposed to enjoy trying to improve.
6) Van Perlo's endgames is a treat. i'm terribly unmotivated to set up positions with the kings + 1 or 2 other pieces and many endgame resources are of the "spectacular but it's never going to happen" variety. this book only contains positions that actually occurred in serious play. they are grouped in a thematic way. i only find time to read one position per week, but i still think it's helpful. we intermediates have a tendency to be very "orthodox" in the way we view endings. Van Perlo shows that some imagination and lateral thinking can turn a 1/2-1/2 into a 1-0 (or vice versa!)
7) i just bought this book. given that i always play 1.e4 and always counter it with 1...e5 then you'd think that i knew something about the Ruy Lopez - but i don't. i'm planning to heal an old wound here. i've only read the first chapter but i like it. i find that i don't need a board. the diagrams plus explanations make this a book something you can learn from while travelling.

i've also spent money to join the internet chess club (see previous post "game of the day / week") which i am very happy to do. i once took some internet lessons from an IM from Finland. i wasn't too impressed with these but i think that internet coaching can work with the right rapport and goals. i used to be a member of cambridge city chess club, uk. at the time there was an FM called Andrew Greet. he and I would go to the same tournaments, and when i drove us there he would pay me the petrol by giving me chess lessons. these were really superb (i only regret that there weren't more). Andrew has now progressed to an IM and has written a number of well-received chess books.

for me, spending money on chess is an indulgence so i want to do it right. do you have any do's and don'ts about how to spend your money improving your chess?

the blogging community

i've had a few posts from my new blogging buddy timhortonsknigt, who has his own blog at cheszpatzerblog.blogspot.com. he also maintains a list of chess blogs that you might wish to check out. you can do this by visiting www.chessgames.com/perl/chessuser?uname=timhortons

both of us are quite new to blogging so please leave comments if you have them. do you have a chess blog that you would like to publicize? or do you have some advice for us to increase the readership of our blogs. please share this with us. there is a large community of chess bloggers but i am interested in connecting those of us that focus on chess improvement for intermediate-strength players who don't have too much time on their hands.

middlegame matters

chances are, the middlegame is where the battle is lost or won. it is quite difficult to know how best to practice this phase of the game. i have one suggestion that achieves several goals at the same time. once a week visit an online chess database (i suggest www.chesslive.de) and enter the moves from an opening you use frequently in tournament play



LESSON 1: can we remember the opening variation accurately?

after entering the opening moves, search the database for a game involving two strong players.



next change the size of the browser window so that you can't see the moves!!



ok, now we can't cheat! then begin to play through the game. when you feel that you have reached a critical position - stop and think for a few minutes. ask yourself "what would i play here?". write your move down. continue this process through the game considering options for the player of both the white and black pieces.

at this stage we've achieved some more goals. LESSON2: developing a sense for critical positions & LESSON 3: asking "what are my opponents ideas in this position?" i think that these are 2 important things we can work on to help our middlegame play.

after you've gone through the game, see how your moves compared to the moves played. how many did you guess correctly? (if you're like me, it won't be too many! and if it's a morozevich game... forget it!). ok, now go through the game with a chess engine. we don't really care how many moves we guessed right, we want to know why we chose differently. you should find that you can attribute your alternative move to one of these categories:
A) my move was tactically unsound
B) my move was too passive
C) my move was the start of an inferior plan
D) my move was better than the GM move

if you scored some D's - well done! but it's the other categories that give us something to work on.

if you scored a lot of A's then break down the type of tactics that you're missing (forks, pins etc) and how many moves ahead would you have to think to have spotted the tactic (don't feel too bad that you missed a 7 move combination!).

if you scored a lot of B's it probably means that you don't really have a plan at all. given that we started from an opening we plan to use, then it's worth getting hold of a resource (free stuff on the internet or maybe a book) that explains the ideas behind an opening.

i read somewhere, that a bad plan is better than no plan. i think there is some truth in that - but wouldn't you love to know the right plan for a given position? if you scored a lot of C's then this is an area to work on. again, resources like books and online videos can help explain the ideas behind certain openings. but ask yourself "was my plan really so bad?" if not, then well done for finding a plausible alternative. afterall, maybe the GM moves were designed to trade into a complex ending that he knew how to win and you were less sure about. a plan that's right for you can sometimes be better than the objectively best plan. but you can start to ask yourself about the type of plans you're making. is there one objective (e.g. create outpost for knight on f5) or several (outpost, trade off my bad bishop, expand on Q-side, double rooks on half-open file)? could you begin to try to add strategies into your plan? i think this type of assessment can also tell us something about our chess character (optimistic, too defensive, impatient). we often don't know much about the player sitting opposite us - so we should at least get to know ourselves a bit better.

there's a few more lessons here. LESSON 4: assess your own play & identify the areas you should work on & LESSON 5: plan a way to improve (read up on an opening, practice tactics against a computer, add some strategic goals to your planning, play differently to your normal character and see how it feels)

these are some of the things i try to do to improve. in a later post, i'll blog this for a real example and you can see my efforts, even if they're terrible. if you try this technique too - let me know how you get on. do you have other methods for improving your middlegame play? share them with us. good luck!

statistics - a double-edged sword?

we busy people have a limited time to prepare for games. i will play in a tournament in 2 weeks time. i have been reviewing the tournament games i have played in france so far. these number 19 (9 white, 10 black). these are the first moves i have faced from my opponents



i find that these statistics guide me in how to prepare my openings. but am i asking for trouble by not spending much time preparing, for example, for my opponents caro kann defence? do you use this sort of information from your games to help with your time management? care to share your statistics with us?

Narbonne open 2007 - an example game

Here is a game I played in 2007 against an opponent rated 1800. this is really just to test out the 'chess publisher' process on my blog. i think this could be a useful way to discuss games.

game of the day / week

in the last post i said that the best players are not always the best teachers. however, there are many IMs and GMs that are doing excellent teaching and i have benefitted from some of this. the internet chess club (www.chessclub.com) is a huge community of players who play, watch and learn chess online. often they produce videos such as 'game of the week' and 'game of the day' where a grandmaster will focus on a GM vs GM game that caught their attention.
i would recommend these videos. i like to watch one on a sunday morning with my first cup of coffee. it's very useful to see how strong chess players plan their game on strategic and tactical levels. i'm not sure that these videos actually improve my own play. maybe on a subliminal level it helps me to have a clearer thought process.

one of my favourite things on the internet chess club is their live relays of top GM tournaments. players of all levels discuss the games and sometimes there is radio commentary via chess.fm

although it is a commercial service it has advantages over free servers like FICS (www.freechess.org) in terms of it's resources for chess improvement. having said that i love the free ethic of FICS. i play there under the handle "MrMoo" and i play on the internet chess club under the handle "muzio". if you see me there, say hi!

you tube as a tool

i hadn't really thought of using youtube (www.youtube.com) as a resource for improving chess, but now that elite tournaments are video-reported (e.g. www.chessvibes.com) i would start to visit youtube to catch up on the global chess scene. as often happens on the internet, i got distracted and started looking at all sorts of chess videos that i hadn't intended to look at. this was fortunate as i began to find some nice videos. i like those of Matthew Pullin, a US player with a national elo of around 2000. his youtube channel is at www.youtube.com/user/GreenCastleBlock. i think it's useful to get instruction from a player who is not too far above you in playing strength (the best players are not necessarily the best teachers - though see next post!).

Have you found youtube a useful resource for chess improvement? which channels or video clips have helped you? let us know!

openings - study techniques

i once drove 80 miles to a tournament only to lose my first game in 6 moves. at our level, i feel the most important goal of an opening is to reach a balanced middle game with fighting chances. because i don't have much time to study openings i'm trying to build a repertoire that is not too steeped in theory and not so offbeat that i get crushed. i'm impressed by players that can play 1. e4 or 1. d4 depending on their mood - but that's not me. i'm a 1. e4 player (and i reply to 1. e4 with 1... e5, and this gives me the chance to mention my first resource. it's a book by GM John Emms called 'Play the open games as black'. i don't have many books, but this one is really good. it's actually a useful resource for players of the white and black pieces, and often gives 2 alternative moves in a position: one that is solid and one that is more double-edged.

when it comes to chess books, no-one tells you how to read them. this may sound like a daft comment but i've experimented with using a magnetic chess set on a plane, at home with a regular board and in front of the computer. i still don't know what is best. there's something to be said for sitting in front of a real board (it makes me think more thoroughly and might help in tournaments by creating a 'search image'). but a chess engine is helpful because sometimes a book will not suggest a move that i think should be played. having an engine handy is useful for knowing what the refutation is.

this brings me to my second resource, the chess engine. in the past i used PC computers and had fritz 5 installed. this had some great features, the best of which was that it would annotate games using language (e.g. 16...Bxd3 - this is where Black starts to go downhill) rather than just reeling off variations. as i graduated to using a mac i started using Shredder Classic, which is pretty good. But there are plenty of engines (and GUIs - graphical user interfaces) out there that are free to download and are more than sufficient for players of our strength. I currently use Glaurung (www.glaurung.com)

i think it is important to read through opening ideas fairly frequently and to test yourself by closing the book and seeing if you can navigate through the variations without having a 'prop'.

i'm thinking about openings because i have a tournament coming up in a few weeks (i'll post about that later) and i haven't played competitively for a while. i'd love to hear about your methods of studying openings and preparing for tournaments. until next time - happy chessing!

welcome!

the purpose of this blog is to share my experiences of trying to improve at chess. i'm an intermediate player (current national elo 1680) and have to fit chess into a busy life. i plan to share tournament experiences, training ideas & resources with people in a similar situation. there are many excellent chess blogs but not many focus on the issue of chess improvement for intermediate players. i hope you find this a useful and occasionally entertaining site as i share my blunders and wonders with you. i also look forward to hearing about your efforts to improve by reading and sharing your comments.